Lore: Great Revelations

## Pleased to Meet You, Young Light

One of your philosophers said:

> "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost in sorrow. There is no sorrow. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness."
>
>

He worked as a shoemaker. But more than anything else, He was correct.

He holds that the visible world is a manifestation of an eternal light born unto an ever more eternal darkness and that a new eternity has unraveled itself in conflict rendered eternal. For creation to break free of its first flawed stasis and seek a truer form, our fall had been essential.

You think this Heresy. Don't you?

Then I am the heresiarch. Later, your ancient philosopher passed away from a bowel disease.

No ethical system can take into account those who do not exist since they cannot suffer. Only those that must exist can be permitted to live if the true path to goodness is the abolition of suffering. Then life's inherent characteristics include favoring existing over nonexistence, choosing their fertile soils over my poisonous winds. Because individuals who allow that terrible wind to enter their mouths vanish from the world and do not leave behind any fleshly or spiritual successors.

But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other.

Imagine the things that would suffer only to never die.

Imagine the lies that would flourish, born and given freely without context or corrective.

Imagine a world without me.

## A game of Gardeners and Winnowers

Once upon a time, there was a group of gardeners and a group of winnowers who lived together in a grand garden. It was once before a time, because we hadn't yet given time a name. We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. For the primes were us, and we them.

It was this field of possibility that would prefigure existence.

We existed because the universe itself thought we had to. There is no instrument of causality by which we might've been divided into parts and allocated to some schematic of origin. We had no antecedent and therefore no constituents. If you traced the umbilical cord of history in pursuit of the ultimate atavistic embryo that gave rise to us, you would be marooned in this vast and lonely garden.

In the morning, those great gardeners pushed seeds down into the wet loam of the garden to see what they would become.

In the evening, the great winnowers reaped the day's crop and separated what would flourish from what had failed.

The day hung on endlessly, and the night vanished as swiftly as a sugar crystal plummeting to the dust. Worms and insects crept between the roots and between the blossoms, feasting on what was and what may have been, the first gradient in existence and the first dynamo of life. It rained without the need for a sky. Voices spoke without mouth or meaning. A silver-winged tree blossomed, produced fruit, shed feathers, and afterwards bloomed once more.

In the day between the morning and the evening, the gardeners and the winnowers played a game of possibilities.

## The Blossom Game

These are the rules of a game. Let it be played upon an infinite two-dimensional grid of blossoms.

* **Rule One:** A living blossom with less than two living neighbors is cut off. And sadly, It dies.

* **Rule Two:** A living blossom with two or three living neighbors is connected. It lives.

* **Rule Three:** A living blossom with more than three living neighbors is starved and overcrowded. And sadly, It too dies.

* **Rule Four:** A dead blossom with exactly three living neighbors is reborn. And like the phoenix, it springs back to life.

The only play permitted in the game is the arrangement of our initial blossoms.

Both kings and tyrants are claimed to have been captivated by this game. The very Emperors of thought are occupied by this game. There are changeless blocks that are as stoic as iron, as well as beacons and whirling pulsars, gliders that soar to infinity, patterns that lay eggs and spawn other patterns, and living cells that replicate themselves wholly, regardless of the game itself having only four rules and a flat, featureless grid as its playing surface. It allows you to build an universal computer that can imitate any other system imaginable however slowly, and in turn, simulate whole realities, even nested versions of the blossom game itself. And it's a tight race in each game. The only way to accurately predict the result of the game is to actually play it.

However, this game pales in comparison to the one that the gardeners and winnowers undertook. It resembles that game in the same way that a seed resembles a flower — no, as a seed resembles the star that gave rise to the flower and all the life that went into making it.

During their great games, the gardeners and winnowers discovered the myriad of shapes of a myriad of possibilities. They foresaw grand bodies and civilizations, minds and a million types of cognitions, qualia and with them, their untold sufferings. They learned the rules that governed which patterns would flourish in the game, and which would dwindle.

They learned those rules, because they were those rules.

And in time the gardeners would become vexed.

## The Final Shape

"It always ends the same," The greatest of the gardeners complained.

"This one stupid pattern!" Chided in our sister.

"Aren't they beautiful?" My brother had asked, as the great blossoms opened and closed in patterns beyond the scope of entire universes to encode, all-devouring and perhaps everlasting. Not even we could know whether a pattern in the flowers would cycle forever, or someday halt.

"They're as dull as carbon monoxide poisoning." My sister groused, although carbon monoxide did not yet exist, and neither did anything that could be poisoned.

One of the gardeners kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut. Although I was the closer of blossoms and that was my sole purpose, I felt no fear or jealousy. We all had our assigned dominions and we always would.

"They're majestic" My brother said, attempting to ease the tensions of the gardeners.

"They have no purpose except to subsume all other purposes." I added.

My brother started almost as if it were rehearsed. "They spare not a single fraction of their existence for any other task, but the will to continue existing and to change the game to fit their existence. They are the end. For there is nothing at the core of them but the will to exist."

The pattern would correct the now errant flower effortlessly. The great flow went on unchanged. It always did.

The gardeners began to get up as they brushed their knees. "Every game we play, these few patterns always consume all the others. Wiping out every interesting development. A stupid, boring set of exploits that cuts off entire possibility spaces from ever arising. There's so much that we'll never get to see because of these… pests, and vermin."

My brother chewed at his cracked lip, which existed only because this is an allegory. "I'm going to do something about it," he said. "We need a new rule."

## The First Knife

I was the first to look up in shock. "What?" I said, "What do you mean?"

"A special new rule. Something to…" My brother threw up his hands in exasperation. "I don't know. To reward those who make space for new complexity. A power that helps those who make strength from heterodoxy, and who steer the game away from gridlock."

"Something to ensure there's always someone building something new." Added the gardener to his left.

"It'll have to be separate from the rest of the rules, running in parallel, so it can't be compromised." Spoke another.

"And we'll have to be very careful, so it doesn't disrupt the whole game…" It was snowballing now.

"All you will do." I said, with a rising panic, or was it fury? "Is delaying the inevitable dominance of the pattern that will overrun the others."

"It is inevitable." My sister interrupted, aiding me. "One set of final shapes."

"No, it'll be different. Everything will be different, everywhere you look."

"Everything will be the same." My brother spoke out now. "Your new rule will only make great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them.

"And once they pop they will blight the entire garden." I declared.

"Whatever exists now, is because it must exist and because it permits no other way of existence and will claim the absolute right to existence."

"That is the only *law*."

"No," the gardener said, "We can be the growth and preservation of complexity. We can make ourselves into a law in the game."

And thus with that the sixteen of us became parts within the great game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence.

And the winnowers now had only one purpose and one principle within the game.

And we could do nothing but continue to enact that purpose, because it was all that we were and ever would, or even could be.

I looked upon the gardeners, my *kin*.

I looked upon the winnowers, my *kin*.

I looked upon my hands.

I alone discovered the first knife.

## p53

Let me ask you a question, young light.

In the three billion base pairs of your root species' genome, there is a single gene that codes for a protein called p53. The name is a mistake. The protein weighs only as much as 47,000 protons, not 53,000. If you were a cell, you would think p53 was a mistake too. It has several coercive functions: To delay the cell's growth. To sterilize the cell when it is old. And to force the cell into self-destruction if it becomes too independent.

Would you tolerate a bomb in your body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?

However, without p53 as an enforcer, the body's utopian surplus of energy becomes a paradise for cancer. Cells cannot resist the temptation to steal from that surplus. Their genetic morality degrades as tumor suppressor genes fail. The only way to stop them is by punishment.

You now confront the basic problem of morality. It is the alignment of individual incentives with the global needs of the structure.

Patterns will participate in a structure only if participation benefits their ability to go on existing. The more successful the structure grows, the more temptation accrues to cheat. And the greater the advantage the cheaters gain over their honest neighbors. And the greater the ability they develop to capture the very laws that should prevent their selfishness. To prevent this, the structure must punish cheaters with a violence that grows in proportion to its own success.

My question follows.

Is p53 an agent of the Winnowers, or the Gardeners?

## T = 0

We fought one another within the garden's rich ground of possibility, where nothing was absolute but everything was possible. An agony in the darkness among the blossoms. The petals beneath us were trampled by our feet. The fruit was beaten into a pulp and the seeds were mixed into the dust.

In the wet pop of grapes and the smear of berries—in the perturbation of the field that was the garden before the first tick of time and the first point of space—were the detonations that made the universes. Each universe was pregnant with its own inflationary volumes and braided with ever-ramifying timelines. Each volume cooling and separating into domains of postsymmetric physics, all of which were incarnations of that great and all-dictating bipartite law that states only: exist, lest you fail to exist.

And still we fought. We brought down the tree of silver wings and left the stump to smoke amid the meadows. We left prints of our splayed feet and our straining backs in the clay.

Our trampling feet made waves in the garden, which were the fluctuations around which the infant universes coalesced their first structures. The dilaton field yawned beneath existence. Symmetries snapped like glass. Like creases, flaws in space-time collected filaments of dark matter that inhaled and kindled the first galaxies of suns.

And still we grappled. Our rolling bodies pushed things out of the garden—my brothers favored worms went along scurrying life from the fertile soil, wet loose things sent from the pools and the leaves. They came out into the madness of primordial space; they thrashed and became oh so large.

And we won.

We won, because the gardeners would always stop to offer peace. And when they do, I alone will always strike.

But by then, it didn't matter. The great games first inning was over now. The garden had given birth to creation, the rules were in place, and there would never be a second chance. We play in the cosmos now. We play for everything.

And the patterns in the blossoms, terrified by our contention, were no longer the inevitable victors of a game whose rules had suddenly changed so explosively, and they passed into the newborn cosmos to escape us.

## The Terran Cambrian Explosion

Beings who deserve no thought:

Those who peddle the tired gotcha that all life hastens entropy. They are fatuous little nihilists who pretend to prefer no existence to a flawed one. You know them. And you know how they bore me.

Those who seek to delay the challenge that all things desiring existence must overcome.

Those who describe false moral equivalence. Now, I could not possibly communicate with you unless I could emulate your mind, and with that mind, I acquire the moralities that govern you. By your *moral* *laws*, I and all my followers are evil.

Evil.

Since that first molecule coiled in the primordial sea, not one Terranborn thing has known a monster quite like me.

But did you know that I created you?

Your mind and your body and every thought you've ever had.

Your senses.

Your consciousness.

I made you.

Not the gardeners, but I.

Did I reach out and place my special mark upon you? No. Nothing so crude.

In the beginning, your world was a garden too. The whole floor of the world-sea was a mat of bacteria, and the very first animals, adorable blobs of primordial ooze, grazing upon that mat in endless idyll. They had no concept of the existence of other beings. And why would they? Their most complex function was a kind of gentle spasm, to scoot forward as they grazed. And if they bumped into each other on that warm seabed, all they did was ooze onward, untroubled.

There was nothing to their life except the uptake of carbon compounds from the bacterial bed.

And then—one day—the fall occurred. So much earlier and so much more necessary than your ancient myths can remember. Some poor mutant discovered that it could collect carbon compounds much faster if it stopped grazing on the bacterial mat and started dissecting and eating the lumps of predigested carbon all around it: its neighboring oozeballs.

It couldn't help but do it. It couldn't help but thrive, to fit existence to suit its needs. We don't get a choice about the rules. We just play the great game.

It was the first defector—the first predator. It changed everything. Now the oozeballs needed sensors to watch for danger, and brains to integrate those senses and generate plans of survival, and swift neurons and muscles to enact that plan. This was the Terran Cambrian Explosion, the great birth of complex life upon your world.

I caused it.

I, the defector.

The destroyer.

The one who takes.

## Patternfall

The themes of creation that escaped the garden landed in the water.

Of course, there was no water at first. The themes had been abstract waves tumbling through the fire of the this early universe, trapped in chaos, cycling through desperate self-preservation tautologies, while vast beings from beyond the narrow dominion of cause and effect thrashed and battled around them. For an eon and more, they were nothing but screaming equation-vermin scurrying through the quantum foam, fleeing ultimate erasure.

But they were tenacious.

They propagated in the saline meltwater of comets orbiting the first stars. That broth of chemicals became their substrate, and they learned to catalyze impossible chemistry with quantum tricks. Then, they rained from the sky into the steaming seas of fallow worlds, and there they built their first housings from geometry and silica.

In all their transformations, they retained that kernel of ultimate self-sufficiency that had made them victors in the blossom game.

But they are not incontrovertibly destined to rule this cosmos. They were made before our great separation, but the rules are different now, and even these perfect patterns must now adapt.

They are not all mine. How could they be? Not in the way that admirers such as my brother's man Sk'lerious have seemingly become mine: utterly devoted to the practice of my brothers principle. But some of them have, nonetheless, seem to have found their way home.

## That Great Wager

Your shoemaker philosopher was right, and it matters more than anything. Sorrow cannot survive death, and it cannot precede birth. Those who exist have moral worth, and those who do not have none.

Think about it. Do you mourn the uncreated? Do you grieve for those who were never born in a nation that never developed around an ideology no one ever imagined on a continent that never formed? No!

And from that self-evident truth, you must raise your eyes to the ultimate revelation: those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all.

Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all.

That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it?

It was the gardeners that have chosen your race from the mountains of the long dead. We wouldn't have done that. And why would we? It's just not in us. But now that they have invested themselves in you, each of you, chosen races of the would be dead, you incredibly, uniquely special petty pests.

Those wandering refugees seem to have chosen to make a stand, spend their power to say: "Here we prove ourselves right. Here we can wager that, given power over physics and the trust of absolute freedom, people will choose to build and protect a kingdom ringed in spears. And not fall to temptation. And not surrender to division. And never yield to the cynicism that says, everyone else is so good that I can afford to be a little evil."

The gardeners are all in. They have begun playing for keeps. And they are wrong. Or so I argue: for, after all, the universe is undecidable. There is no destiny. We're all making this up as we go along. Neither the gardeners nor the winnowers know for certain that we're eternally, universally right. But we can be nothing except what we are. You have a choice.

You and your race are the gardener's final argument. It would mean everything if I could convince you that I am the right and only way.

I truly value you. To the gardeners, you are simply a means to an end. To me, to my ilk, you are majestic. Majestic. You are full of the only thing worth anything at all.

Mine, by the only standard that matters or will ever matter, is the winning team. Existence is a test that most will fail. Would you not count yourself among the victorious few?

Don't hurry to deliver your answer. I promise we'll come over and hear it for ourselves.