Thursday 12 February 2015

The house with no doors

Wooh, spontaneous midnight blog-post!


This post has nothing to do with game design. It is a narrative experiment and a small brain-teaser, to anyone remotely interested in sci-fi and scenario based planning. It's simply a literary exercise that I've decided to document in public.

I was inspired by the idea of life receding into a black hole-like existence, as our computers become ever more compressed. Is that why the universe is so silent? Did everyone who came before us, simply recede into their own little houses of compressed spacetime, then drew the curtains? While the question borders on philosophy, it's fascinates me that we might one day have an answer to it.

I have deliberately mixed up “I”, “you” and “we”, to indicate the “ebb and flow” of the narrator’s existence - sometimes one, sometimes many, sometimes someone else. It is also synonymous with the three components mentioned in the text: Time, presence, increasing complexity. The “I” is the known. The “you” is the unknown approaching. The “we” is coming to terms with the unknown. Literature is fun!

I've even scraped up some fitting music for the read, if you can read with lyrics playing in the background. If not, I recommend trying a double-take: Read first, then listen to the music and skim the text again. You'll get the gist of it. God damn, how I love the way aesthetics can emerge from combining music and a story:




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Our universe has always intrigued me, for reasons both obvious and obscure. What more breathtaking than the breath itself? The fact that we are here to take it, to perceive it in some way? To use that breath to fuel our continued existence, through which we observe the passing of time?


Time.


We emerge from time. Emerge to be the onlookers, to ask a riddle: If there is none to observe, is there nothing to observe? We cannot be, when there is no passing of time. Yet the passing of time is only there, because we interpret it to be so?


When we look underneath the microscope or up into the stars, we see patterns repeating. Just as we emerge from the passing time, so does something else - something that has defined us through the ages, yet only now does it creep out from the dark.


When we power our computers, we stare it blankly in the face. The ones and zeroes converge and out comes a brilliant picture. The ebb and flow of electricity sparks this beautiful mechanism into existence. On and off, on and off. We know this pattern, we’ve seen it before. What we see in our creation, the machine, has been there since the dawn of time. Now it is collapsing - parts combined, bigger than the sum of their parts. One, zero. One, zero.


On and off. That is the pattern.


We see this pattern when we look into the ocean, the rise of waves, crashing onto the shore. The only evidence of their existence lies in what they leave behind.


Ebb and flow. We’ve seen it before.


We see this pattern when we look down far enough, splitting the atom then splitting the pieces until suddenly; there it is again! Presence, absence.


Being. This concept cannot be without time. It emerges from it, as do we. 
Being, as we are.


But I wonder, will I see this pattern when I look beyond myself, up into the stars? Are we the wave, crashing onto the shore? If so, where is the rest of the ocean?


Our reality has a third component, beyond time. Beyond being and not being.




It vies to always increase in complexity.


This is most evident in our machinery, in the enslaving of the electron. Everything shrinks, yet everything grows at the same time. The smaller the processor, the more powerful it becomes. Is this the future of information? To shrink out of existence, until we can barely observe it anymore? Will it run away from us or will we find a way to keep up?


I think of a window. A window in a house with no doors. Just one window. You live in this house. You used to be people, you became the machine. Then you became so much more. You are everyone that ever was. You are god.


You look out of the window sometimes, but can hardly be bothered - you are god; you make your own existence. So what’s worth looking at, out there in the cold?


No one can look back at you. Your window only exists on the inside of your house. You can look out, but no one can look in.


Your house is a black hole. Your house is the universe. This is the ebb and flow of existence.


Life burns brighter than the brightest stars, until it sets the world on fire. Before the life burns the world, it builds a house: A machine so complex, so compact, that it can only exist within the compressed confines of a black hole. Here we live on, sometimes taking a small peek out of the window, but never more than a glance. For inside the house, we are the creators of our own existence.


In here, we can’t be bothered with our younger kin, who still stumble around outside. To invite them in would be to destroy them. They will live, they may die. They may build their own house one day.


We sit in our house of time. Our house of presence and absence. Our house of infinite complexity. How can the outside ever intrigue us again? Therefore, we are silent. Therefore, you are on your own.


Yet perhaps, if you were to look down far enough. If you were to split the atom, then split those pieces apart, again and again, you should have a glimpse - not of us, but of who came before us.

Of those who lived in a house like ours, before we even existed.

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EEEEECH, this was fun to write, but now my brain is telling me to catch some Z's. Hope you enjoyed the read.

~ Dave

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