( 005 ) anonymous text; forward dated to tomorrow evening.

[romanticism]

We're so terribly pathetic, aren't we? All the time that some of us have spent here, and all we can do is form our sad little allegiances, hoping that our perceived solidarity will save us from some invisible monster - but not the one you might be thinking of.

The monster in question is our own painful insignificance.

What are we upon this ship? We are nothing. We are a speck amongst a cluster of stars and universes so far flung from our own, with nothing to our names but our few possessions and the memory of what we might have been in our own worlds. We are a joke to existence, plucked from our homes to be deposited in a mire of stupidity and games and misfortune, and someone is watching over us, laughing. Look at these creatures. Did they ever think they had any purpose except to be a toy for some higher power? Months upon months and we find no solutions, no answers to our questions, just death and danger, and the allure of survival isn't much when survival means returning to this cycle of nothingness over and over.

You say, perhaps we return to our friends, our loved ones. A valid point, I suppose - but not really. The relationships we make here are worthless. They have no means to last, for eventually we shall all die, or we shall be taken from here, replaced by other versions of ourselves we never could have dreamed of. One day perhaps we shall all wake in our own beds and this won't even be a forgotten dream, it will be wiped from us, clean. Bonds made from experiences of chaos and turmoil will dissolve like sugar in water.

Insignificance. That is all we wish to alleviate by making friends, people who we keep at arms length - we all talk about secrets here, but how often do we share our own? I can't imagine us as an honest collective; not for a moment. We are all full of little things that shame us, or would put us in less than favourable positions, if everyone else knew, but we like to maintain a pretence of clarity, or at least a desire for it. I wonder how many of us have taken a life? How many of us have advantages over others in unnatural ways? How many of us talk about it?

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
We have more.

Tell me, does anyone here pray to a god, or perhaps gods? Do you speak to them in times of fear, hoping that they will send you a blessing? Do you think they can hear you? Universes and worlds away, you have been forgotten. Abandoned. Your gods, your existence, they don't care or matter. What empty, pointless entities they are, sitting on pedestals we make for them when we never even knew the vast, godless spaces out there that existed. Thou has made me, and shall Thy work decay? No, thou shalt not, for I am no longer under your jurisdiction, like a criminal dancing on the border and making faces at authorities that can only wade through bureaucratic idiocy in order to have any power over me once again.

When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For we have more.

( ooc: particularly skilled hackers should be able to trace this post back to oxford, except that cambridge will be blocking attempts to do so as soon as he figures out the post is oxford's.

the verse included here is from a hymn to god the father by john donne, while the line embedded in the text is from john donne's first holy sonnet.)

Comments

[cargojet]

I always do that just in case the anonymous texter slips up and gives me a picture of their face. Just the chance of one slip like that is worth a little bit of discomfort now and again.

Better than just ceasing to exist, sure. But see, if I do cease to exist, or go home without my memories or whatever then what the hell, right? Not like I can be mad with something I don't know about when it happens.

It's like. You're deciding who gets to go first at a debate. You flip a coin to decide who goes first. Heads it's you, tails it's them. You can't know once it lands on heads how things would have gone if it landed on tails. Not much point wasting your time thinking about it, since all that matters is that it did land on heads and you've gotta get on with it. Anything else is pointless.

[romanticism]

Have a little more faith in the anonymous. We're not all that daft.

It may not affect you, but it will affect those you leave behind. Does that not concern you? Every connection you make here will likely hurt someone in the end, in circumstances that have a chance of being much shorter than an average lifetime that we might live otherwise.

You're a politician, aren't you? Or at least, you were.

[cargojet]

I hold out that hope.

Do you really think that having an affect on people is something I haven't thought about? As you say, I'm a politician. I affect people's lives for better or for worse without them even knowing about it. For only as long as I'm in office.

And does a short lifespan mean that I can achieve less within it? Some of the greatest men in the world die young.

[romanticism]

And if you aren't in office, you are replaced, with someone else who has a way with rhetoric under their belt too, some just as charismatic, letting creative little metaphors roll off their tongues the same way that you do. The way in which you affect them isn't exactly unique, don't you think? Unless you see yourself as a particularly innovative politician.

Perfectly true, but then these men - and women - have had a world in which to succeed, not the labyrinths of a spaceship.

[cargojet]

I'm gonna be president some day, that's a future that I've known about for years, and even if senators come and go, presidents are remembered, their names recited years after their deaths, their flaws and their victories and their speeches studied over.

So yes, I know I'm not going to disappear. Even if I'm trapped on this ship now, I got a life to go back to. Prophecy. It's a powerful thing.