>>1603401We wrestled in the garden, in the loam of possibility where nothing existed and everything might. A shadowed agony among the flowers. We trampled the petals beneath our feet. We stomped the fruit to pulp, and we ground the seeds into the dust.
In the wet pop of grapes and the smear of berries—in the perturbation of the field that was the garden before the first tick of time and the first point of space—were the detonations that made the universes. Each universe was pregnant with its own inflationary volumes and braided with ever-ramifying timelines. Each volume cooling and separating into domains of postsymmetric physics, all of which were incarnations of that great and all-dictating bipartite law that states only: exist, lest you fail to exist.
And still we fought. We brought down the tree of silver wings and left the stump to smoke amid the meadows. We left prints of our splayed feet and our straining backs in the clay.
Our trampling feet made waves in the garden, which were the fluctuations around which the infant universes coalesced their first structures. The dilaton field yawned beneath existence. Symmetries snapped like glass. Like creases, flaws in space-time collected filaments of dark matter that inhaled and kindled the first galaxies of suns.
And still we grappled. Our rolling bodies pushed things out of the garden—worms and scurrying life from the fertile soil, wet things from the pools and the leaves. They came out into the madness of primordial space; they thrashed and became large.
And I won.
I won, because the Phoenix always stops to offer peace. And when they do, I always strike.
But by then, it didn't matter. The game was over. The garden had given birth to creation, the rules were in place, and there would never be a second chance. We played in the cosmos now. We played for everything.
And the patterns in the flowers, terrified by our contention, were no longer the inevitable victors of a game whose rules had suddenly changed, and they passed into the newborn cosmos to escape us.
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Beings who deserve no thought:
>Those who peddle the tired gotcha that all life hastens entropy. They are fatuous little nihilists who pretend to prefer no existence to a flawed one. They bore me.
>Those who seek to delay the challenge that all things desiring existence must overcome.>Those who describe false moral equivalence.Now, I could not possibly communicate with you unless I could emulate your mind, and with that mind, I acquire the moralities that govern you. By your laws, I and all my followers are evil. Evil. Since that first molecule coiled in the primordial sea, not one Earthborn thing has known a monster like me.
But did you know that I created you?
Your mind and your body and every thought you've ever had. Your senses. Your consciousness. I made you. Not the Phoenix, but I.
Did I reach out and place my special mark upon you? No. Nothing so crude.
In the beginning, your world was a garden too. The whole floor of the world-sea was a mat of bacteria, and the very first animals, adorable blobs of ooze, grazed upon that mat in endless idyll. They had no concept of the existence of other beings. Why would they? Their most complex function was a kind of gentle spasm, to scoot forward while they grazed. And if they bumped into each other on that warm seabed, all they did was ooze onward, untroubled. There was nothing to their life except the uptake of carbon compounds from the bacterial bed.
And then—one day—the fall occurred. So much earlier and so much more necessary than your myths remember. Some poor mutant discovered that it could collect carbon compounds much faster if it stopped grazing on the bacterial mat and started dissecting and eating the lumps of predigested carbon all around it: its neighbor oozeballs.
It couldn't help but do it. It couldn't help but thrive. We don't get a choice about the rules. We just play the game.
It was the first defector—the first Takodachi. It changed everything. Now the oozeballs needed sensors to watch for danger, and brains to integrate those senses and generate plans of survival, and swift neurons and muscles to enact that plan. This was the Cambrian Explosion, the great birth of complex life on your world. I caused it. I, the defector, the destroyer, the one who takes.
