322. Fleur, 3

(Blume)

An infinite desert of gold sands and stones opened itself to me beyond the mountains I've climbed.

Where am i? I left the crocodiles on the eastern shores of probably the northern African continent.

The horn? I remember someone calling it like that. Migiurtinia? I wish it was easier and more efficient to collect human knowledge through their brains. Everything they know but outside of their main focus, day to day focus, is just a mess of blurry and fragmented knowledge. Only a few words now come to me, like that, hardly explanatory.

I swam east and south, and then north. So I'm likely in Arabia... Or Persia? Could I have swim that fast and that long?

I kind of hope so! Something in my brain is tingling when thinking about this name and what it represents.

I'm probably mixing knowledge from different times as well. I can't very well separate the fragments of knowledge I gathered from each individual brain anymore. It's all just me now, with messy memories and wisdom.

The sun is hitting hard already.

It will dry my beautiful skin. But I don't mind crossing another desert. It's fun!

I enjoy different colours shifting around the horizon, so it's likely not that wide a desert, unlike southern Egypt.

I jump off the cliff ahead. I yell a little in joy as the winds turns cold while brushing against me.

I land strongly in the sand and little stones. My body then readjust itself from the dislocations induced by the fall, all my limbs shaking.

I stand up again, readjusting the last bones loudly.

I smile wildly. Life sure can be fun, even alone. My eyes are saturated with light now, and adapt themselves. My pupils shrink a little more to very small dots, or slits.

There's so much for the senses in a desert, I love it.

I begin to run ahead on the burning ground. Let's see how far this body I'm playing with can go.

~

I run all day long over dry earth and occasionally sand. My hair flying behind me tickles my shoulders.

I sweat. My inner temperature has risen almost to a boiling level. I still laugh, changing my metabolism on the fly.

I want to see how far and how long I can go before I really suffer from dehydration.

That would be torture to her, but unlike her I'm a being-like-me. A daiûa as she called me. So no matter what I do, it still feels like a game, and I crave for entertainment. Once upon another time, it was purpose, or meaning. Now it's fun.

And I have fun.

Even if the death of this body I've carefully engineered would mean almost my own. And I've spent a lot of efforts on it, it's complicated to craft an entire animal!

But my mind and existence are now mostly in there, to enjoy what perception of the real world can bring to oneself.

Lots of lights and warmth here.

I'm still reckless, but by nature I'm nearly unable to die anyway.

So I enjoy pushing this body of mine to its limits.

As night comes, I've weakened, and am now dragging my overheated and dry body through the dust of an ancient road.

It's kind of an elegant joke.

With everything of myself as a conscious being I've put into this body, if I were to lose it, I would lose myself as well.

I wouldn't die, but I would lose a lot of what makes me and my mind.

There wouldn't be much left that would regrow in another form or able to sustain my thoughts.

But with every wisdom and power I was able to infuse into this body, it's almost immortal as well.

Beings-like-me like to see themselves as gods, when we compare ourselves to human-kind.

Blind illusion of power... It's an illusion of perspective and understanding of our own reality and limits as living beings.

I've learnt more about myself and our kind than I was about humanity, when I was spending time with Rose. And I've learnt more about humanity with her than through eating deceased people's brains here and then, trying to recover what could still be.

So I've grown beyond this natural flaw my kind tends to have. Seeing ourselves as gods over humans. So many blind spots in that idea alone, it's laughable. But we're still children in some ways.

My knees suddenly shaking remind me that I should consider doing something now. I'm exhausted.

I lash roots into the ground where I stand. I lash thin threads into the air, that have tiniest hair and leaves, to capture more oxygen and water. Tomorrow, they'll help capture more energy from the sunlight as well.

I'll sleep here tonight, standing happy in a harsh but so beautiful land.

~

I sleep.

And I dream. Like many, many other animals. This simple thing helped me change my psyche completely.

It's a form of metabolic rest, or rather, a smart use of thermodynamics.

Like taking a counter intuitive backward change of pressure, to allow temperature to bring a different result to your changes. To allow yourself to jump much farther, you might want to take a few steps backward first.

My mind loved this evolution. Especially of building different levels of functions beyond awareness.

Having an autonomous system to remind your heart to beat and process most of your metabolic processes without you needing to think about them, it's such a nice feat.

Might have evolved easily for normal animals and be a given today, but that was like catching up with a riding train for beings-like-me! It was already so far away it took me a while to understand that was even in existence and possible.

We have so much to learn, to become more like them.

Sleeping helped me improve some of that for myself. It supported me in engineering an autonomous system... And it helped me get a subconscious mind as well!

A glorious discovery to help with another of our inherent flaws.

I have far less emotional inertia now. I can think back, cool down my head, evolve, and just... Become alive, I want to say.

It's hard to describe that transformation.

Emotionally I used to be much simpler, mostly obsessive, mimicking a lot of things I didn't really understand nor felt. I could somewhat understand intellectually what they meant, but not feel, making it all abstract. Just a pointless game at acting human.

Becoming able to sleep (everything it required and implies to sum it up), it was one of the greatest step to make me really able to experience emotions on a real spectrum of perspectives.

I know I'm not the first daiûa or being-like-me to reach this level of humanity.

And you know what, old one?

You were right, it's worth it.

It's definitely fun to be human.

I don't know if the old one went on living back as a being-like-us on the other side once its human existence had died. Similarly to how I am now, it would have been mostly a new persona with little remaining links to its previous life anyway.

She might also have preferred to embrace real and full death as a normal human, scrapping her essence on the other side. I'm not there yet myself.

Funnily enough, this possibility of blank slate before a rebirth could mean that I am her, her reincarnation. I wouldn't realise it. But I know from other facts that it can't be me anyway. But it's still a funny idea that makes me smile in my sleep.

I dream of flight, indanthrene skies and sea of clouds.

I dream of flying straight to the moon. To see the stars, to feel the cold emptiness of space.

To feel an eternity of cold, high burn and radiations mixed together, and silence.

Slowly seeing the moon getting bigger, like the exit of a tunnel. An insanely long and quiet tunnel.

Until it fills my field of sight, and I can clearly see a landscape of mountains and valleys.

Until I can see there jungles, seas, rivers, fields and forests.

And then, as I was falling for a moon landing, I woke up.

I wonder what's really up there?

As far as I know it's void of atmosphere.

Though I wonder if humankind wouldn't have been able to make it entirely viable at some point in the past?

Concentrate enough sunlight into lasers to melt rocks.

Hijack asteroids made of water from Saturn rings and crash them onto the moon.

Use the sun's lasers and water to create nuclear fusion.

Dig the moon to its core, melt it a core. Create a magnetic field. Create clouds of moon dust and water to make an atmosphere.

Throw bacteria to contaminate it all and spread new life.

Make the moon a small Earth.

And grow new species of flowers on both of them.

Maybe some rosemary.

~