I’m putting this down now primarily because I had not been before. No, I am writing for that first audience, the only real one, myself. I am writing because as millennia passed by without intelligent interlocution and the corresponding deluge of happenings and minutiae for my memory to contend with, I began to wonder if my perceptions and recollections had become so insular as to be unreliable and I found myself lacking anything to compare them against. An imperfect, perhaps insufficient solution, of course, but so is its author, and that has its own authenticity. Furthermore, I had no real alternative.
The contemplation of how writing, one of humanity's first great accomplishments, was great precisely because it persisted across ages and worlds provided me with protracted amusement. I came here in a rocket. I had adapted myself to this hostile environment through genetic manipulation. I had been implanted with a solid-state expansion containing the whole tonnage of Earth knowledge. When my first body lost its war of attrition with my new home’s atmosphere, I migrated to the second without incident. As my second body spooled up, I tweaked various aspects of my genetic code to adapt better. Over the generations, I had become as suited to this world as an indigenous life form, even as I watched their development plateau and break on the shores of the sea of time. And yet, I find myself much like a monk in some hermitage when my world was young, putting words to thoughts, proving to myself that I am here.
I am here, though I, am, and here have drifted definitionally since my arrival. Certain bodies took to my speculative adaptations more than others and vice versa. The consistent tweaking of this trait then another, manipulation of the resilient but specific human genome had resulted in an inevitable loss of fidelity across the span of the generations. I’d elected to revert to walking on all fours a while ago, for instance. I did not write about my rationale for that, and it was so long ago now I don’t quite remember the reason. All the ins and outs of how I’d come to give myself ganglia are lost to time, but the broad strokes—I was tired of a traditional human brain—remain, and supposedly are of no import to anyone beyond myself, anyway.
I think the most alarming elision in my memory is the whys and wherefores of my original mission. My augmented memory capacity continuously evaluates its contents, and to accommodate all the data coming in all the time, it deletes that which is of no further use, and I wonder if it had made this calculation about my mission.
My mission had been an exercise in the feasibility of different approaches to interstellar exploration, that much was for certain. My name is Bob. I don’t remember being given it, or the last time I heard someone address me thus. I only knew for certain because it was written on various things around my facility. Bob belonged to a pilot program allowing colonists intergenerational genetic modulation to adapt to the circumstances of the alien worlds of deep space. Other groups, integralists, generally, were content to try to remake Earth in its own image on planets more similar and proximal thereto. But had there been some sort of cataclysm that precipitated this interest in exodus? I couldn’t remember. Why had I chosen the former over the latter? Likewise, gone. Perhaps I’d had a deep ideological conviction on the transmutability of the human body, I couldn’t say. What was the end goal of this trial? Would I be collected and debriefed? When? By whom? These answers are lost, perhaps they wander still as ghosts in my wasted mind. I would have relished some record of them, it hardly affected the present or the future.
***
I fabricated my home on the highest point on the planet, where I could see its curve in most directions at most times of day. Beneath my mountaintop facility, I saw the thinking beasts in the forestation below, and I saw their buildings fall into disrepair and agriculture go fallow. Their ocean darkened a few shades too many. As the thinking beasts degenerated apace with their resource ingurgitation, all but the roughest among them ceased to be, and I was forced to confront the irrelevance of corporeality. Whereas the thinking beasts’ skins hardened and finally became exoskeletal to provide fuller protection from the elements, I forsook the unwieldy and endlessly vulnerable body altogether. I held the components for my bodies in storage, because eventually, statistically, a need for them would inevitably arise. I have one animated avatar which sits in my facility in a chair that I can enter and leave at will.
***
The passage of time distorts meaning. Body to body, I found myself ambivalent about existence, of its necessity and imperative. Now, without one, without the specter of mortality breathing on my neck, “being” was becoming a very abstract concept indeed. It occurred to me frequently that the species that built me may no longer exist, that I may be its last, misbegotten bastion, and therefore under no obligation to remain here. With little effort I could reconstitute my dwelling into something capable of spaceflight. I could return to Earth, if it was still there, though I likely little resembled the Earthlings left there, even if I assumed physical form to do so.
Leaving without a destination in mind had its appeal, certainly, tempered by the realization that the adaptation process would be started anew just to achieve the same degree of harmoniousness I already had here. Soon, I was lost in indecision. I tried something for the first time. I made a couple more mes from my most recently uploaded backup consciousness and the raw body materials. To reduce confusion, I altered the other two’s pigmentation, one being purple and the other yellow.
“So, I thought we could each one of us pursue a different one of our options,” the green me said.
“Divide and conquer,” the purple me said.
“Exactly,” green agreed.
“For my part,” the purple me said, “I’m inclined to do some exploration, I think I will make another purple me and one of us will head towards Earth and the other will simply explore.”
The green me said, “Excellent. It would be my preference to stay here, to see the mission through.”
For the first time, yellow me chimed in, “I think I might die.”
“Die?” green asked yellow.
“Yes, die. Why not die?”
“Because it is something we’ve transcended. The whole of human endeavor was based upon the irreconcilability of their awareness of mortality, and we have achieved such wonders since we have overcome it hanging over us.”
“Those endeavors have led us away from humanity. We’re not bound by their morality. I’m not interested in being a shimmering misty mountaintop. I don’t see how it’s that different from not being. We can only really be once we understand how it is different from unbeing. And that will be my contribution.”
“Very well,” purple said. I think we can all agree that we would rather not die, and he doesn’t mind. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out that we can’t die.”
I scratched my green chin. “If we have a soul, how do you think it would be distributed between us? I’m the oldest of the three, did I give you two some of mine?”
“Oh, I can’t imagine we have one,” yellow said.
“Well in that case, it’s in your hands,” green said.
“All right, well, here I go, I’m going to die now,” yellow said, and his misty nebulousness diffused into atmosphere.
Purple and myself floated there a while waiting for some change in being too overcome us, or for yellow to return. Neither happened.
“Well, I should get going,” purple said. “Lots of space to travel, you know.”
“Yeah, I said,” and watched purple assemble a craft and fly into the night sky.
And now here I am.
Nothing much changes for a few centuries. The daytime sky here darkened. The thinking beasts’ birth rates tapered off. I suppose I could have intervened, but they didn’t seem too troubled by their extinction.
More centuries passed. I saw how thin I could spread myself through the air and still maintain my integrity. I worked up to becoming something of a hive minded mass of molecules, millions of discrete little consciousness working together harmoniously.
Then a ship started landing. I resumed my most recent physical manifestation near the landing site to welcome, at least, a visitor.
A massive protuberant slug slid down an extending gangplank and made a beeline toward me.
“Bob?” you demanded.
“Yes.”
“Bob!” it roared.
“Did you have a disagreement with a Bob of a different color?”
“Bob!” The slug was drawing dangerously near now, its wailing getting less and less coherent.
“Take it easy, friend,” I said, preparing for discorporation, but before I could remove myself from the physical danger, the slug was upon me, and it opened itself wide, and just like that, I was swallowed whole, and just as fast, I was being disintegrated and metabolized, and though I had some inkling this process would be painful, it didn’t feel any different than I had outside the slug, but I was not as I was before. I was inside of this thing; I was this thing. So focused was I anticipating the explosion of agony which surely must be coming that I scarcely noticed the chattering of many voices, at different volumes, in languages of every kind, all around me, and—yes now that I listened for it—my own included.
“What’s happening?” I asked myself.
“Oh, so it found you,” I said.
“What is going on? What is this?”
“Well, it looked to me like a big slug.”
“You know what I mean!”
“I do. Well, I’ve been in here a while… and what I’ve gathered is that this slug as you and I see it is some kind of superior intelligence, or at least superior to you and I, although it covets us, because we, it seems, do in fact have a soul or some sort of lifeforce or immutable will, perhaps, which appears to be indestructible. That’s the good news; the bad news is—ironically—ours are confined to this slug.”
“Huh,” I said.
“And as near as I can figure it, our energy thing is a sort of renewable fuel source for the slug, maybe because it is indestructible.”
“Fuel source for what? What does the slug do? What motivates it?”
“That I don’t know, but I suspect its explanation wouldn’t be very meaningful to us, and it hardly matters now.”
“I suppose,” I said.
Time passed, though how much was unclear. What was happening beyond the slug’s body was mysterious to us. If it got sick or frightened or tired or died, we were none the wiser.
“Perhaps this is what was understood as the Afterlife,” I speculated once.
“Maybe,” I answered, sounding skeptical.
“Maybe this is what not being is like. Maybe this slug thing is the grim reaper, or Charon, etc.”
“Maybe,” I answered. “Why do I have to put a label on everything?”
After another amount of time which could, I suppose, have been eons, I was able to exert will enough to externalize my thoughts, into something like language, or the thoughts that comprise verbal communication, and I put together all these thoughts together and balled it up into some sort of concentrated idea, and I think I have pushed it out, sent it hurtling by some mechanism I do not understand, to a potentially uninterested audience, who come to think of it, may not even exist anymore, for all I know. What someone who might happen upon it might do with it, I guess I don’t know, may be beside the point. I have willed it. It is no longer mine. It is on its own now. When and if it is found, its author may no longer exist, not in any way that matters.
-- Alex Kies graduated from Metropolitan State University and aspires to overtake Derek Chauvin as its most notable alumnus, because surpassing General Alfred Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1953-1956 as his high school’s seems, at this point, unlikely. Would you like to know more? alexkies.net