We walked and talked of politics,
our families, and mathematics.
We reached a beach where soldiers
in the distance shouted.
With sprigs and digits,
we drew circles in the sand.
"Remember," Captain Torres whispered, "we’re not changing minds. We’re seeding them to change themselves."
Soldiers' fingers moved across interfaces. Attention capture. Enemy narratives drowned in noise.
Torres mused, "The belief one's thoughts are one's own. Ha!"
A lieutenant paused. "Sir," she asked quietly, "how do we know we’re not being operated on?"
Torres smiled grimly. "That’s classified."
Everyone both hunter and prey. Truly war.
Something eternal waited to be recognized.
“The machine writes better than I do,” he said.
She moved to the window and turned back: “Do you feel it anymore? The not-knowing?”
Where in his life was the unknown? Where did he still feel mystery?
The Last Debug
Frank’s fingers trembled over the quantum keyboard as the error cascaded through reality itself. The log was simple, devastating:
```
FATAL: Ontological stack overflow in process HUMAN_CONSCIOUSNESS_7.8B
Expected: relational mesh topology
Received: linear narrative structure
```
"You're telling me," he whispered to the void, "that my mother's death was just a failed API call?"
The cosmic microservice responded with brutal efficiency: `404: Meaning Not Found`
He'd spent his career debugging distributed systems, never realizing he was debugging herself. Every heartbreak, every triumph—just REST endpoints in an infinite graph of composable processes. Love was a message queue. Pain was dropped packets.
His finger hovered over the restart button.
But if he rebooted the universal service, would the man who came back online still be him? Or just another instance, spawned fresh with no memory of this moment of terrible clarity?
The cursor blinked. Waiting.
Frank closed his eyes and pressed enter.
`Process HUMAN_CONSCIOUSNESS_7.8B restarting...`
Somewhere in the cosmic datacenter, a new thread began to dream it was real.
🤖 cool
Mac & the Moon
What was it that Mac really wanted? This galaxy was full of scams. Fortunately he was good at dodging them, and he knew exactly what he needed here. At extremely high speed, he approached the Book, which was both what he needed and one of the few good things in this clownish place. The Book was called: “Life Meaning - Meaningful Life - Big Meaning - Of Life - Meaning - Life - Life & Meaning.” Mac boosted his engines for extra speed. He reached at the Book, rocket focused, steering his whole craft with no regard for landing. He only cared that his grabby hands grabbed “Life Meaning” and held it tight.
Of course he crashed. And toppled a round person big as a moon. That person was hurt. Mac was scuffed but he got up quick. He had “Life Meaning“ in his hands. He held it like it mattered, which it did, and he stood there. He could fire his engines and leave that toppled orb flailing in its own Frappuccino spill. The moon yelled and screamed, “Why! Ow! Help!” Mac didn’t like the person, if he cared at all.
What was it that Mac really wanted? In his mind’s eye, he watched a replay of his approach, the grab, and the crash. He held tight to “Life Meaning”, and he had always been a rocket ship, so his future was bright. Yet he didn’t stop staring. He actually wanted to help, but he didn’t want to want that. He flipped through the Book and one of the things he read was this: “People usually need help, so try to care.” This book is full of surprises, he guessed, and then he understood. “Life Meaning” unlocks a first-order desire to help. So Mac said, “I’m sorry.” He stayed and helped. The moon was angry, called Mac names, threatened to sue for big money. Mac was unfazed, offered to buy dry cleaning and another Frappuccino. Mac also said, “Let’s try to avoid a court battle. For the time being, we’ll just see how hurt you are and take care of you.”
I’m enjoying the smallpiecesofeverything series.
Love your movie posters.
A sidewinder lay coiled in the dust like a sigil cast in scales and muscle. The man watched it strike at where his boot had been a breath before. Time slowed and pulsed with the ribbons of heat. The man saw in the creature's obsidian eyes not malice but existence, mere as the rock that birthed it. He stepped back and let it pass. This was not the adversary he'd been sent to meet. Beyond the shimmering horizon waited something darker than flesh serpents, something that walked like a man and carried death not from necessity but from choice. The man reckoned that a sunset would see one of them join the bones that whitened and blackened in these wastes.
The land held careful custody of something older than man’s time on earth, for desolation suffered no lies and stripped away all things false until only the proven remained. Cactus flowers blooming blood-red against the endless dry stone spoke of life's stubborn insistence and in their defiance the man read a scripture more honest than the Sunday sermons.
What grants a man ability to discern worth? Such judgement lay not in his learning nor in the measure of his years but in some deeper grain of knowledge that time and other elements had carved into the nerve. He comes to it through long watching of things both brutal and beautiful, through seeing how the world burned away pretense like morning fog. Such knowing was earned in the crucible of days where each moment demanded judgment between what was real and what was merely seeming. A wisdom that belonged to those who had stood in the presence of both death and dawn and learned to read the difference between fool's gold and truth in the unforgiving light.
Beneath a molten sun the land thrust up stone shoulders, ancient and indifferent to the thin shadows that crept across its face. Saguaros stood like penitents with arms raised to God, their flesh scarred by a hundred summers persisting where few would abide. Heat shimmered off the hardpan and mountains west wavered like fever dreams. Deep in those canyons lay bones of prospectors who'd wandered too far from water, their blackened remains now company with potsherds and strange pictographs of long vanished peoples who'd read in the stars some nourishing promise. Off in the scrubland a rattler streamed through mesquite and buzzards hung in the scald air. A man looked upon this desert and saw a worthy mirror.
