THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: SPAWNING (Patreon)

On those special days, the world is like a dream. Fall comes, as it does, and campus blooms with people and colors even as everything is dying. Dying. It should be colorful, everything is cycling through a dance of energy, each loop cut tightening the strings, every day a countdown. Everything. Everyone. Dying or dead. 

Except for me. 

It wasn’t easy. I mean, it wasn’t just something you could go and find in the card catalog. Instead, it was hidden inside. Books you wouldn’t know anything about. Old books. They kicked me out of physics in 1924 for claiming that they had it all wrong. I showed them and tried to share it. For some reason it was all very clear to me. Physics WAS Chemistry AND life. These artificial boundaries man threw up did nothing but prevent forward progress. 

I published exactly one paper on unlife before I realized it was not for the world. It had charts that showed how the inverted particles that tracked in the negative; how relative perception could warp space and the passage of time, how biological matter could be imbibed with conscious energy. I bet the paper’s still there, in the archives. It was cribbed, but still, no one had paid much attention to the work it was stolen from in 400 years. The book was called—ah, but that’s not really important is it?—the book was old. The man who had written it knew he was being watched by the church and had hidden his real work inside—codes, cyphers, complex math. It was there if you looked. I looked.

In 1925 I looked and I saw it.

And now I’m here. It’s been 93 years and four moves and almost five and now I’m here, on a bench at the University, watching the leaves and the people. And it’s amazing to me. Special. The campus feels the same. The world here. Despite the clothes changing and the machines, and the cars becoming sleek and small, the campus is the same. It’s my home, really. The place I come back to time and again when it’s time. A spawning ground. 

The thought makes me giggle.

Life is built to fail, and that is a secret I will tell you for nothing. Not on purpose—at least not for us. We are simply the latest in a series of creatures to inherit the genetics of some fabulous, plastic being that existed millions of years ago. Whatever made THAT built it to fail. We’ve inherited this self destruct from our ancient artificial ancestor. There’s no way to reset that slip in our genetics. The ends wear down and we rot, over time. Once, it was for a purpose, today, who can say?

But the rules are there. Jumps and shortcuts and changes. But only for pure energy. Biology is simply a suitcase in which we carry our dirty laundry. To leave and return, you must become thought. That’s the real trick.  

The girl sits on the bench and begins shuffling through her bag to find one of those telephones and begins looking at pictures of buildings, she senses me looking at her. I smile. After a moment she smiles back. 

“Are you lost, miss?” She looks at me strangely. A 20-something in a tweed suit. I cannot help it. We all have our affectations.

She smiles, “Yeah. Yeah. Um…do you know where…building 101 is?”

“I do. I can show you.”

“Are you an upperclassman?” she asks, and I smile. 

I wonder what it will feel like to be a woman.