Enceladus

Enceladus

Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. It is about 500 kilometers (310 mi) in diameter. Enceladus is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System. 

wikipedia

If I can’t sleep, which happens to me quite rarely, but sometimes it does, I imagine myself under the thick layer of ice on Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, the brightest world in the solar system. They say there is a warm ocean underneath the ice that covers the surface of the moon. What if I was a strange, alien organism inhabiting that ocean? What would I look like, think like, feel like? How would I see the world around me? I wouldn’t see it at all most likely. I would live in perpetual darkness engulfing me. I would be made out of that darkness, cut out of it. I would never know light or colours or trees or sky, my brain would be wired differently. Would I have a brain? As I think of it, imagine it, I feel my body disappearing, melting away and great peace descend upon me. I stop being myself, being here, I disappear, I sleep. I live in that ocean on Enceladus, I become that ocean.

There is still «I» to think this thought, to be calmed down or troubled by it. The thought takes Enceladus out of the open space, makes a beautiful, clean copy of it and places the moon into the cute, little, comfortable darkness of my mind turning me into a kind of god capable of creating different cute little universes in my head. Maybe that’s what I want after all, to be god. I sleep.

I don’t think about any of it much, not now, now I am too busy, too tired to occupy my mind with anything except the project. I spend most of the days inside my house working. The house is about three hors drive from the nearest town, I pay to have food delivered to my place once a week. I might use the necessity to buy food and eat as a reason to mix and mingle with the rest of the humanity but I feel neither urge nor need to do so, I don’t even like the idea of coming out to pay for my food delivery, I leave cash in the the mailbox same as the list of products for the next week. I like food and probably miss good restaurants but not enough to leave my little cozy corner in the middle of nowhere and walk into the bright wide world. I can work every day here, only this matters, there is electricity and internet connection, the rest doesn’t concern me.

I wonder what it’s going to be like when I wake up, some day in the future, maybe hundred years from now. I am curious. The world might end, it’s so volatile, so fragile, there is nobody overlooking the balance. But what if it doesn’t? What’s gonna be waiting for us, for me? Maybe we’d fly to Enceladus someday. Maybe we’d see the dark ocean underneath the surface ice. I stop working and imagine what it would be like. We’ll probably start a colony there. If there is anything alive under that surface we’ll destroy and pollute it most likely. Not like this never happened before or isn’t happening now.

Ordovician extinction.

Around 443 million years ago, 85% of all species on Earth went extinct in the Ordovician-Silurian extinction. The extinction was a most likely a result of global cooling and reduced sea levels, which dramatically impacted the many marine species living in warm, shallow coastal waters.

Wikipedia

My mother was told that she would never have children, some reproductive issue, infertility. My parents had adopted three kids before I was born, those were just kids, regular human beings that came into the world in the most natural way, but not me, I was special, I was a miracle, I came out of the womb of a woman whose body was incapable of producing new life, I was a gift from God.

I was very smart too, another proof of my divine origin, even taught myself to read at the age of four, at least that’s what the legend says, but I don’t remember the details. I was a mama’s boy, my dad was too busy and away too often, my siblings were much older and had other things to do, like college and girlfriends, most likely it was my mom who taught me to read. That’s not the way she presented it, though, she always said that I simply opened a book one day and started reading, real miracle. I really believed all that divine, miraculous bullshit for the longest time, it’s hard not to. Now that I have I about a year to live and haven’t achieved much everything seems different. Death puts everything into perspective.

Mom or not but by the age of 10 I was reading a few books a week on all kinds of topics and there wasn’t much to do for me at school. Parents hired a few tutors for me, money was never an issue. I our family money was always freely available.

The issue with school wasn’t that I was too smart per se, rather my complete inability to deal with other children. Here’s an example. When I was in third grade I smashed the head of a boy with a rock. He was bigger than me, twice the size probably, I was never particularly big or strong. I still don’t get what problem he had with me or why I remember all of it so vividly even after all the years. He punched me in the face a few times, it caught me completely off guard. Nobody had ever even spanked me or yelled at me, I was a precious little thing that everyone was supposed to take care of and protect. I was so surprised by this unexpected violence aimed against me that I didn’t even cry or feel pain. I was only 10 or 9, new things fascinated me, there weren’t many of them and the majority were coming from books.

The boy’s name was Jim, yes, Jim, like my father.

When my mom asked what had happened I told her that I walked into a wall, she didn’t suspect anything, I wasn’t the most gracious kid and this wouldn’t be the first time that I bumped into something.

Jim got into the habit of hitting me with a passionate favour and this stopped being entertaining pretty fast. He was sneaky and made sure that there were no witnesses. I didn’t fight him, I didn’t know how, he was bigger and stronger than, I could run away, of course, or hide or complain, my mother would have torn the school apart if she found out that someone was offending her precious baby. She could be a very dangerous woman, even my dad was afraid of her, I was afraid too, even the neighbour’s dog was afraid of her. Maybe that’s why I didn’t say a word. Me and Jim had a little secret.

After about two weeks of Jim practicing his combating skills on me I smacked him with a rock. He was smarter than me and better at dealing with people, despite all the books that I was constantly reading. I hit him right in the classroom before the first lesson with all the kids and the teacher watching. It felt good, surprise on his face was priceless. There was quite a lot of blood too and I got scared, especially after everybody started yelling and seemed to have gone mad. That was the end of my school days. My mother decided that it wasn’t right for her precious baby. They got me private tutors. There wasn’t much discussions about it. My family had money and when mom got something into her head there was no way to persuade her otherwise, my dad had to capitulate. It’s possible too that he didn’t much care and agreed to whatever she was demanding just to be left alone. That was his usual strategy. I don’t blame him. I was also doing whatever mom asked of me just to be left alone.

Devonian extinction.

It was the age of fish. Throughout the oceans species began dying out, and by the time it was all over between 79% and 87% of all species had gone extinct... It was one of the worst mass extinctions in Earth's history.

wikipedia

When I was fifteen I decided that I knew why God had put me into the infertile womb of my mother. I would save the world. How would I save the world? By freeing it from the human race of course. As I read book after book without making much distinction between topics it started dawning on me that humanity was the problem.

My mind is quite rational, my judgements were never coloured by extreme emotional reactions. I am not the most emotional person in the world, maybe that’s the reason why I could deal with my mother quite efficiently. My siblings had life and problems of their own, they were grown-up already and would show up maybe once or twice a year for Christmas or some other holiday. My dad coped with my mom’s overbearing energy by locking himself in the study and typing endlessly or reading. My dad was a writer and a scientist, he was very successful at everything he did except for raising kids and dealing with his wife. I personally can’t brag of being successful at anything at all. My current project is the last attempt to do something properly, change the world, make mommy proud, prove that I was a miracle baby after all. See, I am at least honest with myself about that. I can’t get rid of her, she’s sitting in my head, I even know where exactly, I have a tumour there, I saw it on the X-ray, it has my mom’s face I swear. She’s the one who gave me life. She’s the one who will take it away. When I lye awake at night and talk to the thing in my head that is going to kill me I call it «Mom». It doesn’t talk back. Yet.

But let’s get back to my story, I am getting distracted here. I decided I would save the world from humanity when I was fifteen. It seemed to me the most logical thing in the world. I read books on history of civilisation after civilisation, empire after empire, from Naram-Sin,King of the four corners and a living god of Akkad to all the rulers and conquerors and politicians of today. I was reading so much and so fast that it seemed to me back then that I would run out of all the rulers and the wars and would have nothing to read, but even now, thirty years later there are still plenty. There is always something.

The more I read the more obvious it became to me that we, as a specious, were a mistake, a glitch in the system, we were never supposed to come into existence, there was no way of controlling our exponential growth so we had to be wiped out. Completely. Totally. To the last one. This was the solution to all the problems of the world. Another thing was the suffering. We suffer because we are conscious of who and what we are, what we are missing and lacking, we are filled with fears and regrets. This is the unintended consequence of consciousness.

There was balance in nature. There was order and symmetry, the most chaotic systems still led to beauty and sense, there was none of that in our cities, our civilisation, only chaos and destruction. It didn’t upset me, it simply didn’t make sense. I decided I would do everything possible to put an end to it.

Permian Extinction

The Permian extinction was characterised by the elimination of over 95 percent of marine and 70 percent of terrestrial species. In addition, over half of all taxonomic families present at the time disappeared.

«I was never good with people», she said, «I want them gone after an hour or two together. Otherwise I’ll disappoint them. They’ll understand what a fuck-up I am»

She talked too much that night. Usually she wasn’t talkative and this was the best thing about her. There was something familiar about her too, something that I understood quite well, but couldn’t put into words. I was comfortable with her, I felt a kind of similarity that is rare in people. I think she was pretending to be something that I needed. She was good at pretending I guess, but a part of me wants to believe that it a bit of it was genuine. Back then I thought all of it was genuine, I am older now, I hope I’m wiser, I have a tumour in my head that started speaking to me in the voice of my mother, can’t be sure of anything.

She fucked good too, the girl, I have been with many women, I love them, I enjoy their company, the way their minds work, the way they feel. It’s always different. I paid to sleep with most of them, not that I had to but being too close to someone was too much headache, too much work and effort, there were other spheres of life that I’d prefer to put work and effort into. Like ridding the world of people. But I loved women, not someone in particular, women in general, women came and went, but love stayed, it transferred from one to the other and I loved each one of them in a different way. That was genuine.

My love for women didn’t make me waver in my aspiration to destroy do everything possible to wipe out the human race. My rationing was this: consciousness was a mistake. We were never supposed to exist. Consciousness was the reason for our suffering, our pain, our knowledge of good and bad. This turned life into hell. I was going to save the planet from the parasite and save every human being from pain. It seemed like a noble aspiration to me. It seemed logical.

I was twenty-six when I first met her. I had just graduated from the university and got a good, high-paying job that bored me to death. Only two things entertained me: planning the mess murder and fucking her. She asked me once what made me feel alive, what excited me, I couldn’t say «destruction of the humanity», I said «saving the world» and she laughed, I laughed and we fucked again.

I knew she hated her job, she hated fucking people for money, she’d say «If a customer feels that you don’t like him you are not a professional».

«But do you like me?», I asked, I was selfish, I wanted her to like me, I wanted to be special. I wanted to kill everyone, but I wanted to be liked too.

«You I like»

«How do I know you are not lying?»

«You don’t», she said and smiled.

She was doing something else I guess, this and that, I am not sure if it was working out for her. She was talking about retiring all the time, year after year, time passed and she was still there every time I called, in a cozy apartment on the 23 floor of a high-rise.

Right before the whole humanity destruction thing went to shit I met her for the last time. She was drunk that night, I’d never seen her drunk before, getting drunk was unprofessional. She wanted me to slap her, again and again, there was something mad and stubborn in her. It was interesting, fascinating to watch, somebody falling apart right in from of me. I wanted to put her back together but didn’t know how.

«I gave myself 2 years», she said when we were lying in bed, all the passions subsided. It was time for me to leave, but I didn’t want to and it didn’t look like she was going to kick me out.

«Two years for what?»

«To change, to become something better»

«What if you don’t?»

She stayed silent for a moment.

«I’ll kill myself cause I am useless»

Maybe you won’t have to I thought, maybe we’ll all be dead by then. But I didn’t say anything.

When I left that morning she was still sleeping. I never saw her again.

They arrested me when I got to work.

Triassic Extinction

The start of the Triassic period (and the Mesozoic era) was a desolate time in Earth's history. Something—a bout of violent volcanic eruptions, climate change, or perhaps a fatal run-in with a comet or asteroid—had triggered the extinction of more than 90 percent of Earth's species.

I never went to jail, but never did anything to rid the world of the human race too. It turned out there was a snitch among us which seems quite predictable to me now that I think about it. The idea was to unleash a deadly virus, a kind of bubonic plague equivalent, only this one would actually do the job and kill all the carriers, it would not be transmitted through rats and lice but through air and water, it would be everywhere. I think this could have worked. You see, previously, in all the past centuries nature was the only creator of viruses and bacteria that were attempting to wipe us out. Nature is quite efficient, but it’s blind and messy too, bloody, deadly and dangerous. It’s fascinating that a kind of order and beauty comes out as a result of all the disorderly clashing and colliding of evolution. I suppose chaos and creativity must go hand in hand, something must be destroyed and torn apart for the new to appear.

Our plan could have worked, would have worked, we added human ingenuity to the creative mess of natural selection. A perfect virus was created and waiting to be used, it was so efficient, so beautiful and so lethal that humanity would not have a chance. The plan wasn’t of-course, to use it against people. Scientists were studying it, researching it, looking for vaccines. They did it because they could, because they were curious. It might be hard to stop sometimes if you are driven by the search for something new, for the development, for growth, even if it’s the growth of a cancerous tumour, even if it’s a nuclear bomb.

So there was this invisible, deadly nuclear bomb sitting in the laboratory and our little group of potential destroyers of the humanity got access to it. There weren’t many of us, we didn’t meet or know each other, we never saw each other in real life, we were just avatars on the computer screens, encrypted messages exchanged with all the precautions. I wasn’t responsible for the virus itself, but for the security systems in the laboratory. I knew computers well enough to be able to cover up for the breach of security while one of the employees of the laboratory would get the virus. The rest I would find out from the news cycles.

I started imagining myself on Enceladus around that time. I didn’t really exist, I was water under the ice on that tiny moon. I wasn’t a human being, I was everything and nothing, living, breathing, conscious ocean under a few kilometres of ice. Those thoughts would lull me to sleep. Otherwise I would start thinking about the virus, societies that weren’t functioning properly, about my mother and my beautiful whore that was going to change her life or kill herself in the next two years. I was going to save them. I was going to save my dad locked in his study in front of the computer because he was incapable of standing up to his wife. I was going to save the whole world from humanity and humanity from suffering, from itself. I would die too, it was only fair.

None of that happened of course. The world didn’t come to an end, no virus was implemented, maybe there was no virus at all, maybe the powers that be simply used the idea as a ploy to fish out talented idiots like me and then use them for their own purposes. There was a trial and evidence that didn’t seem too useful or trustworthy but were enough to pronounce me a dangerous lunatic and put me into asylum for two years. No sane human being would do what I was going to do.

My dad’s money and influence played its part. They let me out without much fuss and I started working for the government or whoever that was giving me orders. I didn’t ask, it didn’t matter, work kept me busy, prevented me from thinking about what I did or didn’t do and what that meant.

I tried to find the girl that I was meeting before the trial and the asylum. Out of all the women I had ever slept with or had anything to do with I was searching only for her, don’t know why, maybe because she fucked better than anybody else or maybe I needed some kind of connection, no matter how fake. I never found her. I hope she managed to change her life and didn’t have to kill herself.

Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction

The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or the K-T event, is the name given to the die-off of the dinosaurs and other species that took place some 65.5 million years ago.

Wikipedia

Now that I have cancer and am dying it all fell into place for me. Life is supposed to be messy, it is supposed to end. There have been five large mass extinctions that wiped out almost all life on this planet, but it returned, it returns every time. Chaos is the natural order of things. It is what it is. Maybe we’ll destroy ourselves with some kind of nuclear holocaust or colonise the damn galaxy. None of it really matters. It is all the same. It could be us, humans or a meteorite, a volcano eruption, a damn virus that appeared as a result of good old natural selection. Life and death are two parts of the same endless, messy process, consuming itself and giving life to itself, black holes birthing new universes.

The night that I understood this I managed to sleep without imagining myself dissolving into water under kilometres of ice on a distant moon. I was at peace with myself. The next day I decide that I wanted to see as much of this show as possible, which meant I would need to stay around for as long as possible, which meant I wasn’t going to die.

I spent the next few months researching modern technologies that prolong life. We are doing pretty good in that respect. Humanity is quite imaginative and I am not the only one that wants to watch the play to the end of the last act.

Damn tumour in my head is pretty adamant about killing me. «I have given you life, I’ll be the one to take it back», it says sometimes in my mother’s voice. I have a plan of my own regarding this unpleasant possibility. The plan is quite crazy, the chances that it will work out are pretty low, but it entertains me to think about it. We already have technology to freeze the brain and the body, keep it alive until the day and time when they can be revived, brought back to life, beautiful and new. This pleasure is not a cheap one, but money is not an issue. Money is ones and zeroes these days and I am very, very good at dealing with modern technologies, ones and zeroes can migrate from account to account without much difficulty. I will set up a few accounts for myself here and there. If all goes well in a generation or two their value will double or triple. When I wake up I’ll be a rich man. But this is not the end of it.

There is another thing too, one more precaution, future is an unpredictable thing, hard to plan for, especially if you are going to be dead. The best way to predict the future is to create it. The best way to become rich is to create your own money. This is my secret project, everything I can think of.

You see, there is too much control now, governments, banks and corporations are getting more and more powerful, influential, we have less freedom than ever and if everything goes the same way, I imagine it would, there will be people hungry for freedom, ready for freedom, not willing to sacrifice it on the altar of centralised institutions. Here’s where my money comes into play, it’s untraceable, not connected to any institutions, completely private, it’s an idea that exists only online, can be exchanged, traded, borrowed. It’s worth nothing now, but it will grow in value if everything goes the way I plan and by the time I wake up from my long sleep to see what the world has turned into I will be a very, very rich man, free to explore and study the way the world works, go to Enceladus maybe, see it for myself, dive into its dark waters.

This idea excites me, for the first time since the days when I thought I’d rid the world of the humanity with the help of a deadly virus I feel alive again. I don’t need to sleep, I don’t need to eat much, I don’t have much time, the tumour is eating my brain. I can’t have it operated on, the surgery might damage my intellectual capacities, in that case I won’t be able to finish this monetary revolution. It’s close to the end now. I almost have enough currency for the wide open, wild oceans of the world web. I’ll call it bitcoin, I think, that sounds like an appropriate name.