it's done now. new content in the OP as well so read that first. lamentably the ending must be split up due to exceeding the character limit; i would have preferred having it all together in one post but nice things just can't happen can they
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8154C / 14709F
The clinamen. For many years particle physicists had been troubled by the problem of baryon asymmetry in the early universe, which was in greatly-simplified terms the question of how it came to be that matter and antimatter were not produced in equal amounts. Under other circumstances this would have been expected to occur, and in their precise equality the two substances would have annihilated one another completely to produce an empty universe consisting of aught but radiation; yet this was manifestly not so, as at some point in the process an imbalance took root which gave matter a slight lead over antimatter, allowing much later the formation of galaxies, stars, planets, &c. Considered within the grand scheme of things this slight lead was very slight indeed, the most minuscule deviation from perfect equality, an infinitesimal moment of anisotropy on the face of the void – yet, all the same, present. Knowing that everything in the world, indeed the world itself – all the saints and kings, the vicious and the evil, the nameless, accursed, the vast land and the ocean, the sky and everything in it, the clusters in the deep field of space – was borne of an indescribably minuscule imperfection, a vector that catalysed itself out of nothing, out of perfect stillness, a solitary stain in the otherwise-flawless cartography of the void, lent a deep awareness of contingency to those willing to fully embrace its implications. Yet – you could not help but wonder – were not the ancients aware of this? Other ways of posing the same question had been dredged up time and again throughout history, ultimately boiling down to this: why is there something rather than nothing? Uncounted hours of rumination had been spent here; the philosophers had given a vast range of answers, from the straightforward – for the unintelligent – to those that circumvented the question entirely – for those too intelligent by half.
Spontaneous symmetry-breaking. For your purposes there were only two possibilities. Generally considered to be the more likely was that she appeared to you in this way, i.e. her appearance to you was in some way contingent on your own faculties of apperception – not, it must be clarified, in the anthropomorphising sense which imparted a will that chooses an appearance you are, so to speak, comfortable with, but rather in the sense that every particularity of her appearance to you was a working-out of something immanent to the way your own consciousness organised its perceptions of the world. Or, put another way, the reason she manifested in the way she did was nothing to do with her, allowing even that anything could be 'to do' with her, which it could not – but rather entirely to do with you. The latter and more intriguing possibility, which was less an alternative to the former than it was a potential corollary, was that her appearance to you was not exhausted by its particular characteristics but rather encompassed the universality of your experience: to wit, that the entire universe as you perceived it was a mere epiphenomenon, an externality, of her particular appearance to you. She appeared to you, and in every meaningful sense this appearance was all that existed; the encounter was not a dreamlike interlude in the continuum of the everyday...rather it was the everyday, the world in its worldliness, that was a dream the antecedent encounter engendered simply and for no other reason than to contain itself.
8218C / 14824F
The comedians of Babylon. You came to a distant land occupied by an enigmatic tribe, and stayed with them a while as a guest of their chief. One night the chief invited you to take part in an ancestral custom. The whole tribe gathered, and one from among their number was selected and stood up in front of the rest, where he could be seen easily by all. This man thought for a while, and then spoke. “Twenty-six!” he said. Ripples of laughter passed through the crowd. Satisfied with this response, the man stepped down and returned to his fellows, pausing on the way to select another man. This next speaker, just like the first, stepped up in front of the crowd. Without hesitating he called out “Six!” This was received with even more laughter than the last time, a lot of good-natured thigh-slapping and so on. Things continued in this vein. A person would step up in front of the tribe, speak a number aloud, and there would be – sometimes more, sometimes less – laughter. Seeing this you were understandably quite perplexed and turned to the chief, with whom you were sitting. The chief explained that it had long been the custom of the tribe to gather every so often and tell jokes for each other's entertainment. This had been the custom for such a fantastically long time that all the jokes were by now intimately familiar to the members of the tribe – so familiar that it was no longer necessary to recite them. Each joke had been assigned a number; all the comedian needed to do was provide that number, and the audience would know precisely what joke was meant by it. Having explained this, the chief then graciously offered you a chance to go up and tell a joke; curiosity thus aroused, you agreed. You stood up in front of the crowd, felt all the tribe's eyes upon you. You thought for few moments, then a few more. The tribe was gripped in anticipation. At last you called out, in a tentative voice, “Two thousand one hundred and one!” At that moment, a deadly silence fell over the crowd. Their faces betrayed pure astonishment. Then, somewhere in the back, someone emitted a giggle. It was like a dam bursting. The crowd exploded, erupting in peals of laughter, uncontrollable, they were clutching their chests trying to stop themselves but they couldn't, they laughed and laughed for minutes on end. The tribe was in utter chaos. When at last things seemed to have subdued you stepped down and returned to the side of the chief, who was red in the face, wiping tears from his eyes. You asked what had been so funny. The chief answered, “We've never heard it told like that before!”
The joke's over. In the end you moved on, like you always knew you would. But you had often wondered about that tribe, about what became of them. They were in many ways a very modern people. All that once took the form of an organic interaction – the gossamer thread of comedy that wound unpredictably in and out of everyday discourse – had been replaced by its representation. A social relation had been made into a 'thing', frozen, deadened, preserved like a flower pressed between pages of a book. What had begun as a straightforward compression of communication under the auspices of a textual archive kept in common became a plane of discursivity radically divorced from that archive. What the traveller exposed was that they were no longer people who laughed at jokes, nor were they were people who laughed at numeric references to jokes. They were people who laughed at the references in and of themselves. They laughed at the numbers. What the numbers referred to had become immaterial. Perhaps no-one knew what the actual jokes were; perhaps they had been forgotten for a long time. Perhaps there never had been any jokes to begin with – as far back as you went, it was nothing but numbers. Perhaps any of that. All of that. And yet, you thought. And yet – and yet, who were you...the question raised itself...who were you, to call their comedy impoverished? You with your prejudice, your motivated reasoning, your preconceived notions of what was right and good. Who were you to judge? Could it not be that this tribe had – in the numbers – discovered a radical new form of cognition? Could it not be that in the mere pronunciation of those syllables, those tired signifiers, those utilitarian phonetics – they had found a way to perceive a world of nuance, a resplendence in the sheer joy of language? Could it be that? You would never know; you could never know. That way was barred to you. You left the tribe where you found them, felt the warmth of their cook-fires recede into the horizon as you wandered off, aimless, into the empty desert. For want of any other claim, you had to imagine them happy.
33550362C / 60390684F
$00-00-00-00-0-0
Your room.
[soundStopAll]
[charaSet 空 0000000 0 「 」]
Perhaps, at the end of everything, you thought that this was some kind of mistake.
[scene 00000]
[fadein black 0.0]
[wait fade]
Perhaps you thought that every obstacle set up before you was just that. That it was there for you, for you to overcome, and for no other reason.
[charaTalk 空]
[charaFace 空 0]
[charaFadein 空 0.0 0]
@「 」
And you saw a new Heaven and a new Earth, for the first Heaven and the first Earth were passed away, [r]and there was no more sea.
[k]
Perhaps you thought of this as an orderly progression that cost you nothing but time.
@「 」
And you saw the holy city new Jerusalem coming down from GOD out of Heaven, [r]prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
[k]
Perhaps you thought of this as something like a game, and therefore not serious. That there had never been any real possibility of defeat, not in any meaningful sense, and that you had treated events accordingly.
@「 」
And you heard a great voice out of Heaven, saying, “Behold! The tabernacle of GOD is with men, [r]and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, [line 3]and GOD Himself shall be with them and be their GOD.”
[k]
Perhaps you thought that – lacking seriousness – your defeat didn't matter anyway. You would have tired of this game eventually, and when you did there would always be other games. You would move on. You could always move on, and you would. Move on to some other collection, some other library to fill out. Move on, move on. Your boredom could be infinitely deferred. You could always, always, always move on.
@「 」
“And GOD shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, [r]neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, [line 3]for the former things are passed away.”
[k]
Perhaps you would realise at last where you were, where you had come to – this desert on the threshold of death. Where white ash extended over a searing plane to infinity in every direction. You had come to a place where there were no memories, where there was nothing. A horizontal charnel-house, a 2D ossuary. Where life endured, however pitifully, and for not much longer, as a minuscule stain on the sheer surface of annihilation.
[wt 0.0]
[charaFadeout 空 0.0]
Perhaps then you'd see,
[messageOff]
[wt 0.0]
[fadeout white 0.0]
[wait fade]
[scene 00000]
[wt 0.0]
[fadeout black 0.0]
[wt 0.0]
[wait fade]
[soundStopAll]
[end]
that you stopped moving all the way back there.
Originally Posted by Snow
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