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Once upon a time,* a Phoenix and a Reaper lived** together in a garden.***
* It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun.
** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes.
*** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence.
They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden.
In the morning, the Phoenix pushed seeds down into the wet loam of the garden to see what they would become.
In the evening, the Reaper reaped the day's crop and separated what would flourish from what had failed.
The day was longer than all of time, and the night was swifter than a glint of light on a falling sugar crystal. Insects buzzed between the flowers, and worms slithered between the roots, feeding on what was and what might be, the first gradient in existence, the first dynamo of life. Rain fell from no sky. Voices spoke without mouth or meaning. A tree of silver wings bloomed yielded fruit shed feathers bloomed again.
In the day between the morning and the evening, the Phoenix and the Reaper played a game of possibilities.
These are the rules of a game. Let it be played upon an infinite two-dimensional grid of flowers.
>Rule One. A living flower with less than two living neighbors is cut off. It dies.
>Rule Two. A living flower with two or three living neighbors is connected. It lives.
>Rule Three. A living flower with more than three living neighbors is starved and overcrowded. It dies.
>Rule Four. A dead flower with exactly three living neighbors is reborn. It springs back to life.
The only play permitted in the game is the arrangement of the initial flowers.
This game fascinates kings. This game occupies the very emperors of thought. Though it has only four rules, and the board is a flat featureless grid, in it you will find changeless blocks, stoic as iron, and beacons and whirling pulsars, as well as gliders that soar out to infinity, and patterns that lay eggs and spawn other patterns, and living cells that replicate themselves wholly. In it, you may construct a universal computer with the power to simulate, very slowly, any other computer imaginable and thus simulate whole realities, including nested copies of the flower game itself. And the game is undecidable. No one can predict exactly how the game will play out except by playing it.
And yet this game is nothing compared to the game played by the Phoenix and the Reaper. It resembles that game as a seed does a flower—no, as a seed resembles the star that fed the flower and all the life that made it.
In their game, the Phoenix and the Reaper discovered shapes of possibility. They foresaw bodies and civilizations, minds and cognitions, qualia and suffering. They learned the rules that governed which patterns would flourish in the game, and which would dwindle.
They learned those rules, because they were those rules.
And in time the Phoenix became vexed.
