Re: The Grand Battle II! [Round 3: Escheresque!]
12-25-2009, 10:29 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
There is nothing special about life, when you get down to it, and death is just the absence of that immaterial nothing. It's all the same, and all that separates the nonliving from life and death is molecular complexity.
Gestalt had always thought that. All that separates a squirrel from a pile of useful bones is a confusing flurry of chemical reactions that Gestalt had just never learned to control. What else could there be, anyway? I couldn't feel anything, so it couldn't be there. Not to mention, I...
And that was the thing. Who was this "I"? What was a Gestalt? Introspection had never been a strong suit of the schrotgolem's before, but... Everything was changing since the merge. Life WAS a thing, and the golem was seeing things quite differently through the lens of vitality. Humans, an erstwhile-inscrutable mass of things going at cross purposes were now sleek, elegant machines, and minds, once merely a collection of neural oddities, were now twitching, spinning, things. Things that could be bent and operated and broken like anything else.
This new partnership had brought forth... Understanding. Understanding in the form of a glowing pearl in the middle of swirling black mists of more and more mysteries, but the pearl was there, would eventually be within reach, and had provided elucidation just by its presence.
What Gestalt didn't realize was the longer it remained in intimate contact with Samuel's mind, the more of humanity and life were bleeding through; as the Karmist and the schrotgolem pursued their dark foe, riding the waves of each other's power, deep inside Gestalt pragmatism was turning into fear, a desire to end this game was turning to bloodlust, and an idle, ticking curiosity was turning into a burning need to know everything about the world.
And an already-conflicted feeling regarding Gestalt's quondam companion was becoming a confusing mix of emotions about the one being in this bizarre competition that the golem had really been able to relate to.
An eagle made of shards of stained glass, spotted with blood and suffused with a dark, reeking energy, soared above the Karmist, shrieking silently towards a sky that wasn't a sky, rocketing after a dark shape that wasn't of this world.
There is nothing special about life, when you get down to it, and death is just the absence of that immaterial nothing. It's all the same, and all that separates the nonliving from life and death is molecular complexity.
Gestalt had always thought that. All that separates a squirrel from a pile of useful bones is a confusing flurry of chemical reactions that Gestalt had just never learned to control. What else could there be, anyway? I couldn't feel anything, so it couldn't be there. Not to mention, I...
And that was the thing. Who was this "I"? What was a Gestalt? Introspection had never been a strong suit of the schrotgolem's before, but... Everything was changing since the merge. Life WAS a thing, and the golem was seeing things quite differently through the lens of vitality. Humans, an erstwhile-inscrutable mass of things going at cross purposes were now sleek, elegant machines, and minds, once merely a collection of neural oddities, were now twitching, spinning, things. Things that could be bent and operated and broken like anything else.
This new partnership had brought forth... Understanding. Understanding in the form of a glowing pearl in the middle of swirling black mists of more and more mysteries, but the pearl was there, would eventually be within reach, and had provided elucidation just by its presence.
What Gestalt didn't realize was the longer it remained in intimate contact with Samuel's mind, the more of humanity and life were bleeding through; as the Karmist and the schrotgolem pursued their dark foe, riding the waves of each other's power, deep inside Gestalt pragmatism was turning into fear, a desire to end this game was turning to bloodlust, and an idle, ticking curiosity was turning into a burning need to know everything about the world.
And an already-conflicted feeling regarding Gestalt's quondam companion was becoming a confusing mix of emotions about the one being in this bizarre competition that the golem had really been able to relate to.
An eagle made of shards of stained glass, spotted with blood and suffused with a dark, reeking energy, soared above the Karmist, shrieking silently towards a sky that wasn't a sky, rocketing after a dark shape that wasn't of this world.