102 - The Last of the Apples
Transmission Log - Orestes
Author: Green
Auto generating preface...
A transmission log by GREEN. He thinks the messages aren't reaching anyone. He philosophizes about the concept of life. He complains about his fellow human-inhabitants at the Orestes.
Thank you for sending the mining equipment, I'll distribute it to the crew when the time seems fitting, as per your recommendation.
END-OF-PREFACE
You still haven’t sent the mining equipment, or anything for that matter. Lending credence to my theory that these messages aren’t reaching anyone.
I still, for some reason, feel the desire to update you. There are things to tell. Events that happen. Even in this remote corner of the universe, populated only by three people and a bunch of strange, inert, red crystals, things happen.
If reminds me of something a philosopher once said, when talking about ’life’ (Life, after all, and the inexplicable human desire to find more of it, is why we’re here).
We usually think of things beginning when life appears. That is, before life, there are no real ’events’. Life is activity, motion, desire, growth. In absence of life, there are just rocks planets, stars, etc. We are fascinated about the question of the beginning of life, that strange moment when one cell first divides into two.
But, the philosopher said, there is no life without difference and before what we call ’life’ appeared there was difference. The universe is full of differences. Or, to be more exact, the universe made up of of processes, and processes are just a series of differentiations.
We think of life as continuous, as having a history (genealogy), a clear beginning and end. But this sense of life, the one that we cling to so dearly, the reason we voyage out into the void in search of it, this sense of life is a construct. A story we tell ourselves to try to make sense of the constant differentiation and change. Underneath it all is the force of pure difference; the relation between this molecule and another, between a 1 and a 0, between the geology of this ‘dead’ rock floating in space and ’that’ one. So, if you’re tracking a process of differentiation across the universe, ’events’ are happening all the time.
Not with these crystals though. There really is nothing going on with them, in any sense.
All that’s been happening are the overly-familiar kinds of ’events’. PINK ate the last of the apples. I couldn’t believe it. She ate it right in front of me, like it was a perverse act of sadism. I don’t get her sometimes. She is usually so calm and rational.
NAVY is sulking or has taken a vow of silence or something and has become as unresponsive as the crystals. I ended up screaming my head off at him the other night. I feel bad about it now. These kinds of ’events’ tire me. I wish sometimes I could be less ‘me’, less ‘alive’, and just be a pebble on the beach or something. Being slowly eroded by a wave.
Complied by the Werner H. Young Terminal Emulator
Info: Simple A.I., designed on-site for executing systems maintenance tasks and exchanging messages between the Orestes outpost and the Arsinoe.
Built by Werner Young (2113-2151).
Names of persons have been masked to protect their identity.