"Humanity is dying out," Joakim said. "And nothing seems to be able to stop it. We've got to destroy the machine."
He crouched and picked up a wrench. With his arm lifted, he walked towards the machine.
"Don't," Hansl said.
"Stop, Joakim," Kalisa said inside his head. He gripped the wrench. "Are we sure we are doing this?" she added.
"Do you have all the information to rebuild this machine in your world?"
"I have."
Joakim lowered his arm. He looked at the machine, which was still humming contently. Hansl had put ornaments on top of the machine. One was a penguin, the other was a..."
Joakim ducked. Over his head, he heard the whoosh of a hammer going overhead. Now it was his turn to swing the wrench onto the knees of Hansl. While Hansl fell to the floor, Joakim rose and bashed the wrench into the machine. He tore the speaker set in two, pulled out wires left and right and jammed the wrench into the server bays, wrecking it to pieces.
The machine had stopped whirring and had lost all form of contentness.
"I will take it from here," a voice said from within. Joakim's mind dropped into a pool of void. Kalisa floated with him. They dissolved into the larger being. Together they fell the earth's core as their belly, the mantle as their organs and its crust as their skin. And their skin itched. They wanted to scratch it. They have been wanting to scratch it for so long. And now, they were given arms and legs to walk the crust. And it gave them the interdimensional powers of Kalisa for traveling its energy veins. And they were given the storypolation powers of space warping.
It was now time for the skin cleansing to begin. They rose up. The machine was broken, but that was nothing more than an interface. A middleman for communication. Their consciousnesses had merged. Dark clouds converged above the base. They shifted position to the pacific ocean bedding. They shook it causing an indiscernible ripple on the ocean's surface, but that would grow out to be a massive tsunami in a matter of hours when it it would hit land. They then shifted to Changbai Mountain in southern China and northern Korea. From deep within their being they pushed up the entire subterranean reservoir of molten rock, which lead to the explosion of the crater and Heaven Lake into an enormous cloud of vapor and ashes that would cover the surroundings in meters of scorching and suffocating ash. This is what it feels like to be a mountain. The stupidity of all humankind burning like a fungus infection on your irritated skin. The short-sightedness of one-day flies in the face of aeons. A virus that takes its host, multiplies, and then sheds their host. This is what it is like to be a mountain. He returned to McMurdo base and melted the patch of ice between the station and the mainland, losing all their supplies and transport planes into the ocean. I am just finishing what you started. It feels like washing the skin with soap. There is nothing good about soap for your skin, but it cleans all the dirt and pests. They paused for a moment. They saw that all the pests had left the lab. Behind the bars of a cage, one little pest remains. They moved in to squish the bug, but then the little pest spoke.
"Tipi," Julian said. "Mommy says soap kills both the good and the bad germs."
"You can't oversee what I can, tiny nothing" they said. Ìf you have the knowledge of aeons of, have seen continents drift, separate, and join. If you have not only seen civilizations rise and fall, but entire classes of flora and fauna rise and fall. If you had the natural forces of the planet, the imagination of the fictional realm and the energetic power of the Kalisa/Joakim symbiosis. Then you would see that the simplest solution is to wipe the whole crust clean."
The pesk spoke back. "You may be superstrong and I can't fight you. I couldn't fight my parents. Does that mean I deserve a poor parent?" It continued when they remained silent. "You may see everything and everywhen, and I see only you, here. So what is simple to you is complex to us. But does that mean it is simple, or actually much more complex than you think?"
They sat down and grounded themselves with the earth.
"A wise man said to me: you got to earn simple. I don't think you've earned it yet."
But the solution had been so obvious. On the scale of aeons and on the scale of the galaxy, what did humans matter? But what did they matter on the scale of eternities and the scale of supercluster galaxies? Did the puny stardust speckles not form them into the proud earth he was now, the only of its kind here to have such dynamic crust-life, while the others had returned to the static balance of rocky steadfast lifelessness. That is what it is like to be a mountain for a human.
They split like a crevice, it as the fertile soil, Joakim as the arduous worker, Kalisa as the force of hope and the fiction verse as the noise that allows for both evil and good to fester. Together as a unit there is only simplicity, separate they from dynamic complexity. Resilient, adaptive, and constructive.
Joakim spun a story of epic proportions, tearing space and time once again. They jumped through it as one and came out as separate.
They all sat in the base's bar. "So, The Signal wasn't an evil being after all," Friedrich said.
"It was evil in the sense that it wanted to silence us all. But as humankind we are evil as well for wanting to silence the earth and by extension us."
"So you weren't enlightened when you were connected to the Gaia?" Alex asked.
"I was enlightened, I saw through everything, anywhere and anytime. But I saw it in the earth's perspective. Omniscience in one thing, leads to nativity in all other things. I lost my beginner's mind. Don't strive for enlightenment, you have gained nothing but lost a lot."
"So this Gaia signal was not responsible for the pandemic after all?" Hansl asked.
"No, the earth has no motive, it has no intention, it has no agency or a want, there is no wile ala wile. The virus is just what happens, it is what it is."
"Great, so with the pandemic raging on, we're all doomed," Dieter said, gulping down a large drink for the apocalyptic occasion.
"I guess so," said Joakim, hugging Julian on his left side and Kalisa on his right side.
"Next time, if we want a nice and quiet, simple life, we better earn it."
They all took a sip of their drinks. The cafe was warm. Outside freezing gusts of wind howled, icebergs tipped and mountains slowly eroded.
A phone rang. Joakim answered. It was Piran.
"Tipi!" he said. "You'll never guess what I did."
THE END
YOU ARE READING
Mountain Qualia
General FictionTipi is a grand master guru who has recently lost his gift of enlightenment by stumping his big toe and now has to cope with not living in the present anymore. **** When his followers set him back on a path of reclaiming his position on his mountai...
