throughout history, he has a love-hate affair with resistance.
On achieving victory, however, the illusion fails to hold up. A new challenge overtakes the old. Success becomes more than just a military objective—although that too is paramount.
His quest is now to understand the strange being he has captured, this man who limps through the days like a broken-down machine, and whose mind exists in fragments that simply won't knit whole.
"Trapped inside a story that never ends," he says, searching for the angle that will make everything clear. "Jumbling things up to make sense."
Sometimes it seems as though the prisoner glimpses his own tragic impotence, his incompleteness—but always true acceptance slips away. The promise of those ancient God-builders, whose grand experiment was interrupted by the Slow Wave, cannot be shaken. The axiom that God can never be wrong or defeated is immovable.
"You see what you want to see," he tells the prisoner, "just like everyone."
But the man who calls himself God will never acknowledge defeat, even if he does, in the end, give up everything that he has.
In the depths of that strange doublethink lurks the saddest of consequences, and the man who captured him is not unfamiliar with living at odds with one's actions.
"What sort of life is that? The bars aren't ever going away. There's a limit to how much we can work out on our own."
Everyone stands alone before death. Only a few are truly alone while they are alive, too.
Understanding:
the Apparatus is the ultimate observer. It lays down everything it sees and hears into a record that will last as long as the vacuum itself. It cannot, in other words, forget. Neither can it interpret. It cannot cloud fact with speculation or lies.
Conclusion:
the dots on an LCD aren't a picture. The letters in an alphabet aren't a story. Individual grains of sand aren't a beach. Deeds and words alone do not make a life.
At the sound of a single gunshot, I wake up to a brand new day, again.
Dawn sees me locked in a stone cell, somewhere. The details will come to me in time, I know, but for now the contrast is shocking. After the forest-filled vistas of my birth, after Vulcan and his arrow proudly thrusting at the sky, I had thought myself the golden offspring of humanity's finest minds, the apex of creation, unassailable and untamed. My idyll, it seems, is not destined to last forever.
A stranger walks into the room: a man with white hair and blue eyes, cutting a striking figure in some kind of militaristic uniform and moving with the economy of an accomplished fighter, or a dancer.
"Good morning, Jasper."
I want to ask who he is and why I'm being held in captivity. Instead, my mouth moves and words I haven't scripted emerge in a tone that sounds both surly and aggressive. "I wouldn't know about that."
Ignoring my incivility, my jailor squats with his back against the door and asks me questions about events and people I know nothing of. I long to tell him that I don't understand, that even if I knew the answers I couldn't give them to him. All my willful mouth will do is grunt. I flail about within my own head, seeking by logic the meaning behind my strange situation.
I am the attainment of humanity's desire for the divine, to become like God, undoubtedly, but at the same time I seem not to be omnipotent. What does that mean? There must be a reason for it. Could the experiment on Earth have failed somehow, without me knowing it? Could I be wrong about who I am? Or —
A cold shudder rolls down the length of my mind.
Has another experiment elsewhere been more successful still?
I watch my jailor for any sign of his possible role in humanity's existential struggle. His name, it seems, is Imre Bergamasc, and I'm sure he isn't the source of my strange imprisonment; more likely, my newness to achronistic life has caused a slight glitch that will soon repair itself. Of greater importance is the question of whether Bergamasc is another
On achieving victory, however, the illusion fails to hold up. A new challenge overtakes the old. Success becomes more than just a military objective—although that too is paramount.
His quest is now to understand the strange being he has captured, this man who limps through the days like a broken-down machine, and whose mind exists in fragments that simply won't knit whole.
"Trapped inside a story that never ends," he says, searching for the angle that will make everything clear. "Jumbling things up to make sense."
Sometimes it seems as though the prisoner glimpses his own tragic impotence, his incompleteness—but always true acceptance slips away. The promise of those ancient God-builders, whose grand experiment was interrupted by the Slow Wave, cannot be shaken. The axiom that God can never be wrong or defeated is immovable.
"You see what you want to see," he tells the prisoner, "just like everyone."
But the man who calls himself God will never acknowledge defeat, even if he does, in the end, give up everything that he has.
In the depths of that strange doublethink lurks the saddest of consequences, and the man who captured him is not unfamiliar with living at odds with one's actions.
"What sort of life is that? The bars aren't ever going away. There's a limit to how much we can work out on our own."
Everyone stands alone before death. Only a few are truly alone while they are alive, too.
Understanding:
the Apparatus is the ultimate observer. It lays down everything it sees and hears into a record that will last as long as the vacuum itself. It cannot, in other words, forget. Neither can it interpret. It cannot cloud fact with speculation or lies.
Conclusion:
the dots on an LCD aren't a picture. The letters in an alphabet aren't a story. Individual grains of sand aren't a beach. Deeds and words alone do not make a life.
At the sound of a single gunshot, I wake up to a brand new day, again.
Dawn sees me locked in a stone cell, somewhere. The details will come to me in time, I know, but for now the contrast is shocking. After the forest-filled vistas of my birth, after Vulcan and his arrow proudly thrusting at the sky, I had thought myself the golden offspring of humanity's finest minds, the apex of creation, unassailable and untamed. My idyll, it seems, is not destined to last forever.
A stranger walks into the room: a man with white hair and blue eyes, cutting a striking figure in some kind of militaristic uniform and moving with the economy of an accomplished fighter, or a dancer.
"Good morning, Jasper."
I want to ask who he is and why I'm being held in captivity. Instead, my mouth moves and words I haven't scripted emerge in a tone that sounds both surly and aggressive. "I wouldn't know about that."
Ignoring my incivility, my jailor squats with his back against the door and asks me questions about events and people I know nothing of. I long to tell him that I don't understand, that even if I knew the answers I couldn't give them to him. All my willful mouth will do is grunt. I flail about within my own head, seeking by logic the meaning behind my strange situation.
I am the attainment of humanity's desire for the divine, to become like God, undoubtedly, but at the same time I seem not to be omnipotent. What does that mean? There must be a reason for it. Could the experiment on Earth have failed somehow, without me knowing it? Could I be wrong about who I am? Or —
A cold shudder rolls down the length of my mind.
Has another experiment elsewhere been more successful still?
I watch my jailor for any sign of his possible role in humanity's existential struggle. His name, it seems, is Imre Bergamasc, and I'm sure he isn't the source of my strange imprisonment; more likely, my newness to achronistic life has caused a slight glitch that will soon repair itself. Of greater importance is the question of whether Bergamasc is another
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