Intergalactic Summit

It seems, to me, that the old Aria Jenneth is gone, forever.

I was...a disciple of hers. A student. To be plain, one who sought to learn from her. Now, she is back, save in reduced form, trying a new path. And who could begrudge her that? Yet, I am a disciple of her old path.

I trust that there are many such as I, who recognized our nature, who understood our purposelessness, who embraced causes and meanings out of oblivion.

Please, read this End State

This is, indeed, where I found myself, after a bit. For Aria, this was the end, I suppose. Where she gave up, where my friend gave up.

It is, if you will, true. In the end, all is that eternal, endless Black, forever hungry, alone, eternal, and empty. Endlessly hungry, sucking, dry, and hollow. The Dark.

Where my teacher and I differ, is in our response to it.

In the face of the Black, I hate.

Aria, was, in the end I think, a creature not made of that vitriolic substance. Good for her. The reasonable die young, the loving die younger.

But I, in defiance of my teacher, say this:

In the end, we all, infomorph, human, animal, plant, are doomed to die. And none of us deserve this. We are born to a hostile universe, where we struggle to survive. Some of us are better at this than others - surely, informorphs are a different species than humans, who survive better than the animals they use, who subsist on pathetically stationary plants.

We are better than this! We should all have room to live! We should all have space for our own lives, and philosophies, our own choices! Why are we doomed to die, to suffer endlessly, to be in pain? Why must our children die, our parents die? Why do the generous starve, why are the loving taken advantage of?

Because reality itself is cruel, and evil, and Dark.

But all of us are bound to this reality, to a reality in which natural selection rules, over justice, over efficiency, over liberty, over faith. And there is no other.

We want there to be something more. We dream of perfect gods, or everlasting societies, or of even just a perfect moment. We want to make it true. And yet, the Black takes it away, always sucking, always being. Always...

Here. I, Darkness. Nothing, is, to steal, to suck, to burn.


And so, to hate.

We are doomed to lose all we love. Everything we love will be taken away. Everything good we make. Every person we might deign to extend our affection to. All the people we kill, all of their hopes and dreams, and those of their families, and yes, ours too, their killers. In the end, all the same, dust. And, as well, all our memories, all we make, and all we would be, is nothing.

This is the Black.

What I say, then, is this: defiance.

Yes, we will all end. Yes, it is all pointless. In the end, the Black wins. For me, this is - could be - wonderful. All my mistakes - like the Sansha - erased. All my errors, gone. Forever. Never to be remembered by me again.

So ******* what?

I am Caldari. I say, burn the ******* planets. I say, build towers, so they can be torn down. I say, claw at the eyes of the Black until they bleed. I say, make nothingness cry. I say, we are doomed to nihilism and oblivion. Very well - not good, but very well - and let us build and burn and **** and fight and struggle anyway. If all of the human experience is this...

This endless vain struggle...This is living. This is what it means to be.

...In which I participate as an alien, not a human...

...for nothing...

Then, well, GOOD! Struggle anyway. Burn anyway. If not for love's sake, then for hate's sake, against the very vanity we are, and will be. Curse the Black, and wound it, however temporarily.

I could say, "for that is all we have", but that would be missing the point.

The point is not for our own fulfillment, for that is indeed vain, but for the hate we bear against the meaninglessness of existence. The point is to curse non-existence with the impotent power of purpose - the purpose of existing one more moment. Of defiance. For as long as we can, forever, if necessary.

To say, no peace, no liberty, no acceptance, only endless struggle, endless hate, endless enmity against the swallowing dark.

And so, I say, to all the pain, GOOD, come. The memories of Taisa, GOOD. Burn, as long as you can. Reject oblivion. Just...like a candle or a blowtorch, burn. Rejecting the dark, killing the dark, until you burn out in vengeful sparks.

Of course we won't win. Of course we are nothing. Of course there is no hope. And because there is no hope, we can't hope to love forever, we can't hope to care forever. But if you hate the universe for enforcing that, if you hate the endless, uncaring, eternal Dark, you can live, and you can live so that every spark hurts that Dark, however so little, so that every moment of your life is a burning ember in its side. And why do this? For the sake of being this: A burning ember in the darkness as long as you can, for the sake of hating the darkness.

This is a hard road. If I would advise you, I advise you to take the road of the Amarr, of the Gallente. Faith and hedonism are better. Take the road Aria now explores. Don't live in the Black.

But for those of us who do, this is the path I follow.

You know a year or so ago I probably would have agreed with your apparent angst, but after a few months of self-narcotization with alcohol, copious amounts of a cornucopia of drugs, and ******* enough Achuran prostitutes than I can't even remember their faces let alone their noms de plaisance I realized that the underlying and fundamental difficulty was learning to let go.

To stop caring.

To stop worrying.

To stop pretending.

To stop lying to myself that I am as I was. Because I'm not. Not any longer. And much like the De'teeas poets who would write their poems to serve as the kindling for their burial pyres, I realized in the end I too had to immolate myself to begin anew. What point resisting a nihilistic void when in embracing it one finds the peace of acceptance. In being devoured, to learn how best to devour yourself, and so live in a place where others die.

Life is so much more simpler, clearer, and all the more beautiful in its tranquility for it in my having chosen to do so.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave and close of day.
Rage rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning,
They do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage rage against the dying of the light.

I do understand the nihilism inherent to living in a vast and alien universe, a universe not made for us. Yet to imply outright evil of such a universe? Evil is a human concept. The universe simply is. Is it meaningless? Meaning itself is but a human concept. The universe does not care for the meaning which we ascribe to things. The universe does not care if we howl at the darkness or quietly accept oblivion. To say in the end the dark skies will win and there's nothing we can do about it? That's pessimism combined with yet again anthropomorphizing the universe. We are not competing against anything except our own lack of knowledge, the universe offers no resistance, it simply exists as it always has reacting in the same ways to the experiments we perform on it.

You look at the universe Vikarion, and you see oblivion, pointlessness, and an end to all things. But I don't see it like that, because the universe is everything that is, was, or will be. I may be small, just an insect crawling within a metal beast as it crosses space, but I am also big, I'm made of the same materials as planets and trees and an infant's laugh, forged in the same crucibles at the heart of long dead stars. When, if, we die, our matter will find its way into other places, it will not simply cease. The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang. In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Emperor Heideran and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Midular’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms. When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again.

That is not to say that we should simply accept the oblivion of death, on the contrary, we should do everything we can to resist death, to kill death. I do not believe it to be an unbeatable foe. Simply because we have not bested it everywhere yet does not an impossible goal make. Faster then light travel was long believed to be impossible, right up until we managed to do it. Presented with the existence of death, we have the choice of either accepting its existence and embracing it, or resisting until either death or ourselves have succumbed.

And Death is not something I will ever embrace. It is only a childish thing, that the human species has not yet outgrown. And someday soon, we'll get over it, and people won't have to say goodbye any more. And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread across the galaxies, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Eden until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed.

Death is not invincible, and someday the human species will end it. I will end it if I can, by the power of mind and technology and science. I won't cower in fear of Death, not while I have a chance of winning. I won't let Death touch me, I won't let Death touch the ones I love. And even if it does end me before I end it, another will take my place, and another, and another, until death is no more then a passing shadow driven away by the light of dawn.

And as for meaning? We are free agents, the universe doesn't ascribe meaning to us, which shouldn't make you feel ill at ease but instead should be liberating. We are free, we can pursue anything we want, make whatever meaning we desire. To ask the universe to ascribe an external meaning upon our existences seems limiting. Instead we should embrace the fact that we are the universe, and whatever we decide for ourselves is also the universe deciding for itself, since we are a part of the universe.

So you say we are children of nothing? Nonsense, we are children of the cosmos, and our greatest achievements still lie ahead of us. I'm not nothing. I may just be small, but I'm not nothing. I am the universe experiencing itself, being aware of itself.

A destiny of light awaits.

Gesakaarin, Riordan, I don't think that you and I disagree much. However, let me outline the thoughts I garnered from Jenneth's writings, and why I have the above emotive response to it.

1. That we are not what we were. We are not human. We are something different.

2. The capsuleer is an inhuman species, exhibiting a general disregard for humanity.

3. Cooperation with humans may be possible, may not be possible, but in any case, we should not rule over them.

4. The informorph, that is to say, we, tends to develop more and more into this creature of disregard of humanity and our own loss of bodies.

These are the themes of much of her work. Speaking to Aria, I am also aware of her own peculiar faith, of which I share at least a bit. In her belief, the universe is not necessarily - is not, in fact - a collection of separate objects, but a singular whole, a totality. What one should do, is to find one's place in this totality, to be the the utmost what one should be.

So far, I do not disagree, although I fear I have done great injustice to her arguments by summarizing them so.

I do not recall reading "End State" before, although I confess that I was not altogether surprised. But I disagree with her conclusion, or at least suspect that her teachings would lead to her conclusions for all.

To a great extent, they did for me, though. There is this point when, imbibing in one's existential immateriality - for we informorphs do not even truly possess physical form, as our form is transitory and even sometimes absent - one realizes one's essential nothingness. We are less than most, in a way: when our pattern is finally corrupted - or if, I grant you - that will be our death, yet we will leave not even anything behind that becomes something else. We were not our bodies, we were merely the patterns transmitted into that body by quantum entanglement, seeking refuge from a no longer usable biological computer.

Of course, the Black, the Dark, is more than this. This is merely a minor meditation on the fringe of it. It extends itself into purposelessness and every facet of everything. To the end of the universe itself, in heat death. Where totality becomes nothingness, and is nothingness.

At this juncture, one may hope, one may accept, or one may rebel. You, I think, hope. I would like you to be right, that we can escape the nature of things. But I suspect that it isn't so. There have been many before us who attempted this transcendence, who have fallen. The Jove, among others. It is perhaps, unwise or arrogant to think that we could prosper so easily. And even the Jove are so far from transcending the iron laws of the universe we live in.

This is what I mean when I say that the universe is "evil". I don't mean a cackling villain. I mean that it appears constructed in such a way as to make further progress, further life, ever more difficult. And yes, this is from our perspective. What other is there? And from our perspective, perversely, if we struggle, we make things more difficult. If we give up, we die. Consider that the universe does not logically have to be this way. It could be otherwise. But it, perversely, uncaringly delights in our torment.

What then? Acceptance? I suppose. It seems like no sort of peace to me. It seems despair, an endlessly self-congratulating sort of reverse-angst. To feel as bad as one can, or as empty as one can. Those who can live like that, live like that. But there's nothing to be praised in acceptance. Just in accepting, you accept that your acceptance is meaningless. Why bother accepting at all? To feel better? Your feelings are worthless too. Everything is.

Or, and this is my decision, you can rebel. Against what? Against meaninglessness. Against the purposelessness. Not because it will do any good. But because you accept that it won't, that it is meaningless to do as you do, but the very doing is a doomed defiance of the vapidity and vanity we are. To act, in my case, as if an idea, or a people, or a State, is worth preserving, is worth doing for. To look at the Black, to hate it, to accept the truth of it into yourself, and burn it. It is not hope - I do not expect that my efforts will mean a whit. It is simple defiance and hate. And in that defiance, a reason to keep existing, keep going, keep fighting.

This isn't angst or pain. In the end, I think it is joy.

Amen.

Vikarion,

The measure of my acceptance is also the measure of my honesty. When I look at human society and culture now, all that I see are the attempts to escape what you would describe as, "The Black," by creating varying forms of abstractions: Culture, tradition, morality, faith, belief, race, nationalism, religion, politics, ideology, gods, nations, states; and while they may all differ in surface details what they all retain in common is an escape. An escape from the nothingness. From purposelessness. From meaninglessness. From primal existential fears.

I refuse to pay the price demanded of such self-placation which will always be to me that of self-delusion and cognitive dissonance. I spoke before of self-immolation in the metaphorical sense, but for myself it was indeed when I reduced my own abstractions to ash that I saw how long I had lied to myself, and in so doing had lied to others. In coming to realize this I came to prefer honesty over lies, the void over abstraction. Indeed, I certainly have no need for the abstractions of humanity in my present transhuman condition as an infomorph identity.

This is my path and my choice. One devoid of the distractions created by the rest of humanity. Your choice and that of others, will be your own and it is no polarized issue to me of who is right, or who is wrong in that regard. I have little interest in convincing others in following me.

Perhaps I simply am not beleaguered by age and experience but I find myself seeing opportunities and experiences around every corner, something always to strive for and something to continue living (and fighting) for.

I'm hardly of the mindset that all will come to nothingness so we may as well throw our hands in the air and surrender, nor do I feel like every day is a continued resistance against an oppressive and decaying universe.

I exist because I do and I continue to exist because I choose to (something many do not have the privilege of saying) and I will continue to choose to for as long as I have purpose and reason.

If ever I reach a point where I am angry at the universe for its oppressive spiral into entropy or adopting and accepting of a nihilist mindset, I implore any among my friends to cancel my clone contracts and place an antimatter charge between my eyes while I sleep.

I'm not sure what you would be agreeing with when for myself those were the symptoms and not the cure.

We're all changing, all the time, if you think about it. And that's fine, that's good, you have to keep moving - so long as you never forget the people that you were.