Riding the Wheel
The kite, fluttering and swooping against the sky, is beautiful. Isn’t it? Like so much in the world. A big part of why you can’t let go.
Yosil was right about the “anchor” effect. You’ll never do all the ambitious things that he planned, or achieve his goals. Those vast new territories to conquer, to mold by will alone—you’ll leave those for another generation, perhaps a wiser one.
Still, you understand something that he didn’t.
Nature is necessary.
Without a gritty, paradox-free level of reality, bound by implacable physical laws, rich complexity could never emerge. Only fierce selection
on an enormous scale could produce human beings—so competent at tooth-and-claw, yet rising to dream far beyond, to qualities like art, love, and soul.
But evolution clings! Your body yearns for the tingle of fair wind, the sting of rain, the luscious scent and taste of food, the fight-flight rush of adrenaline.
The rub-slap-tickle of a happy lover.
The music of laughter.
You who make the world by observing it—causing the probability amplitudes of stars to collapse and whole galaxies to reify, just by looking at them—you remain wedded to cause-effect because it offers hope! Hope that evolution will play fair. (Though it hasn’t yet.) Hope that you may win, no matter how unlikely it seems. (Because you are descended from generations of winners!)
Hope to stay alive, though death always waits.
You know it better than others. For you’ve seen the barren soulscape, where just a few billion algae-colonists struggle at the shoreline, clinging till the very last moment. Then, leaping for a moment’s glory like salmon plunging upstream, they try to achieve some goal beyond reckoning—something religions hint at, the way sketches on a cave wall once flickered by torchlight, almost coming alive.
Yes, every flicker that launched itself has failed, so far. But falling back, they left impressions. There, in dust.
And impressions last.
So, what will you do? Cut loose and try for higher ground? Without the stored energy that Yosil tried to gather, your chances will be slim. His calculations were good, even if his soul was warped.
Stay here, then? Half in one world and half elsewhere? Share a bed with Clara and the far-more-human version of your former self … the Albert variant who changes bodies, living from day to day?
It could work. But is it fair?
Or will you try something else? Something creative. Something never seen … at least in this cosmos.
The odds seem low. But then, it’s all in the trying, right?
For creatures rising out of flesh or mud, that’s all there’s ever been.