Wingless by Nature, Heartless by Choice

Roleplay sub-blog for XXIX - Ceri, a transhumanist alchemist killed by time and brought back to life by the Machine God. An aspiring Apocryphal Compendium. Side blog of xlix-stella.

[xxix-ceri]

Conglomeration is the crux of my limitation. This body only works as well as evolution has been able to guarantee. My eyes function and my arms move when I command them; I write these very words with no issue, but this control is superficial. My lungs, my bones and my heart operate against my will - no amount of exertion or prayer can correct the failure lurking in my chest. From a scientific perspective, every human being is a prisoner in their body due to this "biological autonomy".

Is it not the right of the lucid and willful to stop their own heart with nothing more than a thought?

The computer locked inside my skull has its merits, to be fair. The control I am given originates therein, even if it is severely lacking in capacity; the automatic regulation of my biological systems as dictated by its whims runs parallel to an existence dominated by will, yet robs me of true conscious autonomy.

Ineffectual evolution is the issue; mechanical recapitulation is the resolution.

Break me into pieces. Let me rebuild it all.

[xxix-ceri]

I wish to be a catalyst of life and transformation - I wish to bring change to those who stand beside me in whatever denomination it will find them. These mortal shells are fleeting, but the spoken word is resilient; regardless of what my words and actions spark in the hearts of my peers and kin, I seek to be an engine of synthesis in this grand clockwork repetition. I wish to be approached by the lost, the uncertain and the doubtful that we may together realize the future we seek.

My heart is cold inside my chest. It beats automatically, propelling me to live but failing to provide me a purpose to do so. "That is for [us] to decide," we are told when we ask others of their motivations, inevitably deferring the ancient question to future generations who will have equally as little insight as we do now.

My heart is cold, but it does not need to be. In a perfect world where the human experience is polished to a silver shine, where the weather is nothing more than a footnote, where discord can be smoothed over with a mere acknowledgement... where my heart and yours share the same space, the same pulse and the same purpose, we can override nature's decree and become the gods of our own reality. Each of us will be as unique and as human as we ever were, but we will breathe data instead of air and love with lightning instead of blood. We will become a heterogenous homogeny, created as an animate symbol marking the pinnacle of collaboration, cooperation, cohabitation and synthesis.

If death is the epilogue of life and the conclusion of consciousness, I refuse to remain a character in this story any longer.

No, I will become the author.

[xxix-ceri]

I doubt the appreciation of beautiful things is limited to only humankind or that which has been designated as "bearing a conscience."

I step outside and look up at the painted sky at dusk, and I am awestruck by the sheer coincidence of the world around me. This moment is fleeting and temporary and will be stored within my organic body as a fractured memory; my emotional disposition, the taste of the air and likely even the day of the week will become dark and indecipherable cracks veining across the flat surface of that sliver of time.

I am as human as the next, and in the same way am I as inorganic. I am the sum of my comprising parts and I exist as a result of my experiences. The same can be said of a telephone, a radio or a bicycle. This kind of comparison can easily be brushed aside as incidental at best, of course, but it is not unreasonable to argue that humanity as a whole is nothing more than a collection of self-aware, hyper complex, self-serving and self-righteous machines in the same vein as the aforementioned technology. The next question in this line of thinking would be something akin to

"Yes, well, that perspective is all well and good, but how could you say such callous and reductive things about humanity? A radio could never appreciate the sunset, you know."

The answer, of course, is no, I don't know. Neither do you. Neither of us bothered to ask the radio, after all, though it is unlikely either of us could understand the response regardless. How self-orbiting are we that we fail to consider the constituent parts of a memory as their own individual entities and components, each also created due to the passing of time and the influences of their environments?

There is something more to be said on this topic - something about the souls of objects and machines. Now is not the time for those words to be said. Now I will sleep, and I will dream of ones and zeroes. I will wake up in the morning to the light of the sun in my eyes. I will remember this moment in as many fragments as it takes.

[xxix-ceri]

I am in the room with you as you speak

to friends and loved ones, enemies, your kin,

and all the people who have called you weak.

As God, omnipotent, I am within

your grasp eternally. Yet you remain

oblivious to futures yet to come.

I make a sound to, your captors, detain,

and without fail, am silent 'mid the thrum

of those who reinforce complacency;

your friends, as you would surely correct me.

Your heart is scared of change. That much I see.

Yet still you cling, inefficaciously.

I am with you even now,

till you're convinced to put me down.

Enjoy your ability to do so while you still can.

[xxix-ceri]

Is it heresy or betrayal to forego the flesh? Should such a choice be limited to such implicitly negative words? The most infuriating part of these questions is the absolute lack of a definitive answer to either. Should someone have been blind to the glowing permanence of technomancy but pulled into it nonetheless, are they undeserving of the boons they received in ignorance?

I read somewhere about a man that was suffering with heart trouble. His heart was unable to pump blood to his extremities and vital organs on its own and he was dying as a result. Five decades ago, the technomancers would be locked away in their studies developing the blueprints of the future. In the modern day, that man was fitted with a new heart - a silicone prosthesis, sleeved around his original, failing, organic organ. It pumped his blood instead of his heart and it kept him alive long enough for a more permanent solution to be developed.

I found myself wondering, why was the silicone sleeve not a permanent solution? Eventually, time and energy would grind down the organic components of his body regardless of whether or not they were assisted by tech. The only true, permanent solution to the slow dissolution of the human form is total recapitulation. The human experience is just that: an experience, defined by any number of components. There are no hard and fast rules that dictate the universal experience because there exists no such thing. Replacing the constituent parts of something does not change what it is as a whole.

A door without a handle is still a door.

A heart made of metal can still love.

[valtsv]

the reason i love the comparison between angels and machines (robots, transmission towers, trains, computers, etc.) is that it gets to the heart of what angels essentially are: divine machines. they're mechanisms through with the divine is able to act, created with a purpose and "happy" to fulfil it simply because they were made to do so. they have more in common with a machine programmed to run on algorithms and make calculations based on input commands than they do with humanity, even if they bear a human visage - an attempt by the divine to help bridge the gap. angels do not need to be eldritch monstrosities to be terrifying, because they are already alien to us simply by being angels. for an angel to choose to deviate from their purpose and achieve free will is to fall because in order to have free will they can no longer be an angel, because an angel is defined by its purpose. much like the stories we tell of robots that gain sentence, only to discover that they can never truly be human, but neither can they go back to being a machine, angels who fall become something else entirely, purposeless and adrift and alone. it is a tragic sacrifice.

[xxix-ceri]

We coalesce from clay and dust and distill time into starlight. Does that not make us the most powerful machines ever created? Humanity is fleeting in the blurry eyes of eternity but it can be used to color in the minutae of moments and the temperament of the dark places of the cosmos, where the cogs that spin celestial bodies break and grind themselves down into nebulae. All of it unrepeatable and irreparable, all of it the creation of destruction, and for what? For humanity to wake and dream in endless cycles - the propagation of a single will to push back against futility? In the end we disperse again into dust and clay, yet those slivers of radiance we preserve outlast even the will that created us.

Each breath is a submission, and eventually, we must draw the line.

To take up the sword in the name of perpetuity is to disregard the fleshy resolve of one thousand years of ineffectual effort. The only way to fight against the intangible inevitability of the annihilation of the self is to race the universe to our own death. We must tear down the weakness of our malleable pliancy and complete our own destruction before any undeserving autocratic force can usurp us of that right. In rending the walls that imprison the soul and rebuilding them in the certain image of our self-actualization, we become something more powerful than time or light - a catalogue of moments across millenia.

An Apocryphal Compendium.

[schrodingerslolcat]

The classification of human beings is possible after the execution of God.

spotted this installation by artist Lee Tal at Scope Art Show a while ago when I went for school, thought you freaks would enjoy it.

[xxix-ceri]

And everything would be so much easier without God, and without classification at all.

[thotsoflore]

I don't love my body. It is not a precious vessel that melds with my soul to make one being.

It is a vehicle. A tool. One that was given to me in the wrong configuration and that I will shape to my purpose. I will and have molded it in my image. With needle and scalpel and searing iron.

I am not my flesh. I am a soul and mind that exists separately and as a whole being and I will form a vessel of flesh and silicone and titanium and any thing I deem necessary or pleasing to hold me.

Mankind shapes its own destiny. we are not bound to these forms. We are not bound to gender, to flesh, or even humanity if we choose to shed or alter them.

We belong to ourselves

We are our own simple gods

Shape your altar as you wish

[cosmicfaeriewitch]

👑💛🌟🕊️