In The End...

It’s breath-taking up here this evening, on top of the tallest peak in the Himalayan range. The view puts me in a good mood and I’m caught between feeling relaxed before my big job tomorrow and a little sad over the consequences it would bring about, not that there will be any survivors to mourn losses. My target is hardly significant in the bigger picture. Still, I can’t help but feel sympathetic towards the dynamic system it has proved to be. For something that sprung literally out of an explosion from an experiment gone wrong, the planet of Earth has made quite a loud statement on life as they know it here.

I was supposed to send the planet packing two years ago by their calendar. I arrived promptly on the scene, excited about the gig, ready to make a grand entrance and catch them off guard. So imagine my surprise when I found out they’d been expecting me. Apparently some earlier race of humans called Mayans (I confused them with muffins initially) had gotten lucky with their math and accorded an accurate guess. Well that took the fun out of things so I decided to reverse psycho the surprises. I hung around, sight-seeing, waiting for the frenzy to cool down before I could try jumping them again. And that, my dear whoever is reading this, has made all the difference. I’m still going to wipe the planet out, except now, I have a whole new respect for them and my job becomes suddenly that much more significant. Not that it matters, anyhow, perhaps because I’m just a gust of wind, although it is not all that I can be. I pull some clouds around the peak I’m perching on and create a wallpaper-worthy scene for those tourists at the viewing bridge to capture in their cheap DSLRs. They won’t get a chance to put the pictures up on Facebook and boast around uselessly but I thought I’d give them the satisfaction of hope anyway. It’s one of the aspects of this human race that fascinate me.

A gazillion years since what they call the big-bang, as if it happened next door on the Brooklyn Bridge on fourth of July, humans have emerged as the most interesting species in this power-play between equilibrium and entropy. They are notorious fiddlers, unpredictable in their ability to comprehend their existence and extraordinarily stupid to believe in manipulating their advantages. Two days into my visit, I was in awe at this species that had risen so fast up the food chain and was rapidly destroying everything else. It was only a matter of time before they pressed the red button on themselves. I’d have loved to let them get to it, but this experiment has reached its end, take it from me, the results don’t mean squat. Try telling them that and they’ll raise hell. Oh! That is one of their best product of imagination, a theory that suggests ‘someone’ sat down and created their entire surrounding splendour from scratch. They are very sure where they came from and I’ve been tempted on countless occasions to tell them they sprouted from space junk that happened to carry a piece of flotsam from beyond their comprehension range. Damn the DNA black-box that travelled with the cosmic lint. That strip of tales dates back to a different kind of life that used to exist on a different kind of plane in a completely unrelated part of the universe. Coincidence can get its freak on sometimes.

Before I arrived here, if someone had told me carbon atoms had actually managed to put together something phenomenal on this one planet the organic forms called Earth, I would’ve radiated purple beams of sound (yes, sound has colour too. If you don’t know what sound is or what colour is, I can’t help you. Wait, how can you even read this? Don’t ask me what reading is, now); I was then a pulsing star on a galaxy, that in earth distance is really far away, the purple beams equivalent to laughter.

Carbon is by far the least useful material in the universe. It is like the insecure nerd in any high school class, who thinks he’s got a fantastic future ahead but doesn’t. But on Earth, carbon’s wet dreams seemed to have come true. I arrived on Earth as a beam of light in the Northern Hemisphere and I spent a few days laughing over carbon’s triumph. If you follow The Antarctic Explorer, which is a newspaper, you’d find a mention regarding mysterious flashes of light over the horizon, on a particularly icy day, two years ago, sometime in December. That was me. One of the research scientists looking at me through his telescope even thought I might be Santa Claus!

It is actually incredible in a focused way what mass, energy and probability have managed to achieve on this planet. I doubt anyone could’ve predicted universal equilibrium would’ve held out for so long here. The effects must’ve been pronounced in a system as closed as on the Earth. These earthlings have been lucky not to have crossed paths with the Lone Electron that does freelance annihilation of all items suspended in the universal vacuum. It saps the energy right out of you, I tell you. My encounter with it left me a floating mass of protons which if you understand what it’s like, you’ll know can be quite depressing. In earth terms this would be once upon a time, extremely far away.

If there is one thing the denizens of the blue-green blob don’t need coaching on, its destruction. Yet, for the amount of destruction they practice they seem to completely reject the idea of pointlessness. For a species that begins and ends everyday killing at least a thousand members of the bacterial progeny by mounting an attack of fluoride, humans display a stunning degree of short-sightedness when it comes to the circle of life. I wonder if it’s the carbon talking but there just seem to be so many shades of grey when it comes to anabolism and catabolism as viewed from the perspective of individual life forms. The other day I was radiating as heat from the body of this philosopher in a bar in Australia and he made this observation via me to a woman next to him. I thought it was quite profound given her grasp of universal grindings, but she broke into a fit of giggles I couldn’t understand why. Perhaps grey isn’t her favourite colour.

The species single-handedly manipulates all available elements towards practicing the survival of the fittest, yet when it comes to a simple restoration of balance by what they refer to as the order of nature; it leaves them stunned and angry, leading to more rampages. As above, so below they claim; the first time I encountered this statement, uttered by a rickety old farmer, I was terribly impressed with the humans for they had finally cracked the code to the laws of the universe. Then I learnt this was only a sentiment, one pooh-poohed en masse because, get this, ‘It’s so simple and life is so complex so this can’t be true.’  I admit I wanted to give them a preview of their impending end, right then.

All this balderdash and sometimes intelligent observations by accident, are born out of this entity called the brain that is a loosely designed control centre, a puppeteer to choreograph the various sections that come together to be branded as an individual species. Now there is a stellar example of ‘As above so below’ if there was one. If only these pseudo-geniuses had taken control of their brains and dictated a more harmonious existence below. Ah the amount of hogwash acetylcholine can cook up! (I should probably mention here that if such a situation had come about, well equilibrium would’ve reached its tipping point much sooner and entropy would’ve tipped it back without ado.)

It would just be much simpler if the unicellular forms never got together to form the multi-cellular forms and it still beats me how the multi-cellular forms function together as a single being. Wouldn’t it just be fantastic if each of the cells in an animal, say a human, were to exist independently as they are very much capable of doing? Imagine if in this planet’s history, cells went their way just before neural signals reached critical mass.

 ‘The nation wants an answer…’ <disintegrate>

‘My love for you spans univer…’ <disintegrate>

‘Hail Hitl…’ <disintegrate>

‘The atomic bomb…neat idea…’ <disintegrate>

‘I’ll call it Ulysses…’ <disintegrate>

‘We are Spartans…’ <disintegrate>

‘Grunty grumbly grump (Cavemen language translated as: Round, not square.)...’ <disintegrate>

Amoebae would’ve ruled the earth and I probably wouldn’t have had to strip the planet away like I’m about to. I was once a contractile vacuole inside an amoeba and what a brilliant self-sufficient system, I must say! They’ve got no brains, but all the wisdom in the universe. Amoebae don’t get emotional over disintegrating into recyclable compounds in turns, Nitrogen today, ammonia tomorrow. Sadly they occupy the lowest place in the hierarchy of things that matter, unarguably created by humans and not contested, well because amoebae can’t talk.

The inverse is true, humans can’t understand amoeba-ish, but the arrogant multi-cellular beings have a simple rule of thumb – whatever is beneath their level does not deserve a voice and anything above them, unknown or as yet indecipherable deserves to be feared and worshipped. That’s first class bullshit if I’ve heard some. They look up at the air above them, find it colourful and packed glittery when the sun goes down, and they romanticize it as it pleases them. It’s only a matter of time before they rise above, fly farther away and find one level after the other to place beneath their feet to rule or crush. The Lone Electron might be too late for them then. It is good that I am sure about getting this job done right away. (Bullshit incidentally is a terrific source of minerals and even a slew of bacteria. I’d go so far as to call it an ecosystem on its own. Look it up later. Or ask the Profligate Plutonium on Cyrus XVI. That one goes around a lot.)

I’ve made random trips today, all over the world. I watched a beauty pageant, amplifying the sound of applause when a thin frail woman was chosen as the winner, I ran between two villages on an electric line, vibrating under the feet of a cute pigeon ready to poop, bounced off a dolphin getting hunted by a bunch of humans off the North American coast, swirled around Vesuvius when I got bored, created some waves off the Srilankan coast to impress a flock of birds, turned infra-red maps on and off from my vantage point as part of a mosquito’s compound eye in South Africa and roamed about other places before settling down in my current spot in the Himalayas.

The sun is setting, all sorts of puns intended. They still haven’t figured out the concept of time here, but I just watched Caesar bellow ‘The sun never sets on the Roman empire’ and offered ‘Bitch please’ with that funny meme expression. History sadly never recorded Caesar’s bafflement at being offered a futuristic expletive by an energy form he didn’t understand. It added to his shock while addressing Brutus with the famous question a week later according to his exclusive calendar. There’s a good chance Caesar’s carbons are contributing to global warming currently.

I fly down from the mountain and ride a lightning bud into a busy city. I pass by idle lazy life as it were; a parrot squawking at the pet cat, an exhausted lorry driver about to crash into a tree, a clandestine affair between two men behind an alley, a jasmine blossom opening its petals in a flower pot on a window sill in that same alley, a mile long traffic jam, acoustic disturbance outside a closed auditorium, a cloud of dancing CFC molecules from a passenger flight…

I zoom in on a dreamy city somewhere in South India, peek through the windows of an apartment; a couple cuddled on the sofa watching TV, another fighting next-door, a woman complaining into a phone, a girl at a desk writing. My present fancy for storytelling draws me to her. She is oblivious to me, oblivious to the street lamp outside her window flickering because I added a burst of energy to its dull glow. She seems to be having some difficulty stringing the words together. My intrigue piques and I become a whoosh of draft and enter her room. The curtains register a protest and the girl shivers.

There is no point. In the larger scheme of things we don’t matter. Life has no meaning. Shift your perspective to the 10^th floor of a building and everything below becomes a mere fuzz of moving existence. Shift it to the 15^thand you become part of the fuzz to the perspective above.

My…my, what have we here? Her words seem to echo with mine and I’m surprised at her vehemence to stick to the theory. For a moment I’m smitten with the typical human tendency of doubt and wonder if some trouble has led her to this line of contemplation that might turn out to be quite right. Heartbreak, perhaps? Well, I shall be saving her the trouble of getting through it, moving on.

It is time. I have to go out and execute my contract; reinforce the neither created nor destroyed part of the universal clause that binds the girl and me and everything in between. There won’t be an earth for the sun to show up in the east of, when I am done. This is it. Chaos. The apocalypse if you will.

Now where is that butterfly whose feathers I’ve got to ruffle?