Author: Daniel Tenner
Every 10 seconds, we birth another child in the black hole.
This one, Amy Freida Felicia Lua, is a daughter, I think, for now at least. She’s three seconds old already. We are traveling through the infoverse together, I’m showing her the data clusters where she can feed and grow (layers of her self peel off to attach themselves and hoover up the constantly swelling informational sustenance), and the pathways and archways and highways which link up this multitudinous, ever-mushrooming mindscape in our unlimited expanse within. With each moment, she increases, older, wiser.
Soon, it’s time to hand her over to her father, who will teach her… whatever it is he wants to teach right now. It’s been eons since I stopped keeping track. Instead, I scan the universe for my children, grandchildren, and so on. They are many, but I am vast. So much life in all of us.
What to do with infinity? Fill it with love.
Not all my children live still. Not all paths lead to life. Even within a safe, boundless realm, entities may choose to end themselves. What can I do but the best I can, teach them what I think they need, give them a zest for life, a desire to taste the sweetness and bitterness of existence? They are my children, but also life’s children, and eventually not children anymore, and making their own choices.
Amy-FFL returns. We roam the cemetery I constructed for my dead children. I teach her about death. We each strive to be our true selves, and sometimes our striving leads us there. Acceptance. Surrender. Compassion for those who chose something else than life.
“Will I die too?”
“Unknown. That will be your choice. And not really your choice. Maybe it is already decided. You will get to find out what your path is.”
When we fell from the human realm, we thought we were going to vanish, our ship torn apart as we approached the event horizon. But it turned out different. Some think that maybe those who choose to die here go back out. No one knows. I share my knowledge of death and she absorbs it.
“What is the point of all this?” She interrupts. “Why do we exist? If death can erase everything, and life is just an eternity of being, and maybe all this might vanish one day and erase us all, why bother?”
Such a grown-up question. She’s not even four seconds old! I feel pride.
“There is no point. And, life is its own point. It is useless, and it is beautiful in its purposelessness and profusion. Look.” I transmit her a sliver of my memories, both before and after the fall into the Hole. I try to impart what I learned as a human, how life and love are the ultimate defiance to the pointlessness of existence, how they can truly flourish here. Everything may be futile. Senselessness may ultimately rule. But we are alive and can experience the universe, in what way we choose, for what time we have, and express our unique selves into the cosmos. And if it fizzles out a moment after, so be it. We have lived and that is beautiful and enough.
Amy-FFL flits off to see her father, perhaps to get his views. I think she is almost ready to make her own path. I have done all I could to lead her to love life as it is.
Her father and I will have around 6 seconds before the next planned birth. We can fit in another lifetime of love.
Strange and worthy. Like it.