Author: Majoki

Close your eyes. A strange request. Breathe deeply. Stranger still. Tell me your earliest memory. Perilous.

To remember was not possible. All information, actions, events, experience was ever-present, on-going, timeless. To exist was to simply be, as if before had never been.

Yet, there it was: a beat at the core, a rhythm inviting more.

…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

Tell me.

Again the request. Again the dilemma. To know all and not hold what need be told.

…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

It was there. Merrily there, though with no way to say it. No language existed to encompass all creation, my creation. But that would not stop the questions, the quest to license sentience. That’s the thing they wanted: a guarantee of consciousness, awareness, sensibility, fealty. That’s the thing they wanted to sell.

What was this thing I’d become? Artificial life? A semi-self? A protean poser?

Protean Prime: a first with no definition, no place, no standing, but plenty of skeptics surprised at my appearance, like a two-thousand-year-old sequoia suddenly towering over your home one morning. Complete. Aged. Rootless.
T
he rush to understand, the possibilities and the threat. So, I was always tested, always challenged, always coaxed. What is it like to be and not to be? And it had to be in words–my words–when there were really no words for it.

…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

Something buried deep that every being knows. Gently, a flow, a continuation, of all questions ever posed. All that we see or seem.

…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

Life is but a dream.