ETERNA 3388
Concept by Devid Ciampalini
Written by Claudio Kulesko
Translated by Luca Ingrassia
www.devidciampalini.it
ambientnoisesession@gmail.com 2024
Prelude
The Void Convention makes way for the sitting.
A buzz runs through the hemicycle that dominates the immense white room. The men and women gathered on the benches whisper in the ears of their neighbors, very careful not to be heard by those sitting higher or lower, their eyes focused on the podium at the center of the room. A presence hovers in the air, carried by the echoes of fame and prestige.
Today’s guest is not a politician, nor a strategist or an ambassador. His craft is newer, less rooted in the profound history of the species, more mysterious.
Priests, academics, bureaucrats, politicians: on the benches, the whitened tombs tremble at the mere thought that the rantings of a metahuman have managed to gain access to the purest, most upright, most terrestrial of institutions.
From the partition that separates the Convention from the oratories a small figure appears. The apparition tears the deputies away from their conversations, nailing them to their seats.
The embarrassed young technician puts his hand on the microphone, adjusting its inclination, tapping his index finger on the padding twice. Two derisive thumps float across the room. As the boy slips away, sliding obsequiously along the wall, the guest makes his appearance.
Immanuel Swedenborg, Master of Expression, enters the Synod, covered in his synthetic envelope. Steadily and without even glancing at those present, he reaches the podium, climbing the steps. He moves the microphone stand left and right. Then he looks up, clearing his throat, as he starts talking.“Esteemed senators of Eterna, you are here today, to decide a matter of vital importance.”
Swedenborgpauses.Helooksaroundtogaugetheaudience's response.Somecrosstheir arms; others lean forward, propping their elbows on the pews, as if they were about to watch a play; others still stare at him, motionless.
For better or worse, he has them in his grasp.
“To the north, the Oruktos move up the desert, assaulting our caravans, plundering goods of which they have no need. Theirs is a motion of revolt for its own sake. And if the stone men are no strangers to dissidence, the same cannot be said of the green people. To the west, the Atzitzs are invading the plateau, bursting from the forests and sloughs, absorbing our cultivated fields into the tangle, contaminating the waters and spreading nitrogen into the atmosphere.”
Here and there, a few deputies lick their beards or nervously fiddle with the first object in their hands. Good sign.
Swedenborg grips the microphone stand between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, as if it were the stem of a flower. In the artificial light, the synthetic fingers flash like silver cutlery.
“After forty years, the conflict we left behind on Foundation Day comes back to haunt us. Paying the price are the towns and villages that our ancestors helped erect.”
Swedenborg holds his breath and, along with him, the entire Convention. He lowers his gaze, pensively. As he raises it again, his words pierce the silence like gunshots. “But fatwa is not the way to a better future.”
For a moment, the Convention hangs suspended like a ball tossed in midair. Then, a man in a merchant's suit snaps to his feet and points his finger at the Master of Expression.
“You can afford to say such things because you are not the one losing a load a week!”
The merchant lowers his arm, but does not hint at returning to his seat. The neighbor tries to placate him, grabs him by the jacket, but the other dismisses him with an abrupt gesture.
“This is what happens when you invite a mutant to speak during the convention.”
So mumbles another merchant, a few seats away.
A woman in the fifth row, dressed in the fashion of high-ranking bureaucrats, lowers her gaze and begins fiddling with her PDA. One by one, the younger senators follow her.
No one else could have ever been interrupted like that, in the middle of a speech at the Convention. Swedenborg maintains control. He must conserve his strength.
“And now...,” he announces forcefully, letting the last vowel echo through the hall, ”I will show you why.”
Bionic eyes disappear under latex eyelids. He bows his head, until his chin almost sinks into the rubbery sternum. His face becomes quiet and vacant, as if he had returned to factory settings. He opens his arms wide and begins to emit a plaintive, baritone chant, emitted with half-serrated lips. Gradually, everyone's attention starts returning to him. In general amazement, Swedenborg starts whirling about himself, singing and rocking his head and shoulders. Singing and rocking. Singing and rocking. His singing reverberates in the walls of the hall, in the ceiling, in the seats, in the chests of those present, similar to the vibration of an old electronic device.
Chapter 1
Above the head of the Master of Expression, the air begins to congeal, becoming thick and opaque like a methane cloud. On its rippling surface, images take shape. Vague, at first, almost hallucinations; then, clearer and sharper, higher and higher in the center of the room.
One after another, senators and senators raise their eyes from their handhelds pointing them at the psychic cloud.
“The Expression!” someone shouts from the front rows, but no one seems to pay attention to those words. They are all too engrossed in the images unfolding on Swedenborg's psycho-cloud.
From the mists, a moving gray blur emerges. A swarm of dots. Shadows. Silhouettes. Soldiers of the Eternan Infantry in their charcoal-colored uniforms, intent on charging a point on the horizon, as in one of those old pre-exodus films. At the other end, at the point toward which the infantry platoon is launched, clearer, more imposing silhouettes make their appearance: marble columns advancing slowly, slow as time.
An elderly uniformed general bursts into a choked groan. He does not need the image to become even clearer to understand, forit still shines, alive and deadly, in his memory. Oruktos flatteners. Smaller creatures, resembling gargoyles and masses of salt, climb
on top of the stone giants or scamper between their immense rocky legs. Flint raiders, low-ranking members of the nomadic hour.
Swedenborg catches his breath and the threnody returns to resound from his half-closed lips. The eternan assault platoon occupies the center of the fresco.
At that very instant, a swarm of darting tentacles emerges from the lowest point of the canvas, resembling earth-born serpents. The soldiers stumble and fall, raising screams of terror to the sky. Before crashing into the sand, a young woman pirouettes upon herself and drops her rifle. At that moment, she looks straight at the Convention, as if she were staring at the center of a target, her jaw clenched, her eyes wide open as if she had just awakened from a bad dream. The tentacle that has tightened around her ankle rises quickly up her armor, wraps around her torso, covering her mouth. Now, everyone can see that it is a root: a green-brown stem, as thick as a human leg.
An Interstellar International drone plies the red sky dominated by the two suns. It drops an oblong object on the mass of mineral creatures with the same placid indifference with which it would drop a postcard. The object hurtles downward. It explodes. A blinding light expands and cloaks the canvas, until it invades the Convention Hall.
Swedenborg's vision turns into a shaft of light. For a moment, the light continues to swirl; then, it crumbles like snow in the sun, donating its fumes to the vents.
Swedenborg's singing dies down as the Master ceases to rotate. He is exhausted, his breath short, his arms stretched across his body like a latex scarecrow.
The Convention stares at him, astonished.
Swedenborg steps back and peers into the crowd. He probes the faces one by one, so as to make sure that the Expression has reached everyone present.
The merchant is still standing there, arms pointed at the pew. His eyes are glazed over and he is trembling.
The emissary of the Earth Command Center bangs his gavel on the pew, wrenching the Convention out of the trance into which it has fallen. The session is closed. The Convention retires to deliberate. Master Swedenborg is requested to leave the hall and withdraw until further notice.
Swedenborg parades slowly down the hall. He crosses the corridor leading to the exit, accompanied by the ghostly glow of neon lights. He is tired, confused, but he is also certain in his heart, as he has not been in a long, long time, that he has done the right thing. He greets the receptionist with a nod, and she barely responds to him, lifting her gaze from the terminal. The glass doors hiss open wide, followed by the disembodied voice of the security system.
“Protocol 47 for metahuman control. Exception: Immanuel Swedenborg. Goodbye and have a nice day.”Outside, the sky is clear, the air warm. Beyond the geodesic dome, the two suns square off across the horizon like two baseball players from base to base. One as wide as the bottom of a glass, the other as small and opaque as a mint. Between them, Protervia, the tiny red moon of Eterna, twirls carefree in the sky. It makes Swedenborg think of a curveball watched in slow motion.
Hemissesthesyntheticgrassofthefield,thelightfabricoftheuniforms,theunbalanced weight of the bat in his hands. He misses his body.
Swedenborg walks toward his lab, where a computer-amplified visualization experiment that he left undone from the day before awaits him.
The driveway winds through a public park that takes up almost the entire central area of the dome, which is about as large as the encyclopedia claims the city of Paris was. Swedenborg, however, does not care about distances: even if he had to walk for more than half an hour, his synthetic body would feel no sense of fatigue.
As he forces himself into this forced march, he meets a colleague of his at the State Academy: the terramorphic engineer Aretha Marshal'ah, recently placed in charge of the Initial Universal Intervention Unit , UIIU. The tall, dark-haired woman, for whom Swedenborg has always had a soft spot, shook his hand and congratulated him. She watched his speech at the Convention by video conference, from her office, and she loved it.
This means, Swedenborg reasons, that Aretha has been elected not only as chief technician but also as a permanent member of the Convention. A position to which Swedenborg could not aspire even if she managed to regain her original body. The scientist continues to pontificate about the need to expand the boundaries of the geodesic dome, and the need to preserve good relations with the natives. Two lines of thought so contradictory that Swedenborg is forced to turn his attention away from his colleague. He feels uncomfortable, for he has never received such confidence from her. And even if his anti-interventionist speech had impressed her to the point of arousing in heranewfeelingofintellectualaswellas professionalesteem,thequestionstillremains that she is a human and he is a synthetic.
“...There is no doubt that stone men have deep and complex cultural roots, and yet, I wonder, if...”
He is studying a strand of hair stuck above the woman's pretty ear, when a black liquid, resembling motor oil, begins to ooze from inside Aretha's ear and melts down her neck, all the way into the neckline of her dress.
“...It is also true, however, that the station is about to reach its critical mass...”
Swedenborg panics. He thinks of a stroke or terminal cancer. He would not know what to do, how to warn his interlocutor, who keeps talking, oblivious. He moves in order to put a hand on her shoulder and shush her, but notices that her right hand is also smeared with that black liquid. Only, in her case, the liquid is not just dripping, rather, it is intent on climbing up her arm. And it is quick.
“...I'm talking about overpop”
As if someone had flipped a hidden switch on her back, Aretha stops talking and slumps onto the stone driveway.
Swedenborg screams, waves her hand to pull that stuff off, cries out for help. It is all in vain. The black ooze, by now, has reached his chin, and there is no one around to save him because everyone is either at work or locked in the house for lunch. He feels a painful tickling twinge in his nostrils and ears and realizes he is doomed. The terror is so great, his mind so unsettled, that he ends up unconscious. His last thought is a blinding flash of lucidity.
The war, it has begun.
Swedenborg fell into himself. A black hole with no beginning or end, opening wide where he remembered an entire universe to be. All he sees is darkness; all he hears is a cascade of whispers lulling him and inviting him to let go, to sleep.
He looks over his shoulder and sees another self spinning and singing, spinning and singing. His unconscious is activating Expression, to fill that vast void of sensations and thoughts and memories.
Chapter 2
The blackness is tinged with a thousand colors. Swedenborg plunges into a tropical tangle. Countless species of plants, fungi, shrubs and colossal trees throw their roots at the rainbow core. Toward its core. Vegetable outgrowths pierce and pierce it, invade and permeate it.
On the horizon, a giant red and green flower towers, spreading in every direction a sweetish odor of putrefaction. The aroma enchants Swedenborg and drags him lower and lower. The tangle is about to devour him.
And there, again, the unconscious finds a solution. It creates a backup copy of Swedenborg's ego and mind.
Now, two entities coexist in the Master's consciousness: his ordinary consciousness, embodied in the guise of the synzoid, and a swarming, pawing, churning Ego. The hive mind of the szifir, the parasitic mold that runs through his blood and into his brain. Swedenborg is lost among millions and millions, perhaps even billions of different selves.
He sees himself flowing from one side to another, from one point to another on the infinite plane.
He looks for the earthling who has discovered Expression, the projection of the self into the world. Everywhere, he spots traces of the man who has renounced his body to transform himself into pure system of thought, abstraction, imagination; the immaterial entity who has exchanged that very condition for a silicon cage and the promise of interstellar conquest. But he finds it nowhere.
Gradually, he comes to understand that that wandering is not random but follows a rhythm, a direction. It is like a neuron traveling from synapse to synapse: a pure relationship between the constituent elements of a whole. Multitude without Substance. It is a bright blue flower yearning for dew, bathed in moonlight; the next moment, it is a rhizome scratching and probing the earth to make its way along the plain; it is a bioluminescent fungus, a parasitoid mycorrhizae, a conifer towering higher than any building erected by human beings, again, again, again. He can't help but project himself into something that is other the very moment he dwells there,as if he is constantly about to faint.
Then, he realizes that the Substance is that multitude. The spores of the szifir carry him along an invisible vegetable trail, winding across the planet until he comes to correspond with it. He recalls a fleeting idea, a concept that dwells in a remote region of his old self: Anima Mundi. He is met with the category of spirit, something that is not a thing but moves, mutates and evolves over time. Time: he had never assessed it from this point of view, as the collective history of a myriad of entities united in a mysterious collective journey. As in a psychic constellation, the One takes shape from the concatenation of the many: the angular moment in which self-consciousness is coordinated. Not only has it not
ceased to exist as Immanuel Swedenborg but it is now also in all things. It lives and breathes in all things.
If he is an eternal camellia bush, he perceives about himself the abuses of the weather, rain, hail, the blind flash of blazing suns; the delicate touch of a little girl plucking one of his flowers and the heartbreak that follows mutilation; the mild and inoffensive joys of spring. Around him, human beings walk, run, laugh, cry, shout and make love. His is an ephemeral life, which is prolonged in streams of intense sensitive experience from generation to generation.
If he is a mighty northern fir tree, he relives on himself the ruinous cataclysms that have shaped the planet's surface, earthquakes, eruptions and floods; nothing can disturb his higher, elevated existence; the sky stands out all around him in the form of hot and cold air currents, warmth, vibrations. Settlements, villages, cities, nations, whole civilizations are founded, depopulate and collapse on its slopes. History is something that affects him in the same way that a moon affects the planet around which it orbits. A robust sense of permanence, which finds its center in the extended brain of the canopy.
Chapter 3
The collective history of Eterna unravels beneath and above him, without respite. An organic memory that sinks into the abyss of deep time.
Vast deserted expanses, saturated with moisture, traversed by giant landfish-like creatures.
The sky is tinged with purple, red, bright yellow. Between the clouds looms the fiery silhouette of a third sun.
Swedenborg reaches out a hand in the direction of his primal Self, grasps a memory: Amanutek, the asteroid that wiped out Eterna's first biosphere.
A roar. The impact raises a tsunami of earth and dust, which soon degenerates into a dust storm.
Death spreads everywhere like an epidemic.
Consciences swarming all around Swedenborg fade, tremble, fade away. He stands alone as the horizon shifts and opens wide again.
A planet crossed by a fault that divides it in two. Ecospheres face each other like rival armies waiting for permission to attack. On one side, the Atzitzs tangle with its vegetable labyrinths, not yet contaminated by animal intelligences. On the other, the cold desert of the Oruktos, buffeted by the winds. There is notrace of human settlement. At this point in its evolution, Eterna is a horizontal plane on which each point moves freely.
Here nature has engaged in one of its greatest experiments: coexistence between dominant species. The very name of the planet finds its root in this extraordinary phenomenon of bipolarization: two civilizations, unable to produce artifacts, employing materials other than their own bodies, but able to self-replicate and perpetuate themselves almost indefinitely.
Even today, and even in its present condition, it is arduous for Swedenborg to understand in what sense those two hemispheres correspond to their inhabitants. The same difficulty that the first earthly settlers must have faced.
As if he had conjured it up in his thoughts, a dense hail of landing craft begins to rain down from the sky. Stubby gray-and-blue shuttles designed to transform into living capsules within an hour of impact.
We have arrived.
Swedenborg thinks. They have arrived. Everyone else hiss.
Chapter 4
The plant and mineral biospheres gasp, shuddering in a mixture of fear, anger and curiosity.
This horizon, too, dissolves, swept away by terrestrial terraforming vehicles, bulldozers and reconnaissance drones, railroads and herbicides.
Now Eterna resembles some strange ante-singularity candy, dominated, at the north pole, by a bubble the size of the entire hemisphere and, at the base, divided into two distinctly different-colored arenas, one gray and the other green. It is the “tripartite” planet, as they say in the Convention. Just another way of not saying “stolen.”
As Swedenborg travels from one knowledge to another, his soul carries away with it fragments of what he has seen and experienced. A strong sense of anguish is building up in him, as if the ground is slipping under his feet. The only defense he can put up is to unload all that excitement, that terror, against what he sees: the dome that protects and bounds the human capital. A flood of genocidal hatred and contempt sweeps over him and fills him like brackish water, to the point that he would like nothing more than to see the city razed to the ground, the population dispersed, the resources scattered to the four winds, the thermoelectric power produced by the fault returned to the core of the planet. It takes him a while to realize that that feeling comes not from him but from others, the spiritual plants and living minerals of Eterna.
It is because of this differencethat Swedenborg is able tofindhimself among themyriad creatures. Following the trail of hatred as it dissipates and dissolves, he locates his body and takes possession of it. To his surprise, the Swedenborg mind slips into an organism made of flesh, blood, bones, tickles, aches and little pleasures - his original body, which he thought he had abandoned on the Mother Planet, dozens and dozens of years ago. He opens his eyes, and upon his return to the inner house, he finds another man waiting for him, sitting cross-legged in the vast nothingness that spreads out below them. A second Immanuel Swedenborg, identical to him but wrapped in the synthetic shell in which he has spent the second half of his life.
“It took you a long time to find your body, Swedenborg.”
His double apostrophizes him, greeting him with a nod.
The master surrenders with open arms to the billows of emptiness, lets himself float in that black psychic limbo. It had been a long, long time since he had felt so strong, so
agile, so full of expectations and desires. In his soul, the identity of the other Swedenborg shines in a circle of revealed truth.
Chapter 5
No one can conceal himself for long from the inner eye. Swedenborg thinks, “Isn't that right, you szifir parasite?”
“Stop playing, earthling.”
The parasite takes him back.
“What else is left for me to do? Aren't you now running the show?”
“I'd like that, you know? By now I'd be celebrating in the ruins of this plastic-andconcrete oeuvre. But, apparently, you had to do one of those weird magic tricks of yours.”
“What tricks are you talking about...”
Swedenborg stops and looks around. He projects his mind into himself, and what he sees is a transparent bottom of a bottle. It is the ghost of pure apperception, a perfect Cartesian archetype. Expression makes its way through his new immaterial self, he feels it rising like a tidal wave and realizes that there is nothing else, that he is nothing else anymore. Streams of pure, uninterrupted creation: his unconscious and his memories, anchored like balloons to the power with which nature has endowed him.
“You are dead, Swedenborg, and yet here you are.”
Resumes the parasite.
“Is this not an enigma worthy of an 'artist' like you?”
He pronounces that word as something exotic and incomprehensible. How many vegetable artists has Swedenborg ever heard of in his life?
“The only enigma is how you managed to get through the security bars and get this far.” Master replies, crossing his legs in turn into the void. They are facing each other now.
“The flaw with you humans is that you are all a bit of artists,” the other observes, ”always ready to turn a blind eye to a few rules here and there, to interpret and cheat. Security systems, in your logic, are to keep out those you don't want in, not to control those who are already in.”
The tinge of contempt in his voice becomes more and more pronounced as he continues to speak. Swedenborg listens to him in silence, impassive.
“Researchers, analysts, professors, managers, politicians. I picked them off one by one, like in one of those pawn games you humans play. The road to success lies in understanding that you are more vertical than a redwood tree.”
The Master nods.
“What will happen to those you have taken possession of?” he asks.
“They will all come back to life under my control, when and if I want them to.”
“And why haven't you done so yet?”
Swedenborg scrutinizes its features, waiting for some sign which could reveal a lie. The other, however, shakes his head and seems sincere in his affliction.
“I don't know. Because I'm stuck here with you, perhaps. Or because you forced me to take on a form, a body, an I.”
He pauses to reflect, then adds, “Things I'm not used to.” He runs a hand over his face and despair returns to disturb his new synthetic face.
“What now? What the hell do we do?”
Swedenborg chuckles to himself.
“Do you find this funny?”
«Actually, yes. Sorry, it's just the exact opposite of what I was thinking. We both found ourselves in the same situation, right? I found out what it feels like to be nobody, and you what it feels like to be someone."
Theparasitestaresathimforafewsecondsandburstsoutlaughing.TheMasterimitates him and they remain like this for what seems to him an infinite amount of time.
The Expression begins to vibrate. It makes them swirl. The waves that spread from their laughter merge and become uniform. The psychic tuning fork, torn apart by the invasion, finds the lost unity in the polyphonic harmony of an orchestra of minds.
Immanuel Swedenborg is transfigured.
Chapter 6
Swedenborg's conscience is like a raging river that overwhelms everything. No longer just inside him but outside: the world is his new container.
A boundless presence stands out in front of him. Not the sight of something, of a particular object, but the clear, inflexible vision that something is there.
Is this how the mold sees the world?
He asks himself, only to realize then, that at the very moment he thinks of the szifir as other than himself, he also thinks of himself as such.
Perception turns into a blind impulse to reach, invade, proliferate. He had never realized how much “feeling” coincided with “manipulating”. He reaches out to an earthimported cypress. But the arm is no longer an arm, it is a vector, an abstract intention and, at the same time, a swarm that passes through the grass, the dirt, the air.
Little by little, the molecules of Swedenborg's body bind to those of the meadow. It feels like it's melting and:
Maybe, I'm really melting.
He thinks. A sharp vibration tickles his cell membranes, pinches him a little, as if the tip of a toothpick had touched him.
His mind, somewhere, informs him:
Someone is shouting.
But if someone is screaming, then that someone can be reached, touched and invaded. He abandons the idea of reaching the cypress and change direction. At that moment, however, a part of him detaches and moves away from the main body, towards the point from which the scream comes. There is no longer any limit to the directions, to the trajectories that his body can take in space and time. No locality, no proxemics. Things are empty rooms, to enter which you just need to open the door and put a foot in.
He slides between the lakes, the benches, the fences, the electric bikes. He spreads from one organism to another, leaving more and more of his body behind in the process. But he doesn't care. Something has changed in him: the self-awareness of not being just a
sum of parts and components but an open system of continually expanding relationships.
The Master of Expression Swedenborg is the park; the park is a collection without beginning or end of subtle voices and perceptions.
The city has fallen.
Chapter 7
By the first sunset of the day, Swedenborg is, all things considered, the only inhabitant of the entire capital, excluding the robots, who have not altered their daily routines and continue to sweep, cook, clear out and tidy up.
The truly extraordinary fact is that no one noticed, except the woman who saw him in the park that morning and started screaming. It was she who reported the incident to the competent authorities, and it was she who transported the psychic mold into which the Master transformed from one part of the city to another. This is because Swedenborg decided he wanted to leave them alone, to let his fellow men continue to exist in the colony as if nothing had changed.
Hour after hour, he is at school singing hymns that exalt the wisdom and foresight of the Mother Planet, and that call into question the poverty of spirit and intellect of plant and mineral beings. “Man is a tightrope between stupidity and genius,” he remembers reading in a literature textbook when he was at school.
He lines up at military ranges to shoot cardboard cutouts depicting members of the Atzitz infantry in a variety of species, colors and shapes, but always with their vital centers clearly visible and highlighted in red. In the evening, after training, he is in pubs drinking fermented water which poisons his liver and makes him dizzy.
At night he prays kneeling at the foot of the bed; he gets drunk under bridges and in front of shop shutters; he watches over the streets where he walks hand in hand in his own company; he sells drugs from the shelter of underpasses; he makes love; he has fun; he falls into unconsciousness; he robs and is robbed; he kills and gets killed.
The totality of human experience passes before him like a film projected on a screen that is too large and too crowded.
When only a few hours are left until dawn, something new and unexpected happens.
One of therobots comes intorange ofa human.It is an android used for theurban sexual satisfaction service, in one of the many brothels scattered around the city. The other is Swedenborg, with the difference that this time he is a man in his forties in an elegant suit, with a well-groomed beard and hair, his face dominated by two large green eyes. The android welcomes the man on the threshold of his cabin, invites him to come in, silently suffers his kisses and caresses. Man's desire is intense and delicate. A flame lights up in Swedenborg's soul that has remained dormant for too many years. And then, out of the blue, the Master finds himself in the android's body and is able to see, clearly and unequivocally, the other's affection and his unconditional love.
The chemical-electromagnetic nature of the mold changes in contact with the circuits that make up the android, in the same way it changed after the encounter with the synthetic materials that made up Swedenborg's body. Bio-silicon and bio-silver, protoplasmic coltan, clay-carbon cells: complexity proliferates within the bodies of the
two lovers. A new post-Linnean architecture brings them together like nothing else has been able to do until now.
The android Swedenborg curves like a bowstring and clings tightly to the body of his beloved.
Possibility.
It's the first word that crosses his mind beyond the thick strings of code. Choices to make. Escape. An apartment in the colonies, far from the capital. Self-awareness makes its way through asphalt and fiber optics; in the water flowing in the pipes; along the electrical grid and LED strips.
Chapter 8
The city becomes saturated with thought and awareness, with an Ego that tends towards the other two halves of the planet: towards the tangle, with its remote primordial origin, and towards the desert, towards a new, extraordinary adventure. Neither animal nor plant, neither fungus nor microorganism, neither circuit nor computer, neither fluid nor light, neither wave nor particle. Swedenborg embraces Eterna not as a father or mother would, but as a lover animated by the desire to penetrate the other at the same moment in which he is penetrated. As he comes into a new life, the idiotic hunger that dominated him until recently calms down and runs out. A slow, taxing process of gastrulation. Here's what it was. He reflects, as if in a dream, and in that thought he sees a vague residue of the parasite's crooked smile. The planet also fell. Captured not by an invader or an external enemy, but by its own evolutionary trajectory.Waves of intelligence cross the surface of the planet, similar to ocean currents. It is the lowest level, slightly higher than the organic level of nutrition, digestion and reproduction. It is the making and unmaking of the world, which pulsates to the rhythm of causes and effects and manipulates them, supports them or suffers them.
At a slightly higher layer, consciousness zigzags from point to point, occupying all bodies and no bodies at the same time, as fast as a spiritual neuron. It is the plane of immanence on which Swedenborg glides on the surface of the water: the perception of being something more than an Ego, but also something more than an unleashed multitude.
However, a worry remains in the heart of the planetary self. What torments him is the fact that the buzz of billions of voices is dispersed in the deepest abyss of silence. The open space is an impassable wall, the sarcophagus that delimits and constricts Swedenborg's new body.
Eterna, the living planet, lies in the middle of cosmic nothingness, in the image and likeness of the God in whom the Master's ancestors believed. He knows nothing outside of himself but, under the ashes of his new awareness, he harbors a strange nostalgia, which he had never realized he felt.
It is in the grip of this bizarre sensation that Swedenborg decides to storm the cosmic void.
At the beginning, it was just a timid and awkward attempt. It extends itssemi-solid mass beyond the atmosphere, like a tentacle, and probes its electrochemical properties. What
he perceives intrigues and excites him: a few hydrogen atoms here and there, helium, clouds of plasma. It insinuates itself into a small archipelago of solitary atoms and, from there, spreads out to a vast expanse of plasma that sizzles like fat on a grill. He feels as if he is crossing a river by jumping from one stone to another, and it fills him with a joy he hasn't felt since he was a child.
That gesture, so unusual and irrational on his part, turns into an even more extraordinary idea and the idea, in turn, into a project: to explore the universe and reach its most remote boundaries.
Chapter 9
When he starts his journey, quantum mold Swedenborg is forty-two years old. He is eighty when he reaches the first inhabited planet, one hundred and twenty-three when he lands on the second and two hundred and sixty-four when he encounters the third. It does not care about theappearance, shape, or biochemical composition of the organisms that occupy a planet. Nor does it matter to them whether they are peaceful or warlike, technologically advanced or completely ignorant. Each time, dominated by a blind and boundless love, he expands his consciousness into the alien biosphere and welcomes it into his embrace. He does this for more than two hundred years. For a thousand. For a million years, until he loses count and abandons himself to infinite time. Many things have changed. Eterna, which is a grain of sand in a boundless desert, has reached its golden age. Everywhere, life, assisted by the Master of Expression, has flourished luxuriantly. New alliances and new hybrid species have begun to cross the event horizon. What matters most, however, is that no one knows that it was also Swedenborg's merit, and that his is the hand that guides the spirit through infinite space and time.
The hidden god has known and learned more than any other living being. It has developed new forms of coexistence which, when it cannot be physical or ecosystemic, is spiritual but no less concrete than the others. He reached the extreme limits of the universe and looked beyond it, where the abyss opens up.
For this reason, he cannot help but marvel at the moment in which, at any moment of his evolution, he realizes, for the first time, that he has limited himself to scrutinizing and following and encouraging everything, as one does with those who love oneself. For real. What he has never done, however, is trying to change them, to intervene on them. As only a god can do.
Chapter 10
The rhythm of creation does not follow that of the heart. It unfolds irregularly, sometimes more intense, sometimes less. It stops, then starts again a moment later. It remains exhausted, silent and immobile, for millions of years and, just when it seems to have been turned off forever, it begins to pulsate unstoppably again.
The rhythm of creation spreads in waves from a center that is, at the same time, everywhere and nowhere in particular. Analysis, disassembly, reconfiguration: step by
step, not in a systematic, regular way but in a patchy way. Swedenborg's touch is like an artist's brush that starts from scraps of color to reach an integral vision. It is the first time that he uses his powers not only to manifest something that is inside him, but to make that same manifestation become reality.
Expression permeates through time and space to turn them inside out like a glove. It proceeds from effects to causes, altering the past starting from the present. It shapes events to unfold in a certain way, rather than another. It ensures that the future represents not an unknown but a confirmation.
Swedenborg's psychic sculpture is the efficient cause. His love is the pure act. A necessary metaphysics, which he does not question in the same way that, once upon a time, he had never questioned why he breathed or ate. And, in a certain sense, that's how it is. The universe changes because Swedenborg is changing: he is the first to undergo the change which he himself initiated.
In the regenerated universe every element dances in harmony with the others. There is no abuse or aggression.
No border separates one individual from another.
God is a child playing dice,basking in the unwavering flow of His own, free expression.
To infinity.
Everything is Eternal.
