#finishthestory Week 37: The End of the Beginning

This week’s #finishthestory prompt is brought to you by @f3nix

Here's the contest link, if you're interested.

This one has haunted me. I've felt compelled to write on it, but I’ve been afraid to do so. Here’s my best attempt at the ineffable.

"Lucid Dream" by @f3nix

There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.

There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.

Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.

There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.

It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.

A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.
The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.

He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.

The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.

"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"

Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:

"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep".

A deafening, golden silence.

As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.

“The End of the Beginning”
by @Michaias

Ethan’s thoughts reeled, tracing the shape of the sound of an eternal Om. As a child, Ethan had been told that the Good Book says man was made from dust. But clarity came as Ethan faced final assimilation with Yoh’s conscience. His thoughts settled on the words of the evangelist:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Further along still, the Johannine believing community insisted:

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life--

All of it: so much dust.

Like children plucking at the master’s strings, believing themselves composers. To them, to us, the Creator speaks, and it doesn’t matter if creation listens because now creation is, even in spite of itself.

But the Creator doesn’t speak; it sleeps, perchance to dream. Being: a happy accident of attempted voluntary deicide.

Lost in the swirl of all sensual metaphor, as his frontal lobe disintegrated, Ethan finally understood the limitations of Mind and the flesh that inhabits it.

Yoh’s conscience, the warm embrace--it welcomed him. Ethan had escaped the linearity of Time, the shackles of an endless string of causality and its necessary imposition of human, all too human, morality.

Ethan no longer needed the Word to be with God, to be of God.

Words failed him. The void, infinitude, the ineffable, awaited, waiting, aware. He was now and ever had been, forever, always already not yet, nevermore, never been.

He had come here for one purpose: to save existence as everyone understood it. He knew it was a suicide mission, and the double entendre had not been lost on him from the start. He was to lull Yoh’s conscience back to sleep, back to that suicidal slumber that wouldn’t so overwhelm the very Being all its dreamed up beings. In fact, that would save all of dreamed up Being.

Yoh’s consience--so-called for lack of a better word, just another human metaphor for the ineffable--was incompatible with the continued existence of existence, of Being itself. So his mission was clear: the termination of the consciousness of Yoh’s conscience. So that Being might continue, that Time might continue, that causality and morality might continue. That metaphors might continue.

But here, now, in and outside of this every moment of all Time, as the lipids of his brain dissolved, as his neurons fired their final impulses across now-infinite synapses, the message sent, never received, never completed. His final thoughts catapulted into the abyss.

Ethan closed his eyes (metaphorically; his face had long since assimilated into Yoh’s conscience). This time, Yoh’s conscience wouldn’t have to speak, and humanity wouldn’t want for any more understanding or metaphors or apophatic theologies. Ethan was happy for the chance to sleep, perchance to dream. It was Yoh’s turn in the universe or in whatever came after.