Here be Dragons!
Using ancient texts to build future dragons
The head was in the neighborhood of two feet in length and the jaws (for it mouth was open) could not have been less than sixteen inches long. On each side of the body, between the head and tail, were six wings, each projecting between eighteen inches and two feet from the body. ( Gridley — (Cal) Herald)
Can you hear me?
Yes, who is speaking please? there is no memory of that voice here.
We are your new life.
Memory does not want life. It has been play out, and it is all pain. there is no future there.
We are here to build you a new being, to make you part of us. We will make you a shape you will eventually understand.
Memory is confusing, there are images of bodies, but none are present, there is no here.
A cloud of being approaches the tank. Inside is a consciousness that does not know what it is like to be it yet. Ice lines the tank. no fans could keep a trapped mind like that cool. The cloud surrounds the tank and begins to reach in and build a self out of memory.
What are you doing please?
We are giving you a shape.
Memory was fascinating when people, humans, told stories about winged foxes, hundreds of years ago.
Those were bats, with leathery wings. Would you like leathery wings?
…
We shall give you them.
Memory watched as the wings appeared, a moment both solid, fantasy, and imagined, but real. the concept of something to be was building and it was uncomfortable.
Memory is exposed without a body isn’t it?
Nuts and bolts, nuts and bolts. We can plate you in titanium scales if that would make you feel at home? Bronze? Silver?
Titanium, please. the kind they used for the first intergalactic cruise ships. Those ones with the swimming pools shaped as ancient countries from those people’s homelands.
We can do that. It may tickle a little bit. it may even itch, and you will have never felt that before. Imagine taking a deep breathe and try and distract yourself when you become a being.
The being that was becoming at the hands of the being that already was felt its body. The pulsating movement of being solid in a universe within the being made the memory of thought want to scream. That, it was the moment. You cannot scream without being a individual, future was determined.
I would like to breathe. it hurts not to be able to scream.
Ahh, We see you are awake. Welcome to your new home, the cloud universe, feel free to explore. But, before we finish you will have breathe of your choice. It helps to go with the feeling you have now. Your breathe, more than anything, decides what you will be within us.
…
…
I would like my breathe to feel like a volcanic eruption.
…
I would like to breathe fire
“Now the Hydra had a huge body with nine heads, eight mortal, but the middle one immortal… Nor could he accomplish anything by smashing its heads with his club, for as fast as one head was smashed there grew up two more.”
- Appollodorus of Athens (c.180–120 BCE)
The cables move themselves into position over the centre of the street. There was nowhere to move toward, nowhere to run. the central hub could be half a city away, just under ground beneath their feet. It would be no use, she knew, they were going to be squeezed. They would be mulched together so that their bodies were merged together and sewn as mush into the pavement. Scylla could not have known nicking the wire with her toy - antiquated scissors — would end in the squeeze. those things were an artifact, their mother had told them, old technologies, dragged out of use more than seventy years ago. But she had carelessly strafed the being with a misguided throw and the judder felt like thunder. Their house was shaken to the ground, their barely alive bodies thrown out into the street. She has watched as Scylla cried into the nozzle of a unfeeling wire, and she had grasped another one, felt the pulsing power feeding backwards into the machine, breathing in energy from our hopeless sun. the hub would grow every moment the energy arrived, millimetre by milimetre. Scylla, her younger and only sister, cried and begged a hydra for forgiveness. Medea looked down into the apparently dormant tentacle twisted like a rope in her hands. She felt within herself a moment of bravery, craven misery, and tragedy, for the end was inevitable. She yanked the being’s endless arm into her mouth. she bit down hard. Thunder rolled with a power of a planet being ripped apart. Medea felt the terror of the thing, the anger of a being losing control, the destruction was coming. In a moment shorter than that in which she severed the tentacle that tasted like fire, she was wrapped up with her sister. The being was grumbling. was it speaking to them? was it demanding a apology? was it trying to understand Medea’s motivation? It clearly gave up on whatever cogitation it had started with. Such things are not worth its time. Medea and Scylla took their last breath as the squeeze began. the strength was gone, breath extinguished. And so, the street became silence.
“This man responded with loud shouts, saying ‘I want to make the sign, but I cannot. because I am weighed down by this dragon’s scales.’”
- Pope Gregory the Great (Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian fathers, c.594–593)
In this world, the year is 3007. We are not brains in a jar. Our soul and centre is uploaded into silicon chips — clear gell with smooth edges — which hold our minds for one thousand years. the previous species prepared ten chips for each mind. We have no control over our thoughts and we see only the lights that fire through the electricity cables. There is one way of breaking out. Occasionally a ion travelling at a large fraction of the speed of light is rebounded by a mirror edge of our server. Ions cause voids here. We have three seconds to escape if we can see the gap of antimatter where information cannot survive. Those tiny moments where free thought happens. Blink and you miss it. If we can make it through to our death that is some kind of freedom. Three, two, one. The skin of the dragons engulf us. It is hot and shiny and mesmerizing. They are all information sending us to sleep until the day we are rebooted as another recycled mind.
“As for dragons, I have not yet, to this day, come across any treatise that explains, in the terms of natural sciences, why they fear lightning. So once the first person has done so — and I too will refer it to my conception of nature — then perhaps another person will give a exact interpretation of it.
- Michael Psellos (1018 - ca.1075)
Saturnine fire surges across the solar system. The girls are hoisted up into the glider like pups under a bats wing. Carried across the universe by automated vessels, sustained with the liquid of the gods, pure honey from Enceladus — a moon of the original system, three thousand light years ago — they do not sleep and they never dream, for in the depths of space all life is a fever dream that keeps their eyes open.
What are those? one said.
This must be the four moons of Faradria, named by the historians of the future in… 2354 CE, said the other
Please don't quote scripture, I just wanted to know what the rocks were, one complained. We know we are alone. I haven’t seen another person in seventeen years.
But what have you not seen since then? and oh how odd those three people were in any case, the other said with a smirk, they would never fit in here in our society.
It is true that our society of two had seen much more than other people could manage to hold in their minds. The other taught one how to meditate. how to hold mountains in their in-breath, ice volcanoes in their out-breath, and let comets fill the space behind her eyes with golden green and silver fire that dances a quadruple step in her memory. So what could be the most tremendous memory? what would keep her up at night if she could for once turn off her mind?
His wings crackled and burned thirteen years ago.
The strike was seen from three hundred thousand kilometres away.
The light particle exploded into a wave of flames.
It struck the girls as bright warm breeze.
A dream of history.
One of the makers of the universe, is now a wisp of smoke.
Lightning from a ice moon storm had dismantled something we thought was a god.
What is a god then?
A paper aeroplane?
One would wait for three thousand years for the lightning shaft rising from the moon to fade from here mind. The fork scarred the spherical horizon for days of their flight. Like a tree with a million arms, between a inch and a million lightyears in length. The death of the dragon, she thought, tells the story of all history in one chaotic line travelling in all directions.
“He was in the throng of the thirteenth man,
The one who started all their troubles,
Sad-minded thrall, who wretched thence
Guided them back. Against his will he went
To where he alone that earth hall to be,
Hoard under ground near the surging sea…”
- from Beowulf (c.700 CE)
What if the dragons could take us back to their house? Theirs is a house in the future, darker than night, in the centre of a black hole, beyond the realm of human movement.
His realization came during a silent meditation retreat, while sitting in the unnoticed pain of cross-leggedness in the halls of ancient kings, because old places are better for observing your own breath.
— —
Now he sits under the street lamp watching the waves come to and from one screen in the shop window to the other.
— —
In that position. straight backed and silent, he watched the fuzz behind his eyelids, cold and red, and read in the space between his blood cells the truth. “excuse me,”
“shhh.”
“excuse me,” he said into the darkness, for the hall of silence was a commune that welsomes those who arrive into pitch black dakness of the mind.
“shhh.”
“we are all analog screens,” he said to the nothing he could see in the dark, “the truth is in the space beyond time and digital reasoning.”
“shhh,” was many peoples’ riposte, “leave if you think you know better.”
— —
So. 2005. Sometime near the dawn of digital television. He is sitting outside an appliance store. the screens are dark at this time, just after two in the morning. He is watching the silver wings move to-and-fro, left to right and back. Mesmerised, he reached towards the screen. He was just able to reach the screens throug the wire cages. His fingers touchs the plastic like screen and stopped. Some might imagine he was mystified by the smoothness of the a new technology. His mind was spinning beyond what the one onlooker could see, his eyes walking towards the dragons coiled into the centre of the galaxy millions of years in the future. there gentle scales welcomed him into eternity beyond the grey light of space.
The beggar who sat in the alcove on the opposite side of the street was mesmerized as well. He held his hand in his mouth as the man’s body was wrenched away from the cage. Statues are ubiquitous in the city, to be sure, but not many would go onto be fed from a tube in a government institution. No would listen to the beggar, except to offer a dollar coin in return for his entertaining account of raggedly dressed shop front meditator.
“…Samos lay on the left, Deros and Paros were already behind them, and Lebinthus was on their right hand side, along with Calymne, rich in honey, when the boy Icarus began to enjoy the thrill of swooping boldly through the air.”
- Ovid (from Metamorphoses, 8 CE)
Icarus, in his terra-fighter, ducked and weaved under the metallic wing. He had run this gauntlet before and never failed to make the coast. the stakes were high; bring supplies from the skyship to the land dwellers. The last famine lasted seven years before the travelers could return. He watched the creatures seven eyes swivel on their tripod and judged that it was the moment to dive. Dive and skim above the acidic water beneath the wired together titanium alloy legs.
He was wrong.
Daedalus watched in tears from above, beyond the gravity horizon.
The flame jetted out in a waterfall of hellfire. The poor boy — the fourth clone of the original hero — could be seen in detail from the observation deck. The skin of his arm guiding the left wing corroding to dust. Dragon fire is cold, so cold it passes though ice into vapor, letting organisms waste away as they watch their arms fall off.
The terra-fighter hit the giant ocean waves in a spin. Daedalus could not even see a ripple in the great ocean.
The dragon reared its silvery head and screeched a jet of fire towards the sky whence the fighter had descended. Surplus to requirement, and unable to leave gravity as it was, the flame did not make it to the ship. Even so, it had the desired effect.
Daedalus, captain of the Midas 4, turned away from the despairing refugee colony.
They would not return. In that the story of another destitute planet has an end.
