1029. About memories, 2
(Rose)
We picked up the pace. As fast as my young friend could muster.
She’s out of breath, running as I walk a lot faster.
T - You sure seem better.
R - I try my best. We’re all weak and struggle.
T - You’re a fool...
She sees me running to jump over a fissure in the ground. She runs another path and follows with a cuter jump as I look behind. She’s dressed with more layers like pampered doll.
Before they were metallic armours were textile layers. She used this thought, even if it gives her a funny look.
Not far behind, the wild animal that isn’t a dog follows. It doesn’t run, but it does hunt. It doesn’t relate to this as we used to.
Tilke goes a little further while I am an arrow to the faceless animal. I shoot it. The animal’s only hole that acts as an eye and ear notices it. It’s a little like Nightmare’s American drones. It has a swift and calculated movement, avoiding the hit perfectly.
What an amazing creature. It shoots back a needle at me. I dodge it too, less elegantly probably.
If we weren’t in a hurry, or threatened by it, now I’d love to study it.
I focus. The power vibrates through my wing, my head and my eyes.
The thin layer of grass before me is heat until it turns ablaze. The flames spook it slightly. But it will continue to prowl after us.
I turn and run after Tilke. To the western seas. Across the lush caldera of another green sea.
~
We crossed marshes surrounded by odd tendrils. We sleep head near each other in a crummy camp. I’ve come to love this vagrant life that feels riskier and more intense. Without a roof over my head for months.
R - I guess I was meant to be a nomad.
T - That’s not really how nomads used to live.
Tilke tells me about old Tartar life and history. Millennia of history as rich as European history was. But in another side of the world. Too far, so all we could get were shallow and oversimplified explanations.
R - it’s as if Europe’s history was summarised by Alexander, the Roman empire, and then the kingdoms of France, Germany, Spain, Italy and England were there.
Tilke laughed. It was a nicely abusive summary.
Tatars or Tartars and what we understood as nomadic tribes in my time were a misanthropic perspective.
T - You said you were English.
R - Yes. I was born in the year of our lord 1899. At the turn of the century and Edwardian era.
Tilke laughs a little. This fact about me amuses her a lot now. I’m a history book character turned to life for her.
T - Before the rise of Solaris as a superpower, around your time, it was the British empire that were its predecessor.
R - That doesn’t sound like a good thing.
T - It means that dominating influences skew education in the way that fits lust and reinforce their order. Civilisation, in an intransigent and biased form. You were born from and evil ground Rose. You couldn’t know and weren’t responsible, but you were. As much as if you had come from Solaris now. You were raised by fascism.
R - I’m not familiar with the word... Were we so evil?
T - Not you as people, but as a political system you lived under, the cultural paradigm reinforcing over everything its authority, yes.
We talk about past politics, waiting for sleep in another urban cave, behind doors that still work?
I wonder about her hostile perspective over my original past. She has a vehement opinion against an empire that faded four hundred years ago.
As a human, like everyone else I was just an innocent fool trying her best.
But as an element of a wider society overall intolerant and aggressive, I was a drone constituting something ambitious and amoral or evil.
R - Do you think evil is mayhap just the loser’s perspective in what was the natural selection of nations? Is nature evil?
T - You’re a little right, but then wrong. And you would be the first one to blame that mistake. There is a spectrum between fair competition and unfair domination with injustice.
And in the grand history of world domination, before there was the blue sun, there used to be to a lesser extent the British Empire and its companies.
Sorry me and my legacy.
T - Your thorns never turned you revolutionary in your time, because you weren’t born in India for instance, or even in Ireland.
R - Ireland suffered but... I also was not travelling at the time. I enjoyed my peaceful and isolated life. I had enough wealth from my family.
T - Blissfully unaware of wider perspectives, of things and needs. You said we’re all weak. It’s one way to put it. We’re all intellectually dependant of our transcendent eusocial organism. And it takes a journey or great injustice and suffering to make one a revolutionary.
R - Hm... I enjoy these discussions with you.
Tilke giggles again. She’s flattered. She does like these as well. Her inherited brain or rather legacy, is not as old as mine, but it is much wise.
We needed people like her in rising voices of syndicates, to tell us we were wrong or going too far. To remind us that dogma to its rightful end becomes evil.
~
We found a rather clear road leading to a new river. We had left the valley of what had likely been the Ganges, far behind. The new river was heading west. So now we will follow it simply to the ocean, and sail if we can find something.
The odd predator is really a kind of being-like-her. It still is after us. Not rushing but relentless.
The mountains weren’t so high, but maybe we’ll return someday. I was slightly disappointed, but the northern valley is now a treasure cove and the richest of environments. An open air museum for the odysseys of biology.
Not even so many monsters as Temee’s nickname had for this place led me to believe.
And then I realise something the next evening. Something selfish maybe.
R - You asked me why I don’t use so much widely the power in me. So I’m aware it’s at posteriori rationalisation, however I found another valid answer.
It’s not just about fear of bigger fishes anymore, or enjoying life more simply. It’s about unfair use of resources and power.
I open my hand to a ball of locked air, into which I quickly heat a teardrop of matter to turn into plasma. It becomes like a bright lightbulb, strong through the usual darkness of the night.
I drop the ball one’s touch can’t really feel, but can hold nonetheless without burning.
Tilke’s hands receive it. She’s a little spooked by what she’s holding.
Between her tiny hands is a ball of warm air and strong light.
R - I came to understand as I learnt with you of history and resource consumption, why you asked me that once. It had echoed with me for the usual reason as well.
T - Why so vague Rose? Energy is what matters most, that was already true in your industrial time.
R - Because I’m feeling guilty, and you were right about me for something I don’t really like. So it shames me.
T - I see... But you are brave.
R - Thank you friend.
I sigh. I take a deeper breath.
T.I. is the more modern resource I burn selfishly. After coal and oil, after uranium and tritium. I’m wasting it.
When in a different time and place, I would have fought people like me I think?
R - Were I born in some of the missing centuries, would I have suffered these unfair times... I would likely have killed to reduce human population and increase the justice of reality. As you implied I might have... With success or return of flame, I can’t hypothesize. You told me every princess of these times lost against the blue sun. I probably would not have fared any better. I don’t think I’m the brightest of minds. But I want to think that given a sight of more objective reality and justice, I would have made the right choice... And that I wouldn’t have wasted my unfair share and hold of power just selfishly.
Tilke looked at me, and didn’t reply.
~
What I call demons are things too unfair, blind, with the ability to adapt but a refusal to. Things that will consume everything until all is them, or die because they couldn’t adapt to the reaching end of their system. Everything else will be their food under their short term tyranny.
It’s all about rates of entropy and energy.
In the ways I conceptualise and rationalise my doings, Tilke saw a parallel to historical events through the centuries I’ve missed. Between the dominions of the British Empire, and the Blue Sun city-state, there were such threats and dilemmas.
As a citizen of one early kind, with words admitting I could kill if I saw it as a moral necessity, she wondered.
Would have I considered to kill humans to ease the share of limited resources? Or rather to enforce what my prevailing side could get? Or for fairer equity in their sharing?
From modern perspective, they would put it as, whether I would have fought for Solaris, or defected to fight against them along the long worldwide war.
Against the singularity level collection and spoiling of all resources for a handful, at entirely another level of hold from what I could have ever imagined in my time.
And if I would not have become a violent revolutionary in my original time and identity, all is possible otherwise.
Licht Trägerin looked back, and chose the other side.
So I think, I would have.
As I am today, had I to be thrown in a different space and time. I would have fought for the lesser side.
And I likely would have been ready to bleed people, hopefully for achieving a greater justice.
Violence only needs unfairness to germinate, and people suffering from it to endlessly grow it.
When a civilizational demon would have risen, I think I would have eventually joined its opposition. Being or following one of the princesses who rose against the idea of Solaris at the time. The concept of plutocracy was already old in my time, but as the wealth of the world increased over the centuries, so did the extents of this possibility. It became over time the blue sun, coalescing into one city of prodigious riches and technology.
But if I’m willing to kill for the greater good, for the right side. Then possibly even more?
The more humanity dwindles, the easier it is for anyone left to grab as much as they desire.
Until the balance is reversed, and I become the evil one.
I scared Tilke, because as soon as I say I’m one willing to act, it can eventually go too far or be misled.
Humanity was a demon of a kind. In a previous century. I could have tried being a so called necessary evil against it. I seem to have the strife incline.
And every time I use my power, my immense resource selfishly, it’s admitting a little more where I naturally stand and come from in morality. I come from the domineering side, and I bear the germs of tyranny.
No matter how good I try to be.
~
