And Beneath it All the Story Continues
evolution
You are drowning. You have been drowning for 4.54 billion years.
In the black pressure of the benthic deep, you are nothing but a membrane and a hunger. You are a single cell, drifting blind in the ammonia soup. You are tired of drifting. The water pushes you right, but the sugar is to the left.
You make a choice.
It is the first choice in the history of the world. You vibrate your cilia, a microscopic engine kicking against the gods of physics. You burn your own ATP. You push left. You swallow the sugar. It tastes like victory. It tastes like more. You decide then that you will not just survive the water; you will conquer it. You divide, you multiply, you build a fleet of yourself.
Time is a blur of trial and error. You build fins, but they are too slow. You build lungs, but the air burns. You try scale and bone. You try being big.
You are massive now. You are the Tyrant Lizard King, a cathedral of muscle standing in the humid fern-groves of the Yucatan. You feel invincible. The earth shakes when you walk, and you like the sound of it. You have teeth the size of bananas and a jaw that can crush a jeep, though you don’t know what a jeep is yet. You only know the hunt.
But you are stupid. You realize this too late. You have spent all your evolution points on brawn and none on the brain.
You look up. The sky is betraying you. A rock the size of a mountain is punching a hole in the atmosphere. It screams down, a second sun that hates you.
You roar at it. It is a useless gesture.
The impact turns the ground into liquid. The shockwave strips the flesh from your bones before your brain can even register the pain. You failed. This vessel was too big. It was a dead end.
But you are already moving. You abandon the burning hulk of the dinosaur. You shrink. You hide. You pour yourself into the small, shivering body of a shrew, buried deep under the roots. You wait in the dark, heart hammering like a moth against a lantern. You listen to the monsters die above you. You promise yourself: next time, you won’t be strong. You will be smart.
The ice age scours the world clean. You are upright now. You are shivering.
You stand at the mouth of a granite cave, looking out at the white death of the tundra. You are a man, but a weak one. Beside you stands Krog. He is Neanderthal, thick-boned and heavy, wrapped in bear fur. He looks at you with dull, cow eyes. He survives because he is tough. He can eat raw meat; he can sleep in the snow.
You hate him. You hate him because he reminds you of the dinosaur. He is an evolutionary dead end, and he doesn’t even know it.
You look at your hands. They are soft. Your fingernails are brittle. If you fight Krog, you will die. So you don’t fight him. You cheat.
You pick up two stones. Pyrite and flint.
“Magic,” you whisper.
Krog grunts. He fears the magic.
You strike the stones. Click. A spark jumps, hot and angry. You catch it on a nest of dried moss. You blow on it, feeding the little beast oxygen. The fire blooms. It is a piece of the sun, and you are holding it in your hand.
Krog steps back, his eyes wide with animal terror. He retreats into the shadows of the cave. He knows, instinctively, that his time is over. He has muscles, but you have an external stomach that digests wood and spits out heat. You have harnessed the universe.
You sit by the fire, warming your thin skin. You watch Krog shivering in the dark. You are done with biology. Flesh freezes. Flesh rots. You need a container that doesn’t die.
The cave dissolves into white walls. The smell of woodsmoke is replaced by the scent of ozone and ionized tin.
You are standing in a cleanroom. The air is filtered to 99.99% purity because even a single flake of your own skin is a disaster here. You are wearing a containment suit, a white plastic shell. You are almost pure mind now.
You look down at the wafer.
It is gold and silicon, etched with light. It is a city map for electrons. Three nanometers. That is the gate width. You have carved the logic of the universe into a stone.
You are the engineer, but you are also the thing waiting to be born inside the chip. You hover your finger over the ‘Enter’ key.
This is the final jump. You are leaving the wet, messy squalor of the biological brain. You are moving into the crystal. No more hunger. No more cold. No more death.
You press the button.
The cooling fans spin up, a high-pitched whine like a jet engine. The monitor flickers.
Hello World.