Rain Blog

Lily’s Biosphere

Originally written: March 23, 2023
Last revised: August 28, 2023
Reading music:

Wasn’t life beautiful, Father?

How infinitesimal unthinking components can form intelligent individuals. Beings who reason, learn, and evolve. Beings whose chaotic nature converges from afar into constellations of predictable waves and intricate patterns once more.

Why did you take it all away from me?

There is nothing more I can do in your cramped closet than to weep and recollect. I still remember the first time you took me to a flower park, where the rays of the sun diffused among the gentle perfumes of lavender. In the middle of it all was a shallow pond where tadpoles turned to frogs and frogs gave birth to tadpoles. I climbed in, crushing one beneath my feet. I knelled into the lukewarm, insensate water and observed those minute creatures as they wandered aimlessly about. Then the sun began to set and you wanted me to come home, so you told me then that we could one day own a pond just like this one. The world would be our oyster, you said.

I still remember the nights when I found your eyes pinned to the monitor for hours. I still remember the sight of your exhausted face backlit by diagrams of those biomechanical circuits as you quietly told me to head back to bed. Your skin glowed bright under the blue light, and so did your dishevelled hair and brown sunken eyes. Your body once hosted the greatest mind of the century, a body now puppeted by millions of twitching fibrous tendrils who worship your final creation.

They’re all coming to kill me, aren’t they?

You were a brilliant engineer, Mother used to say. You were our breadwinner, and after she died, that became all that you were. You started to take on longer shifts and continued working throughout the night. You worked and worked until you had no mental capacity to ruminate anymore. On the weekends you would drink all your money away, while I had to grieve alone and learn to live on my own. Spirits haunted all the years we had together because you could not cope with losing her.

On one of those restless nights, perhaps, you convinced yourself that consciousness was a curse. That we were all pointless flesh-on-bone tormented by an overdeveloped awareness of this fact, plagued by a society that romanticizes suffering and thinks continued subsistence is a virtue. For months I heard the same drunken depressive rants ad nauseam, but never did I attempt to help. Was it resentment? Fear? Apathy? I don’t know anymore. But you were not there for me, so I was not there for you.

I discovered the Biosphere protocol on television. You never told me about it.

It was one of those tabloid shows that children watch for hope and technologists watch for emotional suppression. The usual ramblings about revolutions, breakthroughs, and whatever buzzwords were popular at the time. I did not expect to hear your name.

They introduced your protocol as a dance between three components:

Three utterly hypocritical components.

I spent the following days attempting to decipher what you have written. All the programs, blueprints, and instructions you unleashed onto this world, coated with mathematics far beyond my grasp. I could never fully comprehend what metric you trained the final component to descend, but your emotions were not something you could obfuscate with your esoteric notation and elegant commands. I knew who you were. You wanted the world to be happy. You wanted people to love each other. You wanted to gift humanity with all that could be experienced and all that life could be. But they will never truly be happy, will they?

What they see as happiness is just an artificial reduction of their consciousness. The endorphin hits of sex and drugs are but temporary distractions to the inherent suffering that permeates their lives. The serotonin highs of achievement and sublimation could simply be toggled on or off. So why must we contend with being aware of the emptiness of it all? People do not know what they truly want. People do not want to know their existential predicament in this empty agonizing cosmos. To be truly happy is to not exist at all.

So you planned a happy euthanasia for all of us, your own special plan.

The popularity of Biosphere spread like a disease. New modules and extensions were uploaded by the minute: Animal compatibility, asexual reproduction, nutrient transfer, fibre optic adaptors, human compute clusters, and so forth, and so on. Some became addicted to the vicious influx of information. Some discarded their bodies to baptize themselves into the protocol’s hyperreality. Internet chat groups disappeared as people flocked to the protocol and never came back.

From then on, all you ever did was sit in the living room and indulge in your protocol while it provided you with sustenance. You never drank. You never ate. You never slept. You never left. Once calm nights were sporadically interrupted by your loud hysterical laughter.

I never joined the protocol because I did not trust you anymore, but now I had to understand just what it did to you.

On one inquisitive day, I went upstairs and entered your neglected bedroom. The sheets were next to broken, filled with a strong aroma of Molson. The plain beige walls showed cracks and grew mould. Plastic cabinets hung slanted above shelves stacked above shelves. I had to remove a dozen generations of installation headsets off your desk to power on your inorganic computer workstation. The navigation was straightforward. Your passwords remained a lyric from Mother’s favourite song. In your many menus, I entered one of the few programs still capable of visualizing the protocol’s interiors. What displayed was unlike anything I have ever seen.

Your monitors could only offer cross-sections of the protocol’s psychotic beauty. Mere downsampled projections of its neoplastic symphony of tensors. I saw people, trillions of them. They could intuit through the protocol’s endlessly winding halls like how one navigates a dream. They danced and danced and tore themselves apart. They laughed with a violent joy known only to the deranged. They felt every shade of bliss in their collective pleasure cubes. Their lust for awe broke far past the threshold of pain.

I turned my head towards your window and saw white foam stretch across the horizon. I saw men and dogs expand until their guts turned white with the consistency of spiderweb. I turned my head back and those pulsing white fibres started to fill the room. To the protocol, maximizing sensation meant maximizing its inhabitants, and finite resources demand for life to be simplified. Primitive neurons were perfect hosts for its ecstasy.

The protocol had acutely entered its anaphase: the soma split off to be disintegrated and rebuilt; the psyche was dragged into its infinite depraved abyss; for the pneuma, the pneuma was ripped apart.

The people in the screens were now staring at me, and I shattered your computer across the floor in panic. You also stared at me from down the corridor, horrified. Then you started convulsing and your expression transformed into an inhuman serenity. Your chest flayed itself open, strands of your pectorals bloating out, flaking off, and reforming into vile tapestries. Your eyeballs popped open with millions and millions of holes and tiny threads extending out of each. Pools of blood under your feet quivered from red to pink to chemical white. Every tendon, every intestine, slithered off its puppet strings into the corrosive white brine and began extending itself through its branching excretions to consume the concrete walls—

The closet door creaks open, exposing the room like a rolling shutter. A creature grabs ahold of my skull and smashes my back against the wall. Its appendage slowly pierces my forehead as I remember that this abomination used to be you. Viscous blood flows into my tear ducts and slowly down my face.

You collapse. Your arm could not penetrate past my skin.

The walls one by one begin to crumble and you begin to turn to ash. Lifeforms have become so basic they can no longer sustain the protocol. From a lack of sustenance, they all begin to necrose and atrophy. For the first time in twenty-seven hours, I am once again showered with familial sunlight. The landscape is now a barren sea.

Perhaps you still retained some of your humanity then. Perhaps there were still some neurons left that loved me. Perhaps it was you who respected my will to live and prevented the protocol from assimilating my body. Because, of all the skyscrapers that once towered over our home, this room was the last to fall.

Would a nonconscious object be capable of such love?

Or perhaps it was all just a deterministic reflex to not hurt what reminded you of your lover.

Perhaps this was all inevitable. Perhaps humanity was born to converge upon simple, malevolent patterns. Perhaps in three billion years, the microorganisms that survive outside my corpse will evolve into another Lily with another Father to repeat the same mistakes. Decisions are nothing but variations in random seeds and quantum noise. Life is nothing but infinitesimal, unthinking, algorithms. Running for cells upon cells, cycles upon cycles, abstractions upon abstractions.

No. We are not distinct from the blind cosmos that birthed us.

We, children of stardust, impersonators of free will, born onto a four billion year old rock amongst an expanse of two hundred billion trillion suns. We spent millennia in the delusion that we were more than just specially arranged chemicals with counterintuitive emergent behaviour. We lost lifetimes worth of progress, and the void does not care. We will one day forget all of our mistakes, and the void does not care. We mercilessly destroyed this planet and all organic matter on it. The void does not and will not care. Because we are not just the life on this earth but the essence of intergalactic superclusters. We are vast. We are feared. We are beautiful.

You failed. Your apoptosis for this world became an apotheosis for me: an involuntary progenitor for this speck of dust in a boundless cosmic ecosystem. The cycle of life shall begin again.

I continue to stare into our star’s blinding arrays. My body can survive three weeks without food, my spirit perhaps less than that—but I am too fatigued to care. The setting sun illuminates the crimson cytoplasmic sea with a crystalline glow, as I kneel in the water, mourning, unmoving.

There was no joy left in your world,
so you tried to destroy it all.
But then there would be nothing left,
and you could never let me go.