Empathy For Them - Short Story

You would feel lonely too. Being the summation of all things isn’t so easy. Sure, the almighty They completes Themselves in every way, but it’s not the most exciting form of stasis. When you have everything, you don’t notice it, They thinks. Consider your own life: how often do you contemplate your electricity? But anyways, consisting of light and dark, being alive and dead, male and female… how do you dress for that? They wears Their famous robe out of pure comfort. It covers Their breasts, and the robe provides crotch freedom for Their male and female genitalia. In Their time, there are no fashion designers to address what They need to address, because They lives outside of time. Besides, who is They trying to impress? There’s no one there to play with Them, no one to argue with, no one to have sex with, no one to fight with, no one to discover unknown parts of yourself with. Being the summation of everything is lonely and boring.

So say you’re Them, why not consider what makes you whole in the first place? Why not separate those specifics: the dark from the light, the dead from alive, male from the female? Putting those specifics back together in different orders means They creates all types, infinite in replications and stories, finding the extremes in existence and pitting them against polar opposites. Doesn’t that sound exciting?

They thinks, Let’s start off with a Big Bang! You’ve seen those pictures of the universe, the rings rippling out from a crepuscular purple exploding center. The light erupts up and down, but the ripples swell out across the dark surface of spacetime. This big dark place illumines from the explosions, and the creation becomes more specific. There are enough details of Them out there to create magic, to get really weird with all of it. They watches over every nook and cranny, it’s like spinning plates because They is everywhere at once. But having too many delicate and urgent matters can raise the fear of failure to a narcotized level of pure anxiety... when it’s not zen-like peaceful.

Though infinity can be sad and distracting like scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed which hooks you in with the distantly beautiful but doesn’t connect you with the parts of yourself that matter most.

They realizes, what matters is the connection of what’s inside to the outside. It’s about building a relationship with something beautiful and alive. But look at all that creation that is so dead we don’t even think of it as dead: comets and asteroids, and Kuiper Belts and Milky Ways, black holes, white dwarfs, red giants. And then, here, on earth, something has clicked. Finally, after all that failure, success. This is the opposite of boredom, They thinks, it’s the first connective step of bonding, which leads to true presence.

So why Earth and not somewhere else? Not every rock needs to be polished, They thinks, not every planet needs life.

Besides, creating all of the dead work seems to be requisite to create the truly living—you can ask any artist or writer or musician about that. And what those same musicians and writers and artists know—shit, businessmen or scientists even—is that any creator also has to be an editor. Some people say killer or destroyer, but that’s a little melodramatic. But They is the first to say (and not David Mamet) that sometimes you have to “kill your darlings.” Throwing out what is good with a large portion of the bad is what helps make any creation beautiful even if the horrific evisceration of those creations can feel tragic—the tortured artist/wounded healer mythology doesn’t come from nowhere.

They sparks life from collaborative, symbiotic relationships with the rocks and dead matter around the initial prokaryotic microorganisms. Materialism has very early roots, They imagine rebel scientist Lynn Margulis would have said to Karl Marx. In Their literally infinite wisdom (and, since they are whole and balanced, infinite stupidity), They allows for replication. But They quickly realize that replication of microbes doesn’t guarantee to hold Their attention. And this is when They gets their first idea to do mass “killings of darlings” or create Their first “threshold” (as They say and Fermi appropriates).

They makes their first threshold by adding a gaseous substance found in dying stars: oxygen. Oxygen’s electron behavior has the instability necessary for life and allows for the creation of gender and thus sex! What tickles Their nipples is Their new bacteria farts oxygen, slowly changing the atmospheric composition. Most bacteria are so desperate not to breathe the oxygen--because who can breathe farts--so the old bacteria suffocate and die off in a mass extinction. They calls this the Fart Holocaust and They loved how engrossing the struggle to survive was! They is also entertained by the oxidation process, because the free radicals from breathing oxygen molecules are what radiate us, give us cancer, and kill us (why do you think we’re supposed to buy all those anti-oxidants and oxidizing skin creams?). How juicy is that plot twist? The very thing that helps organisms survive the holocaust will be their own death knell too! Thus, the three most compelling parts of stories, the struggle to survive, sex, and death.

They call all of these surviving creations “strugglethings.” The strugglethings evolve into millions of shapes and sizes, like cyanobacteria and trilobites and wooly mammoths and beech trees and cockroaches and kelp and blue footed boobies and Tyranosaurus Rexes and maybe-delusional, aspiring novelists.

But the amazingness of these new strugglethings is exactly what makes Them want to create more thresholds. The dinosaur strugglethings have massive jaws and/or talons and/or claws and look monstrous even to each other, they rule the earth. Becoming indomitable against all the odds is engaging and surprising because dominance is the exact opposite of being a strugglething. However, though strength alone is good for individual survival, it stalls out early with regard to collective evolution and bores Them. Thank goodness that They found an asteroid in the darkness and sent it to Earth to end them, because what is also not boring is toppling of a mighty empire! And this creation of rare empires and the empires’ destructions can go on in infinite waves.

Because They wants entertainment! Connection! Companionship! Meaning! Something to shed a light in the universe of blackness! And that’s why they are so gripped by these multitudinous, near-impossible stories that move like waves. How else can you balance the familiar with novelty? Narrative waves create constant change and at the same time a unified path! They feels the stories of other strugglethings and is compelled to follow for many iterations, like different seasons of great television a la Jill Solloway or Jenji Kohan or David Simon. And when the waves crash, there’s a Van Goghian turbulence that can be relished!

If in being the entertainment, you are feeling confused and separated from Them and Truth, that’s the point! They loves confusion! How fucking engaging is watching confusion and distraction! And limitation in understanding! Laughs for lightyears.

To add to the hilarious mess, the strugglethings, on a species and individual level, don’t share the same confusion. The strugglethings are confused about the confusion. Most strugglethings are even unaware of the confusion they are so confused. Oh, god, how terrible they act towards each other. Only a few strugglethings can survive on sunbeams instead of other strugglethings, but these innocent sunbeamers seem to live only to get eaten. And the ones who eat off the non-cannibalistic strugglethings become cannibalized who then become cannibalized. They thinks, how luridly fun! Isn’t that a knee slapper, that most strugglethings have to eat other strugglethings to survive? Oh, the Almighty They uses the confusion here to have each strugglething think of itself as separate and its species as separate (even though they have way more in common than anything else in Their galaxy). This trickery is necessary. The key to creating, They thinks, is that the strugglethings must not be too objective, otherwise collectively the creations might all see the same truth, stop killing one another, which means the strugglethings will become whole, become like Them. Then strugglethings would live in a timeless infinity of peace and, because of the starvation from not eating other living things, death.

 Yawn.

Wanting to add nuance, They imbues human strugglethings with the capacity to work together, making tools and systems and stories and morality beyond simple strength and survival. This helps the humans protect those alive in a way that allowed so many to survive thresholds that They never thought possible! What delights and perplexes Them is the threshold passing of the human strugglethings into awareness and complex consciousness that allows for the idea of God, Them.

And at that point, They can be actively loved.

But They wants to be loved in non-boring ways, so They gives a different version of love to each group of human strugglethings, which entertains Them mightily. This desire to be loved creates a wonderful twist! What cracks Them up to no end is the way in which the human strugglethings make the differences even more different. Combined with the confused confusions, one gender assumes control of the belief system and only sees “god” or Them as a man or masculine! The juicy irony is that the male genitalia is not what They’d pick if They were choosing for something powerful, as it’s floppy 95% of the time! Not impressive! They thinks: wouldn’t you want a dark cave of life creation if you wanted power? What a hoot! They also thinks, The strugglethings’ vision is so funny how off it is, but that’s exactly what happens with a lopsided leadership. And, of course, how jawdropping is all the fighting! Muslims fight with Jews. Christians with Muslims. Christians with Jews. Hindus and Christians and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and all the other religions and races and creeds fight with one another and killed each other for the rightness of their vision, meaning that They doesn’t even have to step in and do the gruesome editing or “killing of darlings.” The human strugglethings do Their job for Them. How tragic and unexpected and compelling!

This fullness of life and death meant that They is sad about some developments, but at least They don’t yawn from the sadness.

Please don’t think of sadness as a negative for Them. They knows that sadness is part of the whole, and enables Them with different abilities than happiness. In happiness, They is present and time can fly by, which means They can forget about all the strugglethings in the world. Whereas sadness adds an expansiveness, a slowing down, a contemplation, an ability to truly absorb problems, comprehend them on a wide scale and in more granular details. Happiness is a bright star against the darkness: individual, brilliant, destined to fade from specialness. Sadness is the infinite black space. They thinks sadness is maybe Their greatest superpower.

They also gives strugglethings the fear of sadness so as not to indulge in the superpower most close to Them. And, hilariously They thinks, constantly striving for happiness—and failing—creates more sadness. If you have acceptance, then you are less interesting. They wants to see strugglethings confused and surprised, sad and happy, because bouncing from one pole to the other means waves of struggling. And struggle is entertaining.

The human strugglethings raise their own struggle to a higher level. Not only have they fought with one another and done the “killing of darlings” for Them, but the human strugglethings even created their own Holocaust, killing each other by the millions, punctuated by a nuclear explosion so large that they could cause their own extinction! A self-inflicted threshold! They watches in grim astonishment, no other strugglething would have done that! They are horrified, but they can’t look away becuase the drama enthralls Them.

And the humans save themselves from this atrocity of their own creating. Humans tend not to want to be destroyed and so behave more peacefully, slowly destroying each other less frequently as a percentage, not a total--old habits are hard to break.  The capacity to destroy works against itself, funny enough.

Now the human strugglethings even recreate the Oxygen Holocaust without even knowing it, in times of relative peace (there is always some fighting). Like the cyanobacteria that emitted oxygen to kill off huge quantities of life, the humans emit greenhouse gases that reduce the livability of the planet! And they’re not even doing it on purpose! This dramatic irony is intoxicating to watch, but it doesn’t stop there. Once the human strugglethings, at least some of them, see the ecocidal ways, others double down on polluting and killing off their hopes of survival. This mania is why humans are Their favorite strugglethings.

How mesmerizing a development? How unpredictable to watch and not at all suicidally insipid and lame? How amazing that the collective work helps those who would not have crossed thresholds to now cross thresholds! This should be fun to challenge strugglethings now! Even the meteor might not be an answer.

What continues to interest Them most is that--in addition to authoring their own threshold--the human strugglethings have expanded past their limits on creation too. The humans are on the verge of creating an entire species created by human strugglethings. Artificial Intelligence, humans say, with an incomparable level of reason and learning and progress compared to anything else created on this planet of Their creation. The progress will bore through challenges so fast that it will surpass all the stories that were used for Them before.

How fucked is that? They thinks. This is like if a human strugglething had a dog, and then the dog had a human baby that would replace it’s master. Pets obey you and die in your lifetime!

Isn’t this obsessively captivating, the idea of creating something that no longer needs Them and now They is being replaced? But once They is actually replaced, where does They go? Do They tell Themselves the sob stories about how replacement came to be to stave off the boredom?  After all, They know Their creations have some modicum of free will themselves because the strugglethings have some piece of eternal Themness inside. Where does They turn to now? Is there a nursing home for gods? Is it filled? Does They share stories about their universe? Do They die? Is They already dead?

This part, I don’t know. I am just one, lone strugglething who wakes up in the black of morning, hours before daybreak, having heard in my dreams the primal scream of loneliness and impending death, and the sadness connecting me to something larger. But the concept of god dying and the expanse of time are so large that I can’t even wrap my brain around it. Instead I imagine a river pouring into a lake of swirling darkness, and then my mind’s eye follows to the other edge of the lake where a new river begins again.