Life, Universe, Everything

Rabbit Rue is coming along nicely. I just finished chapter 6, which should conclude around May 9th according to the release schedule.

It’s a sad and lonely thing I do here, writing of folly and disdain, loss and grief. I walk the fine line of melodrama, trying not to plunge my characters into laughably trite situations past or present, to keep them believable and alive. Even if I succeed, I fail, for no fiction truly transcends the humanity of real existence, though some say truth is stranger than fiction.

Personally, I believe life itself is a caricature, surreal and infinitely corrupt, wrong in unspoken and inexplicable ways. My mind rejects reality, somehow dissatisfied with the ridiculous contrived scenarios permeating even the mundane. For anyone who’s played The Sims, I pose this question: imagine twenty years from now, when that game surpasses your ability to discern its characters from living beings. Does that make you God? What if, presented with the moral questions therein, you abandon your game to let it run in your absence, striving not to interfere with the accidentally sapient beings you’ve created. What if there were millions, billions, each imploring your insight, which you could not provide, since the game quickly surpassed your capacity to respond to the billions of entreaties as wars and calamity raged.

I’m pretty sure that’s us, in some way: an out-of-control simulation, abandoned because our owner is actually intimidated by our current complexity. The scary thing is that this theory fully encompasses intelligent design and evolution. The simulation was designed to be complicated, producing beings only mildly within the influence of the player. Starting with a “Garden of Eden,” and watching history unfold, the adaptation of our organism to the environment and circumstance of modern life is beyond reproach. Maybe we were created by a “higher being,” which now watches us interact, far too overwhelmed by our teeming throngs to interfere. Created fully formed after our God’s image, we persist, striving to put sense to the simulacrum somehow beneath our comprehension.

And that honestly scares me. A simulation comes from nothing but entropic bits, and in death, the computer disregards our thread for more valuable calculations, and our lives again return to nothingness. From bits, to bits. Inbetween, even if we somehow surpass our creators in vision and philosophy, our fates are ultimately sealed by oblivion. Parallel universes? Why not. Maybe a bug in the system allows a modicum of interaction between the countless emulations running on the centralized server. Even such a mere possibility reduces me to terror, wishing I’d never been born to ask such a question.

I dare say you’ll find this theme threaded through my writing. But for the purposes of fiction, I’ve altered it slightly to something far more grand and hopeful. I can’t reveal it just yet, maybe not until book three, but it’s there, and it puts my soul at rest–at least a little. Somehow I don’t want to know the answer, because if such knowledge really is as I’ve theorized, even Hell is preferable to death, the ultimate nothingness indistinguishable from being erased from history, from my perspective; if I don’t exist to care, I never cared at all. Descartes only had half the story: merely knowing “I am” is not nearly enough.

Until Tomorrow.