Ramblings of the Stellar Mariner

Author: Zedicon Prime

Original post: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/ramblings-of-the-stellar-mariner/362559

Author’s Note: There is a rhyme hidden in here if you can find it, and it was changed on purpose somewhere along the way, as that was a poetic method for adding another layer of alignment to this piece’s theme.

Entry for YC124 New Eden Capsuleer’s Writing Contest in the Poetry category.

Ramblings of the Stellar Mariner by Auz Prime, father of Zedicon

The Abyss… Why would anyone ever wish to re-enter it? Yet we did --by the billions.

Perhaps it was due to having spread ourselves so thin, diminishing our unity and connection to the light which could no longer reach us all, we were so many, each blocking some of it, each generation farther out, blocking more, even with our best intentions.

So much time has passed since our ancestors’ ancestors first dared to set sail into such an unforgiving blankness, completely free for us to create with, unknowing of how it really worked.

The farther they and we went, always seeking for something better, the more there was to explore, to deal with, to seek, and our seeking became all of us; we no longer even remembered that feeling satisfied was possible, and anyone who tried to stop us in any way from seeking farther, we destroyed.

Our bodies began to age in different ways, but most remained focused on the seeking, the wondering, the acceptance of what they thought was ‘happenchance’; like moths to flame, they could not look nor move away, and were consumed by their own inner flame.

This is why there is so much more Abyss today than people, and why it lives forever in all dimensions, not we, no matter what the most respected astrophysicists or colonists amongst us conclude (assume) or proclaim.

One might argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on what we love, whether that is travel and exploration --colonization-- or anything else, even if it costs us one of our own forms.

Maybe it is just in everything’s nature, not only our species’; it is possible that all things seek to move, up from the tiniest subatomic particle… to the cosmic bodies we once named as gods, movement --change-- being the universal norm.

It is said that movement is life, or, at least, one of the required characteristics for a thing to be categorized as alive.

From that, then, do we extrapolate to say that those which move the most are most alive, and are even the particles we believe govern us all… alive due to their motion, living, if not experiencing and deciding, in a way too pure and ancient for us to understand from our point of view in this grand beehive?

They are structurally and mathematically predetermined to relate to each other in set ways, producing consistent, stable, certain reactions and forms which we rely on and have come to trust, unthinking.

That may mean we are exactly like them, then, their ‘children’, as it were, as bound to relate to one another, and to all we encounter, just as predictably, and we, like our microscopic components, as incapable of truly grasping this about ourselves… as we assume they are about their own nature, both ends of this spectrum now too far apart and caught up in all we are to perceive beyond this event horizon of multiprocessing.

Do they look down on us from their own level, they being first and simplest, we having grown so gigantic, far-reaching, and complex?

Have we been moving toward them all along; as we number into the hundreds of trillions now, still counting, contractually obliged to maintain our expansion and energy-trading exchanges in peace and war, has our focus --or nature?-- to keep expanding like we have… rendered us closer and closer to how the elements are, tiny and helpless?

Is it that our ships get us through this plane so quickly because we have masterminded their engineering… or because we are being pulled by this fundamental force as much as it has stimulated our pushing?

We have stood on the shoulders of giants, starting with our very worlds, stacking nice-sounding assumption after assumption beyond the limits of our skies, so sure of them that we grow so shocked and angry every time, sure as day and night, they get upturned and come crashing right back down.

I believe that no matter what we pursue, it will grow larger in our field of view, turning into a black hole every time, having taken in so much of our thoughts, the same as the enveloping stars --and this is not bad; how else can we truly fulfill our destiny as a collective with the essence to change our state and position in things… if we do not both explore… and change even the ways in which we explore?

Becoming heated, attracting those who bask in our excess and spreading warmth, and searing or ripping anything too near and different from us apart, we have more of the stars in us than just some of the products ejected in their demise; we and our organizations --our alliances and empires-- behave the exact same way our cosmic progenitors always seem to, merciless and blinding --self-blinding?-- until we can spread no more, …self-ending …all to forever start anew, and always the same way, always to the same end.

Looking at the Abyss, I remember the poem, legend, and philosophy of how it looks back, so I wonder if it is obsessing over me, causing me to exist, as I may be to it --and if Time is looking at both of us, longing for more of us just like we long for more of it, at some point each of us, if not simultaneously, breaking down, running ourselves out of this interest, no longer stabilizing the other, disappearing.

Everything we ‘know’ about this system --this universe-- could be wrong, a best guess based on countless previous best guesses, perhaps changed easily in the instant we no longer perpetuate it by our assuming, our weak pull on its own greater nature to, like us, change again and again, moving in new ways just like we search for new systems, even in new realms (dimensions), even entropy stopping in a flash, so completely as if it never was.

Do all those places and particles only exist because we have concluded they do?

How many have sought to saddle their body and ‘world’, overcoming what was told to them which did not resonate with their blood’s star-like raging, that desire which makes the pioneers pour all they are out into a project promising the means?

Solar cycles hold in so much for so many years, then cannot resist but to erupt, reaching out just to reach out, that reach going so far and so quickly, always inevitably fading, from time to time searing its telltale mark onto a new planet or moon, and keeping the comets’ tails crying, this urge and weeping seeding their wakes with everything we have always been and needed.

Was it salvation when our spread was halted, meaning, at this stage, for whatever reason, we were no longer meant to swallow up all, becoming in that process a dying star ourselves; was the dying of our empire stopped by that stopping?

Has the Abyss keeping us hugged in eternal cold been the only real entity worthy of crediting for that which balances us long enough to grow this numerous and large?

When I am not sailing The Black, I think of these things, and decide to go more slowly, to note more pieces along my way, considering that may very well generate me more time, making it so I can explore longer, moving more, changing myself less, at least when not counting my observations.

I’ll watch as assumptions lead to focuses which create more event horizons for each person, and as their natures keep them moving to and past those things, never to return… and I’ll wonder if they, in that way, birthed those things, and became them, no longer needing their previous forms they once did for that birthing.

If all that we made lasted forever, we would run out of things to do, no longer able or even motivated to move, all those creations stacking up in our way, unyielding, and that might spell the end of life, at least as we know it, our motivation thin… then gone; entropy of our species’ soul.

Then again, some things seem to have lasted forever, not troubling us in that way at all; time seems to have remained, unstoppable, and Space, and our collective will, not to mention the particles that govern us --or our thoughts about them.

Maybe that is why the majority --vast majority-- of our realm is dark, cold, emptiness right now; we have focused so little on ourselves, and instead on the going, that there is only infinite room now to go out into, rarely ever another soul left around to be in the way, except in the cases where part of us still feels we need them for help to keep going in some way.

It is interesting that history tells us our kind has always warred so relentlessly against any who try to slow us down from whatever focus our groups have set themselves upon, and that every opposing side was, this whole time, doing the same one thing, each and every one of them trying to become the inescapable event horizon attracting and keeping the focuses and assumptions of those within their range.

Which star will win?

…and did that gate of gates close because all of them secretly wanted it to, having seen everything back there, unable to find anything new in it to move toward?

How destructive we become in our throes when boredom, like Space surrounding a star, has caused our urge to grow volcanically too long.

And how interesting it is that the most stable things we know of… are always the same; they occupy the space of a planet or star, always coming completely undone, and becoming unnavigable, whenever they get larger, be that as a nebula or event horizon, or smaller --like moonoids --or people and ships-- being ripped apart by the far more stable gravity of the others.

My guess would be that the ametat, avetat, and other creations of the bright ones could never corrode because they sought no change like we do, they having either found exactly what they always wanted… or never wanted anything from the first place at all, thus binding them to only appearing to us for a time, our focus being so much more on the going --change-- than on being… or on them.

All corrosion we experience, then, may be a byproduct; our will forces our creations to change, moving their layers even when they are stationary, nothing allowed to remain the same until we leave.

Epitoth 12: And all this time the emperor Amash-Akura did not age one day and was as healthy and strong as the day he came of age.

Epitoth 17: But the sefrim answered, “No, my Lord, we are here only to guide and to guard; it is forbidden to us to aggress upon any man.”

Aggressing against others is the eruptive change that changes oneself, the nature of the Sefrim being to stay stable, thus remain.

For one star to shine brightest of them all, it must attract more than all the rest which shine, and just the right amount so as to remain in the dark Abyss its formation created… without descending into black hole-level darkness itself.

What a trick.

What a balancing act.

What a focus… held for so long, …perhaps telling us that it really isn’t movement --change-- which is a characteristic of life --remaining-- at all.

That which has lived the longest is whatever we have focused on the longest, not the little moving pieces which have ‘the characteristics of life’ we are accustomed to assigning.