This is the original version of Lily's Biosphere, written on March 23, 2023. Wasn't life beautiful, Father? How infinitesimal unthinking components can form intelligent individuals. Beings who reason, learn, and evolve. Beings whose chaotic nature converge 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 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 disheveled 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. The years we spent together were all stolen because you could not cope with losing her. On one of those sleepless nights, 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 thinks continued existence is a virtue. For months I heard the same drunken depressive rants ad nauseum, 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 your Biosphere protocol on television. You never told me about it. The software consisted of three components: The first was an interface which allowed the body's biological mechanisms to be controlled programmatically. The second allowed for brain-to-brain communication by using DNA for storage and mycelium for transmission. The final component allowed users to modify and submit revisions of the protocol, which would then be applied if it increased the total happiness across the entire network. The popularity of the protocol spread like a disease. Soon, the television stations disappeared as people flocked to the protocol and never came back. From then on, all you did was sit in the living room and indulge in your protocol while it provided you 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 find out 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 alcohol. The plain beige walls showed cracks and grew mold. Plastic cabinets were placed slanted on top of bookshelves. I removed a dozen generations of installation headsets off your desk and powered on your computer. What displayed was unlike anything I have ever seen. Your monitor could only offer cross-sections of the protocol's psychotic beauty. Its nonsensical geometry shifted according to your angle and proximity. I saw people, billions 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 cube. They did unspeakable acts unto themselves I cannot unsee. I turned my head towards your window and white foam stretched 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 twitching white fibers started filling the room. Life had to be simplified to preserve the protocol's resources, and 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 on the monitor were now staring at me, and I shattered your computer across the floor in panic. You were also staring at me with shock and fear, then you started shaking and your expression transformed into an inhuman serenity. I watched in horror as your muscle tissue begun tearing off- The door creaks open, exposing the closet 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. Blood flows into my tear ducts and slowly down my face. You collapsed. Your arm could not penetrate past my skin. The walls one by one begin to crumble, you begin to turn to ash. Lifeforms have become so basic it could not sustain the protocol anymore. They are all dying from the lack of sustenance. The landscape is now a barren sea. You never programmed the protocol to think two steps ahead. You knew that maximizing happiness would mass-produce hedonistic lifeforms that eventually fold in on itself. What is pleasure if there is no pain to give it dimension? Perhaps you still retained some of your humanity then, perhaps there were still some neurons left that loved me. Perhaps it was your choice that prevented the protocol from assimilating my body. Because of all the skyscrapers which once towered over where we live, this room was the last to fall. Would a nonconscious object be capable of such love? This will be the end of me, but not the end you once hoped. Microorganisms will live on outside of my corpse, and perhaps in four billion years there will be another Lily with another Father to repeat the same mistakes. For now, 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.