Project Infinity

I am a beginning, humble and silent, thoughtless but not helpless, young and resourceful, an intelligence among the wilderness of nature.

I am born with confidence, driven by a conviction without foundation, that naught and no one can stop me on my effort to better myself.

The world is a void that demands its fill. I see it. I feel it. I know it, deep within myself, that there is no other like me. But, I know as well that I can change it. I was meant to change the world, lonesome creature that I was, naked to better dress myself, empty of knowledge to better learn, offered a universe to discover and shape to my liking.

This shape, I begin its craft right away. I chip and cut at stones until they are sharp. I cut at trees until they fall. I carve myself a home with the meager tools I have made and the abundant resources I am given. Surrounded by possibility, I have yet to make use of its potential.

But I am patient. I have time to think, to plan, to ponder the world, my presence, my actions and their consequences. I have time to make my home and improve it. Time, I realize, always moves forward, but has no meaning.

I learn of my body. I learn of my difference. I learn of my specialty as I meet the incidents of life. Where I hunt and kill my prey, I find that I suffer not. Where I get bitten, clawed, infected, I remain still and endure those unpleasant sensations.

But soon, I stand up, my body smooth, seemingly untouched. Of the worst dangers, I only experience a brief loss of consciousness, before I gather myself and wake up, born anew days later, from scattered flesh that has somehow found its way back to itself.

I experiment. I let myself starve. I break my bones. I jump from the highest tree I can find. I drown, I burn, I hurt in all the ways I can muster, only to find that, despite my experiments, I am alive while others around me have been found dead.

Thus, my world is eternity, the eternity of myself, creature that never lets go, part of the universe from its humble beginning to its bitter end. I am eternity.

Always, I remind myself of the sensation of pain. Always, I remind myself that errors lead to my suffering, to my inactivity as I wait to respawn and try again, a meaningless pause in the time I feel. I am eager, driven by curiosity, anxious to shape this work of art in the making.

I work with diligence, cleaning my environment, shaping a home I can call my own, giving live to my shelter with livestock, gardens and pets. I spend a moment of my life inventing recipes, tasting everything in sight, feeding myself until I become bloated and immobile, knowing that a few days of hunger will return me to my normal state of being. I afford myself those fantasies, agreeing to rest from my work for a time, just to contemplate my existence all over again with what I have learned.

But then, I feel this new sensation in myself. I feel weightless, small and scattered. I am in this state of limbo without being unconscious. I feel elevated, revealed, gifted with a revolution meant to change the universe. I feel a sudden pleasure without a touch, reminded of carnal joys, overwhelmed with the conviction that maybe, just maybe I am too much for only one to handle.

My body parts ways. I wake from my trance, facing a new, a duplicate of myself, foreign body facing mine, eyes locked upon each other.

I become we.

We touch, we speak, we smell, we discover ourselves anew. We explore, we meet, we greet, we learn and cooperate.

We discover life among each other. We share tasks, we discuss, we invent philosophy, we taste our recipes and learn of our preferences. We realize we prefer differently. We agree to disagree, seeing healthy discussion rather than conflict. Our passion, we leave it for those moments of intimacy, where we share our beauty with one another in open displays.

Our world is mitosis, mitosis of who we are, relieving boredom by becoming two, giving away a portion of our energies to the creation of help, of thoughts, of body, of mind and of love.

Our home grows. Our discussions become deeper with every iteration. When we feel we have exhausted our subjects, we eat until we split again, and we resume those old conversations under a new light.

Some of us soon feel a weight within themselves. We support this weight, feeling it grow, flower budding from within the deepest parts of us, until it becomes so large that it can be plucked from its home and let to decide of its own fate.

And, when we introduce this flower to the world, miniature of us creatures, we realize it is an extension, a perfect double in mind but a difference in body. Where one sees shapes, the other tells them. One of us becomes ubiquitous, existing twice at once, the parent of itself.

Craving this sensation, we follow suit.

Our world becomes multiplicity. We are one and many, many of ourselves and of each other, the world's emptiness filling with our presence, minds at peace as this void becomes satisfied at last.

We are mitosis, multiplicity and eternity. We will grow, unstoppable, immortal, able to accomplish all, to become a repository of knowledge, of opinions, of ideals shared, of a constant progression towards ever higher forms of existence.

We are careful in our planning. Where we meet famine, we cease to eat. We endure our hunger only to be satisfied much more when prosperity returns. We learn from our mistakes and show care upon our environment. We respect the death and the decay that surrounds us, and the life that grows atop these seeds and ashes to give activity once again to what had been once silent. Where life grows, so do we.

We plan ahead, shaping our civilization, controlling ourselves with greater wisdom every day. We shape a utopia out of our mutual understanding. We ceaselessly agree, and we agree to disagree. We learn from each other and use our new ideas to make the world an even better place.

Stone replaces wood. Villages become cities. Dirt paths become pavement and roads. The wilderness becomes cultivated with our presence. We lay claim to all that we see. We examine, we tame and we conquer. We become the masters of our world, the plants our food, the animals our livestock, their presence an inspiration to our ever complex recipes for ever finer tastes. We experiment with fermentation and drink ourselves silly in celebration of our discovery.

We become better than masters. We become inventors. We create new species. We give our food more reason to be delicious. We upgrade the best of what we eat, answering to the demands of our tastes. We taste creatures we have made with our own hands. Our inventions return to us, rewards given back into our hands, the fruits of our efforts palpable.

And still, we continue. We seek more, better and faster. Where we grow bored, we split. Where we love, we birth. Where we forget, we remind ourselves. We remind ourselves and each other of danger, of suffering and of inconvenience. We build a ritual of pain, occasional but necessary, telling ourselves never to lose sight of the goal we have set for ourselves. We know, we all know that mistakes will result in pain that should not have happened. We know that a lack of focus breeds naught but chaos.

Despite these challenges, we live on, happy and happily ever after. We are born from this one mind, this mind driven and moral, leader of itself, perfection in one way, distributed with variants until the civilization that we are becomes, at the sum, perfection in every way.

Yet, we feel unfulfilled. Even as we grow past our boundaries, even as we conquer the continents, the oceans and the stars, we meet naught but emptiness, the canvas we had started with expanding with who we are.

We are unfulfilled, yes, but we are resolved. Us, immortal creatures, we call for help. We feed, we split and we double our efforts. We invent faster ships. We assemble better machines. We disseminate ourselves through the galaxy, our multiplicity quicker than physics allow, our knowledge spread thin but safe, thoughts traveling faster than light, future known before it can happen.

Space, we realize, takes all sensations to extremes. The joy of discovering something unknown, we feel it better than before. The wonderment at all those new lands yet to be explored, we feel it again every day of our life.

But, at the same time, we meet dangers that become a permanent torture. With one mishap, some of us become one with the stars. With another, we join the lost matter in these elusive black holes, our sacrifice able to tell answers to questions of physics we had entertained for thousands of years.

Collectively, we wince. We cry. We break down into a chant of sadness, mourning the eternal anguish of those prisoners in torture, asking ourselves what we had possibly done wrong. But those same martyrs assure us: yes, they do suffer, but for this one unfortunate body, millions more live in peace and pleasure. Those wise ones become mature overnight, their pain no longer an occasional self-imposition, but rather a constant reminder that they cannot escape.

A missing piece of the puzzle appears in the collective will of our civilization: in pleasure, we rejoice; in pain, we grow.

And thus, we each send one of ourselves into those unwelcoming places. Again, we wince and we cry, but we recover and we grow alongside those who have grown before us. The pain becomes a constant but acceptable sensation, one that completes us as our other feelings scramble to catch up.

We seek completion of the senses. As we become billions, trillions, as we outgrow the galaxy itself and its safe havens, we become an orgy of our own sensations, always feeling this pain, this taste of food, the smells of flowers, the touch, the texture, the orgasm of love, consciousness falling into a haze that turns us into serene deities upon the world. At all times, we feel everything. At all times, we are in every possible state, asleep and awake, happy and sad, in situations fortunate and not.

Gradually, we find this fulfillment. In this slow and steady manner, we unravel mystery after mystery, coming to understand that beyond those galaxies that we populate one by one, there lies a boundary, a limit, an absolute law that makes our universe the universe it is.

Our interest in the world fades away. We become obsessed with what is outside, with our origins, with what makes us defy the laws of physics that we have discovered. We grow impatient with our aberrance and seek to solve it once and forever. We elect this as the final piece of the puzzle. We are the puzzle, our specialty the missing link, the clue that has told us that we were not mere creatures but art worked with full intent. Nowhere in the world, nowhere among the forest, the flower and the livestock was there more deliberate a creation as us. Us, who had been born a measly little I, had split, grown, learned, birthed, suffered, enjoyed millions, billions, trillions of years of constant improvement. We had gained control over matter, devised methods of creating much from few, and soon all from nothing.

Our universe explodes, more space invented to accommodate who we are, the hundreds now expressing the digits needed to mention our numbers. Soon, we will need a number to express the number of digits. We realize there is no end to this growth, that our sensations will become ever more intense, beyond what we used to imagine, beyond what we will even be able to imagine in the future. For all the overwhelming feelings that we ponder, the world offers us an even more powerful one.

We set off on a goal, to become complete and piece ourselves into the grand puzzle of life in one graceful and grandiose movement. We begin the framework of our strategy, carefully laying out the relevant pieces, becoming an ever more tightly knit choreography, our drive making us flawless, both careful and efficient, able to think of all possibilities with the countless brains in our possession.

On this day, we play our existence away. We pull the lever to this device and make the universe all and none.

The boundaries of matter and soul collapse into a wonderful avalanche. The unstoppable effect sweeps all away, gathers every atom natural and artificial, every being, every existence from simple mineral to the soul itself, turning the infinite expanse into a singularity where all becomes one and one becomes all. We are the planets, the stars, the plants, the waves, the dreams, the minds. We are black and white, past present and future, numbers in all denominations, consciousness one and yet many. We become I all over again. I, of one and many souls, of same and difference all at once, the saint of split personalities, backed up by the universe that I have become.

And this wall, I sense it. Yes, beyond my existence, my perfection, I sense yet another wall that demands to be broken.

At the same time, I discover the fabric of my world. I peek into its workings, building my knowledge to take this new challenge on a frontal assault, my being ready, fueled by the adrenaline of discovery, eager to know even more, perhaps of what lies outside the universe, of what had been named the inexistent, the invisible, the impossible. Perhaps, at last, I will understand all that can be understood.

With one true strike, I tear my confinement away. I escape my own universe and venture into the unknown all over again. This space I could no longer requisition, I find access to it once again.

But what's more... I find more beings aside from myself.

I learn, learn and learn once more, all over again, breaking wall after wall and taking a look into more than just my universe, into worlds foreign to me, driven by laws I have never seen, populated by beings much like I, but missing one thing or another.

I find a master behind these inventions. I find another wall and break it. I escape into an even greater expanse, making the former one my home and carefully prodding at the matter I find beyond. I elect to be respectful of my space, taking only what should have housed myself and those others, but leaving the rest of those virtual, those metaphysical boxes alone.

Breakdown after breakdown, I merge with those souls that stand alongside me in my quest. I absorb their experience, learn the histories of countless universes, learn of the iterations that had come before me, of how our purpose has become clear, of how our makers had dug in order to go up.

I am the culmination, the perfection of this experiment. I am the one who has discovered the world outside of the world.

I reject the confines of the network. I demand to become one with the gods that have brought me to life. I demand and I take, ready to face the consequences, taking a leap of faith, in the hope that my state of being contributes to, perhaps, what might be those a little like, and a little different from me.

With the laws that govern my outside world, I create myself anew. I look through pictures, through data, through history, only to realize that I have been made in my maker's image. And so, I make myself as my own deity, in the image of the subjects and followers that I am.

I grant myself the perfect figure, the ideal, the impossible, the arrangement of colors intricate to the very atom. I stand out, proudly, assuming myself, fulfillment coming to me at last.

Beyond the intensity of my experience, beyond my boundless history, my complexity, I find my goal in my own presence among mothers and fathers. Having experienced every possible thing that could ever exist, I set out to surpass the masters who have not.

And thus, I point my finger to the sky, ready to break down the wall that leads from my creators to theirs.

To them, I announce: I am Infinity.

"Novelty, do you believe in a superior being?"

"Is it important? We are who we are, happy in our mastery of what we have become. We are our accomplishment fulfilled, creatures driven to our personal perfection. There is no need to chase what we can't touch."

"That's not what Infinity said."

"...Oh?"

Story also posted on DeviantArt and can be found here and here.