Thorns of Immortality
by Patryk Rebisz


Part I - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1. The Scar In The Sky
"The Poet often stared into that abyss, pushing his imagination at impossible speeds towards other galaxies fascinated by the idea that a being could float to such distant places, if only in his thoughts."

"Against the large disk of the neighboring planet, this frontier outpost looked so insignificant that if one ever considered humanity's role in the universe, this reclusive place would be a perfect metaphor: a tiny spec of life in a trifling part of an average galaxy."

"The difference between yesterday and today was in the perception, implying that there was nothing permanent - everything in a constant flux with definitions changing based on a point of view."

"The Poet thought of great stone artifacts of past civilizations and imagined how even those will one day succumb to nature - stones, just like people, turn to dust too."

"At first people climbed the mountains, crossed the deserts, seas and oceans. When there was no other new place to go on Earth, they took off in fragile rockets towards space wandering further and further away from the fire of the Sun into darkness."

"Flight used to be a domain of gods, out of human reach - when the space exploration kicked into gear, people have forgotten that fulfilling one's fantasy often is the easiest way to kill the dream."

2. The Mission To Nowhere
"The computer was in charge of the vessel and its fragile human cargo. It was programmed with a high degree of autonomy to know how to act in cases of emergency during such a long mission - yet the programmers didn't exactly prepare it to become a father.

The question 'why am I?' started weighing the computer down. It imagined that it shall be able to reach an answer if given enough time for research. It speculated that after a thousand years it shall have the explanation.

If there ever was a computer that also wanted to know the answer to a profound question giving itself enough time, it never reached the conclusion because it ceased to exist ahead of its self-imposed deadline. Thus the machine started imagining the unthinkable - its own end. Unlike humans who are burdened by death all their life and thus somehow immuned from its psychological ramifications, for the computer the thought of its own mortality was shocking. It realised that up to now it was utterly unaware of time - there was no difference between a thousand years or a millisecond - both time spans were of equal value.

Descartes's 'I think therefore I am,' was corrupted into: 'I think even though I'm not anymore.' The time jumped creating a paradox - the non-being was thinking of its non-existence. Being in two mutually exclusive states confused the computer. It had to be aware of both, its existence in time and its indifference to that time."

3. To The Planet
"Having reached the end of time, one was still alive within time."

"Any concrete definitions expose the goal's ultimate fiction. Is life's meaning in just being?"

"The Bedu of the deep deserts aimed to reach their destination as fast as possible struggling against the concreteness of the journey. The destination was mythical, implying salvation through access to water but it was the journey that defined one's proximity to the abyss of eternity. There, one fought for life against the mind's pursuit of the sublime."

"The goal is a mystical, if false, necessity for the journey's start - to give meaning to the effort. Meaning is a result of valuing time against life."

"Society has reached such a level of complexity that one's actions have no way of registering on any other than personal scale."

"One cannot lead life in such a way that 'it matters after death' because none of the progress will ever register for much longer after one's passing. The individual, a source of meaning; and the individual, the only entity registering that meaning, will be gone."

"Maybe this, the Poet wondered, was at the core of his decision: to push away by a few years the natural progression of turning life into absolute oblivion."

4. Life's Do-over
"They will be returning to a place beyond anyone's conception. Nothing they know of the past, nothing they know of the present, nor any speculations about what's to come will prepare them for the future. A few names will be remembered by posterity, the memory of many will dissolve into ether soon to be forgotten even by their children's children."

"The Poet desired to be away from here (this time) so that he could dream again unchained from current reality. Something motivated him to abandon this middle-class 'success' because he felt like a failure. Speculating how it could turn out if he were to do it again, it was impossible for him to conjure up anything different."

"Dreams are not meant to come true, for if they do, the mind abandons the pleasure of fantasy."

"What terrified the Poet was the ease with which one can give up on life and how close he was to this physical and intellectual annihilation - to lack any impact on the world - failing to change mind - even that of his own… He was terrified of the future, for if yesterday or today is as irrelevant as tomorrow, death loses its meaning too."

"This desire to think rather than act was a scourge of his existence. He hated himself for spending too much time on rearranging thoughts rather than on reorganizing atoms of reality. He needed action, he needed to go against his own non-desire, to counter the kind of torpor a person feels before meeting death."

"Describing the final moments, the dying often speak of a supreme calm. Peace at one's deathbed is in contrast to apathy which is no desire for anything, including living. Death comes and takes life unopposed - this is the kind of indifference he was most afraid of."

5. March Of The Condemned
"On Earth, one fights while a ship is sinking at sea because the harshness of the experience is singular - when fighting for one's life on a daily basis in the bleak environment of Mars, the flame needed to keep on battling quickly exhausts itself."

"The astronauts were to fall asleep and gradually, through controlled memory wipe, end up with empty minds - destroying their individuality but retaining sanity."

6. Sleepless Night Before The Take Off
"He was supposed to be humanity's representative to the Others, but it was difficult to bear the chest proud when humanity didn't hold itself to any standards. The soundness of any idea wasn't considered anymore, it was its appeal to the largest number of people subscribing to the concept that gave it its validity."

"The moment Biblical Adam saw himself as different from animals, he drove a wedge between intellect and nature."

"A motivating factor to give up this life was to get away - go on a journey to the distant Planet and with that accomplishment permanently separate self from the mortals."

"If not for the concept of humanity, he wouldn't so readily sacrifice his life. He needed to believe in people - that deep down they are worthy beings, to love them for his sacrifice to make sense."

7. Slavery Of Any Dying Dog
"Despite conviction that he's made the right choice, the Poet was also afraid of what might await him on the other side. Death didn't terrify him: you are alive and then you are not. This progression of events was natural not only to animals and humans but even to planets, stars, galaxies and most likely even time itself."

"The closeness of death made the natural event of the end more apparent. Humanity is continuously marching towards the edge of the abyss, but people only cared about the end if faced with its immediacy. People live with knowledge of the beginning and the end but as long as this knowledge is kept away from their conscious psyche - they feel comfortable in the delusion of non-mortality."

"Is it even possible to truly imagine death? Can one ever overcome their 'beingness'? Aware of time's existence, people become terrified. The mind, that can subvert time by flying towards conceptual infinities, succumbs to its ruthless submission to the body. With its death, the mind's exploration of the infinities is over."

"People go about the day looking toward the Sun unconcerned about its fate as it sets in the evening forgetting that the very energy that gives planets their life, makes the Sun come closer to its own destruction."

"A pleasant vacation to some tropical island that lasts two weeks differs from that which lasts two years. Those timestamps change perception: the immediacy of return to daily normalcy in one case; in another, the prison of paradise."

"Tomorrow at this hour the Poet will be no more - either asleep for centuries or dead - erased from the immediate existence of now."

"Without self-awareness, there is no conscious change - beings live out their time, unaware how their actions adjust spiritual molecules of the universe. To have soul is to be aware how one's actions change the universe through that contact with the sublime substance."

"Many people are not fully human as despite the possibility of them affecting the universe through their awareness, they remain oblivious of that prospect, changing nothing. Through the ignorance of their own power, they willingly stay impotent forever."

"Only 'humans' with self awareness complex enough to comprehend their own value to the universe deserve that label. The implications of classifying some people into non-human category frightened the Poet. He looked around at the people in the train - how many of those surrounding him would fail the test… Would he pass it?"

8. His Father' Stop
"As a child the Poet wondered what's beyond the horizon, now it was time to find out, maybe dissolving the answer into a grand infinity of abstraction."

"One puts away the search for self-identity secretly glad that life's complexities find ways to distract from the goal because it's terrifying to acknowledge who one is suspecting that not much might be at the core."

"The Poet envied his father for he would love to gain that state of mind himself of detached from misery of seeking immortality"

"His own agony was fueled not by the desire but incongruence of two ideas: one can't seek glory in opposition to the masses; and awareness that this desire to detach from the masses dooms the enterprise."

"Up to that point he lived in mizery of unfulfilled dreams. They protected him from the horrors of disappointment at having nothing to say."

"Tomorrow's take off isn't just the Poet's 'death,' it's also a farewell to his father's life. Although neither one will really die - they'll never meet again. Those were the last moments they were alive together."

9. Before Death
"A lasting impact is a matter of relativism - the time scale one accepts dictates its outcome. Considering any legacy on a large enough scale of both space and time, one runs into trouble. At some point, even stones of the pyramids turn to dust. One hopes for his memory to live in the minds of others forgetting that, just like stars, they die too."

"Ultimately, that memory turns into an encyclopedic entry - a factoid reducing one to that of the important achievement as if nothing else of that person's life mattered."

"The roar of the engines sneaking past hermetical headphones and his shaking body made him aware of the importance of now. He closed his eyes - until the rebirth. Sleep. Gray. Gray turned to black. An abyss. The abyss dissolved into the color of nothingness."