A hairless ape in a cold-death universe

A hairless ape in a cold-death universe

A very short story about humanity's philosophical journey to the stars

Preface:

I had spent a full day-off studying up on the basics of quantum physics and its relationship to the theory of relativity, before realizing whatever space and time were, I needed food soon, and left my small college apartment. I went to the grocery store, with a story from the ideas I was working through, boiling in my mind. By the time I had walked with my cart back to my car, it had burst out in a fit of genius as a full story as I raced home and carried my bags of generic milk, chicken, and pasta upstairs as fast as I could. I began to type furiously with some guilt that I had started another story instead of working on my other thirteen writing projects. 

When I had finished, I knew something about this needed to be shared with others as it meant so much to me. I hope this story does you well as it helps you work out thoughts you have, about how the universe is, what we should do, and our identity amongst the stars. 

Chapter One

Outside the round rivet window, off in the distance, a star moved by slowly, while stars he was much closer to, seemed to zip by in greater speed as he remembered the trees in northern Vermont when he was a child. It was all about perspective, he thought, but he cynically gruffed at whose perspective that could be. 

He stretched his body up, against the zero-gravity machine as he tried to feel alive again after the last cryo-sleep being so long, and so deep. It was as if it was one rest not to be awakened from. He looked at the date and with his analytical mind knew half a moment after the glance, that many centuries had passed. There would be no home like the home he had as he thought of it, and people to care about, not that he could recall what that was like. 

He was angry they had put the clock in the ship. There was no reason to, as time was nothing more than our experience with it. Within that moment, in the fourth dimension were all things that ever were, or ever will be. There was only being, and time to stretch itself across, other than in our hubris. He thought on that much, our hubris. We seemed to be drawn to something we couldn’t know, and then when we have some small thought to cling to, reality seemed to rip it from us leaving us in the horror of the unknown. 

He thought back to a professor he had in his undergraduate work who was teaching him about the history of science as if it was progress, but all he could see it as was humanity becoming more dogmatic and didactic as we had more tools for which to destroy the world around us with little understanding of the repercussions. 

He looked around his ship, the metals, plastics, and synthesized materials, derived from the world he came from, a world never to have those scarce resources again, a world he would never see again. 

That wasn’t the only reason he hated the damned clock. It seemed to be counting up his sentence amongst the void as much as it was counting down, counting toward something, but not something to hope for, something to desire, but something that just like every advancement he and his people had come up with, it would raise the precedence, take us away from what we were, and destroy the world around. 

He reminded himself that this world that seemed so deeply contaminated in the chemical and physical as much as it was the social and philosophical. He recalled when he left, the deep feeling of the spirit of the age, a pride of being human, and a sense of curiosity and wonderment. In his case, distance did not help the heart grow fond, neither did time and he had more than enough of that, whatever it was. Rather, he began to see holes in the dreams and failings in the hopes of humanity. 

All the foolish games they play, all the words they say when they mean something else, all the things they pretend to care about so they can get what they want. And what do humans want? To survive, to survive in gluttony and excess. Now, when he thought back to that last speech made by the head space-ranger with all its pride and sense of honor, it was no more than posturing, and playing the game. 

Humans were never some rational and autonomous being that could see the world as it was. They were still what they had always been, hairless apes whose mind’s evolved in a dangerous positive feedback loop until they culminated into a beast that had grown so rational, it could despise its own existence. How was it life’s only goal was to perpetuate itself, but now man’s mind had gone so far as to no longer desire that. Sex became a synthesized act for the ape to feel the sense of procreation, but with no intention of offspring, or rearing them. Cut off on all sides from his grasslands and trees was this ape, but not by the lion or the buffalo, but by himself in his arrogance and hedonism. 

There was a small mirror for shaving across from him in the rocket, but he darted his eyes away from it to avoid a view of the beast. Whenever he did see the shape of the jaw, the sharp canines, and the brow he thought of it as nothing more than a chimpanzee that pampered itself under roofs, cut off from his world, the elements, and his striving to survive. 

Man had become no more than what he ever was, a wanter. Going from desire to desire as he filled them. This was all man ever was, but in civilizing himself, he lied to himself. He was no more than an ape whose mind had evolved further than it should to where it could perceive and be aware of itself and think on things outside of its existence and survival. Did this mind then turn to the deeper things of the universe, the burning question of being? No, most of these minds turned to stories, people, the sexual, and anything it could to not think those thoughts. 

He felt some pride that he was better in all this than them in his efforts, but it was little consolation as he found there were no answers to his questions and as climbing a sand dune, there was nothing to grasp, even when he felt it in his hands. 

As he had for every moment he was conscious for over the last many years, he felt the thrusting of the ground beneath him as the energy of quantum particles collided into one another as they shot him forward at an increasing speed that light could not catch up to on its best day. He thought back to the day the light from his sun was no longer visible from his telescope as the light he was receiving now from that area was older than the star. He thought to the particles in the accelerator with the amazement still that something smaller to him than he was to the rest of the universe was shooting him forward at speeds never before imagined. 

When the theory of the design came out, everyone was skeptical, but when it came to its design, everyone was in awe and hailed in the new age of man amongst the stars, those stars they always looked up to in the infancy of humanity with wonder. He knew better. They were just balls of light, raging hydrogen and Helium where he could see and heavier elements inside where he could not. His own body, the ship, all the rocks around him, forged in stars, those very stars we couldn’t stop looking up at, not knowing we were made of them. 

So the space-rangers were sent out, a title he used to feel honor in having. Anymore, it was just another set of vowels and consonants that people pretended had any meaning or value. Sent out to the edges of what could even be theorized, and for what? Humanity had this notion that their progress was inevitable, but like all carefully crafted lies developed in the social realm, he had long since doubted it. How can humanity say they go to the stars for answers, when they never answered the ones they had on the ground. Perhaps in their naivety, they thought there would be answers to those questions, but all he found were more questions. 

Those fools, those fools, did they think they could really find the answers to the questions that they have always had. Questions that don’t exist because of how the universe is, but from how confused this hairless ape was to be conscious. He thought back to those quantum particles. How much they mattered to him and to his life going, to keep the air breathable, and propelling him toward his goal, but long since he had given up on the mission but continued on in his boredom, and long since had he thought to switch off the air. 

The quantum particles seemed to matter to him such a great deal, despite how truly small they were. Outside of the rocket in flecks of dust were countless more quantum particles, but he paid no thought to them. What about all the particles that ever were or could be? All the way out on the edge of space, never to be considered or found important. Or, perhaps, something deeper, and more perceived. Humanity had such a fantasy with knowing and seeing, but if the hairless ape’s eye never carried the view of something to its primitive brain, things would no less exist in the world as they don’t in his mind. They may not have any relevance or meaning placed on them, but then again, could anything? 

Those fools, those damned fools. To have made God in their own image and to have thought themselves the center of this universe as if it had the mind to care where they were placed. And, when they find that they are no more than just the same pathetic hairless apes that they have always been, they double down on some new lie. 

For most of man’s time, he had made Gods and heavens to dream of rather than to be where he was, but they were always so conveniently outside of the view and grasp of the ape. He had now flown a distance that needed difficult math to even keep track of, and he came across no gates of pearl and castles of white stone and streets of gold in the clouds. Only clouds of basic gasses and dust. Still, was a man any better in the lie of the heavens than he was since the theories of the Copernican, Newtonian, Einstienian, and whatever half-replicable deceit they had now? 

To be wrong and for the Ape to have expended less energy and stayed in his grasslands seemed to make more sense than destroying his world and connection to it. The greatest sin seemed to be to have made this God in one’s own image, as if there was anything more sacred about us than any other creature that walked, swam, or flew. Now, the scientists in their classes mock those that believe in this God, but their God has become their people and the doctrine, their theories. 

He never flew past heaven in his travels as this heaven that never was, crashed down to earth and man made himself the angels and his rulers God. The ape had always put its own spirit in the rocks, rivers, and even the sky, but now he was doomed to see there was only the ape that was doing the anthropomorphizing. Still, he felt some hypocrisy in his judgements, no matter how accurate and true. Doomed to be alone to conserve supplies of synthetic food and air that didn’t smell of the forests the ape came from, he came on his voyage alone. 

Sleeping much at first, then distracting himself with all the films downloaded on the ship. His heart began to long for companionship as it couldn’t help but see a face in the stars, and a beauty as if it was something more than all it was. He tricked himself into thinking they had souls and they wished him well, or at least could perceive like him so he wouldn’t be so alone, so damned alone. If they could speak, they were silent and in his delusion to fill the ape’s need for a tribe, he became embittered until he broke down and made his way to that large red button that stared at him everyday as he screamed, working up the courage to slam his palm into it and pull the cursed breath from his ape lungs. He had long since moved past the madness that comes from isolation and had moved to a deep feeling of nothing mattering enough to live or die for. 

Chapter Two

He looked back out the window as he saw the stars. There they were, nothing more than what they were, and how little that was. He had moved past the regret of leaving and becoming a space-ranger, not because there was any good to it, but because neither good nor evil could be found outside of the Ape’s mind and there was only desire. In that, he had at least become more honest with himself as he quit hiding the desires of the ape as anything human or rational. He had even combatted the cycle of want the Ape goes on, but still some of the ape’s wants needed to be brought into fruition if he was going to perpetuate. 

What a curious thing, it was, to desire to keep being. The rocks outside that occasionally pelted the hull of the ship had no such desire, and yet they were. And when they broke up, they were, just in many pieces. Something in the ape made it want to stay together, to keep being, and to fight any threat at such horrendous consequence to others. He looked out the window as the same view met his eyes, though he had never been in this spot before. More stars, with galaxies off in the distance. As far as light could meet his eye, it just kept going. 

A few years back, as he saw that he was seeing the same thing he saw before, he ran the math and figured at his rate of acceleration, he should have long since come to the edge of the universe. Now, as he looked forward to where the ship was going, light was coming in as far as the eye could see and the telescope detect. This meant that the universe was infinitely more massive, and unimaginably older than humanity and its scientists thought. The hubris the Ape had to think it was born toward the center or toward the beginning of everything. 

He turned from the window to see the telecom against the far wall, smashed, from his tool box as it had flown into it from a sudden redirection in the ship's computer. Long since, he had tried to fix it, but he had failed. At first the irony of humanity not knowing what he was discovering and the crushing loneliness that was painful, but now, whatever he discovered would eventually be found to be no more than how things seemed from his perspective. Maybe it was for the best that the telecom was broken. 

It also broke him free from the Ape’s desire to be heard and seen. He saw it for what it was. The community the Ape makes to save himself from the cold or the carnivore lurking in the trees. Out here, while it was near absolute zero, there were no beasts to attack. The evolutionary adaptation of the social system was no more than a hindrance as his biological computer continued to run the program of looking for kinship, belonging, and her...

He winced up his face as, like he avoided the mirror, he tried to force her from his mind. With all the silence around, his mind took occasion to raise the frequency and the volume of the thoughts it seemed to care about. Out of all of them, it seemed to think in its evolutionary primacy that she was one he needed to think about. He placed his head in his hands as he rocked and clenched up the muscles in his face. 

Her thought, nothing more than the ape trying to feel connection to another ape it knows best. The feelings of romance, nothing more than a socially nuanced view of his sexual desire for her. Her beauty, nothing more than an Ape seeing his kind. If she were a cat, a horse, or a dog, she would not have this beauty to him. So he told himself and combatted her memory in his head. He felt shame to not be with her, as if some vital part of him was torn away as she was. 

“No! I promised her I would never leave as long as she was there!” He screamed, long since not caring for the seeming madness of speaking to himself. Still, he felt despair and dishonor at his actions. 

“She said it too! She said she would love me forever. If I lied, we both did. She gave up first!” He rocked back and forth as he tried to be anything more than the ape he was. 

“No, I didn’t give up. I did what I could. I loved her!” He screamed as the last breath was used to yell the last word as it picked up until he was hyperventilating. His brain ran the same program it had many times before in the cyclical hell he had grown used to, but familiarity is not always good. He stood up and walked toward that red button that always stared back at him tauntingly as he held his palms hovering over it ready to smack as he both tried to work up the courage to walk away, and to press it. 

He began to shake and sweat as he pushed out all the thoughts telling him what to do. Instead, he was left with only the emotions and feelings of the Ape he had grown so accustomed to ignoring. 

“You decide, you may be no more than a monkey, but at least you are real. Decide! Do something!” He yelled out as he stood there quivering over the button as rage flowed through his body. As he screamed out in his pain, he smacked his hand down toward the button with enough force to hurt himself as he closed his eyes. He sat there listening, to see what would happen, but the same as he had been doomed to feel, nothing did. He opened his eyes to see something in him, perhaps the ape, pulled his hand to the side just enough to hit the wall. His hand was hurt, but he felt some relief that something within him wanted to perpetuate still, even if it was just the ape he had evolved from, or maybe still was. 

He stepped back, still in shock and what almost happened, and all the nothingness that could have proceeded it. He stared back at that haunting red button with a sense of pride that he won this match. He felt some comfort to think that, him not pressing it was considered a win to him. He knew he was still in no better of a spot now, however, so he stumbled toward the cupboards, undid a latch, and opened them up before pulling out a small red box. Upon opening it, he was horrified to find out he was right in his memory, as only seven more pale blue pills looked back up at him. 

He reached down to his belt and grabbed his space-ranger knife he used for little else as he pushed his thumb against the one side of the pill as he pushed down on the other half with his knife frantically. Once it broke in half, he popped it into his mouth, swallowed without water, and stumbled away, leaving the cabinet open and the box just sitting there as he came to the rudimentary fold-down couch and crashed onto it. 

He sat back as time, whatever it was, slowed down. His breath slowed as well until he didn’t feel like he was outrunning himself. He still wouldn’t say he was at peace as all the drug did was chemically synthesize something that the ape in him perceived as the absence of a recent pain. He tried to now breath deliberately as now he had control of himself. He paid attention to his breath as his predicament, the predicament of all humans, slipped from his mind, if just for a chemically induced moment. 

The intense heat of burning anxiety had faded away, and he was now cool, cool to feel the gentle breeze coming in from the vent above the couch. He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was a  child and his brother and him would play in the backyard under the maple trees, and when he thought his parents wouldn’t notice, they slipped back into the forest behind their home. He always felt like he belonged in that forest, and now that he better knew what he was, it made more sense. 

They would pretend to be cowboys, robbers, soldiers, and his personal favorite, Space-rangers. They had seen the very first of them ever leave from the base on mars to the edges of their solar system. He recalled how the last message he got from Earth was that them and Mars had given up on diplomacy and had declared war. He pushed out such a terrible and daunting thought, for one so small, and so good. 

When they played as rangers, he would imagine himself as one someday in what he considered now a half baked idea he would probably take back. Still, he found it endearing. They would then take their toy laser guns into the woods after mom and dad were asleep, and they would watch the country sky between the maples as the stars came out. 

With cool air around him and crickets chirping below him, he felt something that he always wanted to feel, an emotion or experience since robbed from him. He felt, the sacred. Now, even then he was not too foolish as to look to the sky and see the religions made on the ground, but something within him could look into the deep unknown and still think that out there, there was something such that it could be hoped for. 

His brother and him would quit chatting about space facts as they just looked up and felt small, and yet they felt a feeling he no longer felt though he still felt insignificant. They felt that they belonged up there. The thought of belonging now seemed silly as it entailed how something should be, and there is nothing to tell you how things should be outside of the over-evolved ape he was. Maybe it was a lie to feel that way, but was it better to feel the beautiful wonder of that lie than to feel the brunt force of the truth? That was even with the ignorant assumption that he could ever know. 

He had seen more than any human had ever seen before, and yet, just like all of them, it was so little in the face of the unknown, and doomed to sift out of his grasp at the sand. 

With his eyes still closed, he felt himself back with his brother, back in that forest looking at the stars through the trees. He used to think they were beautiful trees, but he now knew they were nothing more than randomly complex biochemical reactions that culminated in a shape that was something preferred by himself as a biochemical reaction. This didn’t take the longing to smell the old forest, and dig the old pen knife his father gave him into the tree so he could taste the sweet sap until he felt sick.

 It began to dawn on him, just how wonderful his childhood seemed to be, or perhaps how dreadful his life now was in contrast. What made it more... Meaningful, mysterious, aesthetic? He considered on this more until he thought back to his undergraduate college degree when he was still trying to prove himself as a person and learning again, in that class about the history of academia and science. 

For centuries, the mystic and the faithful scoured their natural world in wonder and amazement to find through their synthesis and analysis, the edge of the corner of the curtain they could peel back and look behind to see their God. As prideful as it may have been, what an exciting time to be alive, to think you are a rational being, made by a perfect being for His ends. 

The empirical didn’t conclude in finding the corner of the curtain, but discovered there was no curtain, no one behind it, and we were no one special to consider this. In a few generations, it began to sink in that man had his soul stolen from him in his efforts to know the world, seeing himself as nothing more than mechanistic and perhaps even determined past free will. 

With heaven now fully crashed down to earth, man with no God turned to his neighbor with the same standard, and with their intents to bring a heavenly utopia to earth, brought violent polluting hells to its face. It seemed to be the truth, what man learned, and yet the illusion of meaning, no matter the stretch, was better than the nothing he had left. Not only did humanity realize they were no more than hairless apes in a skeptical and causal universe, but that the dream of ascending on high had sunk down to the depths. 

Their future was not one to be hoped for. If they somehow managed to not slaughter eachother or contaminate their land beyond repair, they would die in a heat-death as their beautiful sun went supernovae and incinerated everything that was ever known to live. The brightest of these hairless apes in their refusal to accept the fate of a universe that randomly popped them into existence and then soon out with no reason, made a plan to find our way deep into the stars, to save humanity. 

It was then assumed that we would evolve into some higher life form. But, even with all this effort, even with all the planning, fretting, and naive hope, the universe would expand and expand as it cooled and cooled until it finally was too cold to support a life-form made primarily of water. He thought the last humans would probably labor tirelessly to collect materials to heat themselves, until finally, the last light in all of existence flickers and goes out, and with it, the only beings that ever could know and perceive. 

He saw it as inevitable, impending, and absolute. It was outside of the possible for life to continue on. He felt the cool breeze from the vent as he shivered a little bit. At the very best, these hairless apes we are, would die in a monumental cold-death, and the universe would never have anyone to know it or perceive it ever again. The thought troubled him, but the surrender he gave it seemed to at minimum align him with the powers that be, as meaningless as they were. He used to feel scared about it, as if it was wrong and should not be that way, but there was no shouldness to it, only how it was. 

He wished so deeply he could escape back to an age, back to a place he could just be the ape he was, around other apes in the environment he was meant for. Even if he had some of the trappings of civilization like a home and a village, to be able to wonder again, anything would be worth it. The sacred was taken away, and something deep within him wanted it back, wanted to believe a lie of the divine, and then maybe, at least in his mind, it could combat the violent and bitter truth that everything was going to fade into cold darkness forever.

Humanity knew the day would come that the sun would explode in a fiery finale for the solar system we were so attached to. 

Chapter Three

It was clear that he could no longer cling to the divine for the sacredness he desired, nor to the moral and ethical for what he should do. Left with only what he saw around him in its plainness, he felt as isolated, alone, and empty as he ever had. Should he continue to focus on and accentuate the truth if it leads him to such pains, or is it then right for him to start to believe the lies that comforted a mind too aware for the universe it instantiated in. 

As he was no more than an overly analytical ape, would it be within his purpose and design of randomness to believe? If there was nothing rather rational and godlike in him, was there anything that necessitated him to keep ascending toward understanding when there was no end in sight, and along the way he seemed to lose something with himself? 

He stood up and walked toward the same small round riveted window he had seen most all of the sights he had that were more than ten feet from him. He let go of the rest of humanity in his mind, not because he did not care for them, but their proximity and future was such, that they were nothing more than what he thought of them and as he knew, thoughts of the world outside of you are keen to be wrong. 

He turned his mind to the phenomenon of his own life and plight, a problem all the more but one much smaller than the human race. He looked at more stars like he had seen so many times before raced past as he thought of his life, his small rocket space, his tasteless meals, his research, and all the other monotonous things he did to stay alive. 

He found it strange how he never thought to give up on his research when he was the only one who would ever know what he now knew. He didn’t even give up, even in all his doubt for the future and the nature of truth and knowledge. Something in him, something about the ape drove him on. No thought of his own demise as he is propelled through space at break-neck speeds, or thought of the universe coming to its cold, dark finale made any difference in his learning. 

Was there something special about humans that made them do this? Was there anything special about him? No, of course not. The fact that he is amongst the stars shows his kind are the kind such that they just learn and adapt, and the reason they are like that is they just happen to be by the randomness of the universe that had enough worlds that there were some beings that could come out of the primordial soup to wonder what they were. 

As he always did, he attacked every idea he had with his doubt as his mind had allowed it to run rampant in his isolated madness, but this time, he was aware he was doing it. Now, he was aware of his thoughts. Not only could he tell that he was doubting, but he could now wonder if he should. 

There he was thinking with that word “should” again, but doubt is a double edged sword. He wielded it so often and for so long in all his wallowings, but he was now beginning to doubt that he had used it correctly. He had doubted that humanity could ever truly know something, but maybe he needed to doubt that. He doubted he would ever reach earth and share his message, but now he could doubt that. He doubted there was any way around the cold-death, but now he could doubt it so. He doubted who he was, but now he realized he should doubt that. He felt right that he should, no matter what the word “should” entailed. 

He thought of all the ideas of the divine, the moral, the religious, the ethical, the human, the artistic, the hopeful, the loving, and yes, even the sacred. He had doubted them on strong empirical grounds, but as he knew, there was no single grounds to view any one thing. 

He could not develop surety in these concepts but maybe there really could be a good, a valued, a meaning, a purpose, and something about him that made him more than just the clump of cells that make up a hairless ape. There was nothing now that could be known any more than before, but that included anything that expelled these wonderful things he delighted in their possibility. 

With his eyes still to the window, as the stars passed by like the trees of Northern Vermont, a shape came into view slowly. At first it was the spirals of a large, bright galaxy colored in turquoise and cyan. He turned his head as he moved closer to the glass as he saw the magenta and amber bulge at the center. Spinning in its splendor and majesty, this galaxy had never worried about if he had ever seen it, what its future was, or what it was fundamentally. It was just there being and existing. 

It was not uncommon for him to see a galaxy of this size, though it was rare to see one of this brightness of color, but that is not what stood out to him. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly special about it all and nothing had changed with it, but something was starting to change in him. 

Something within him could see the beauty, really see it. Something within him knew in an objectivity he hadn’t had in years, that this was beautiful. He pressed himself closer to the glass as he became in awe of its beauty, of its elegance, and something else, something more powerful: Its sacredness. 

His heart began to warm and pound as the rest of his chest felt warm and tight as if he had been held for the first time in many years. He thought back to when he and his brother would look up at the stars in wonder. He could feel it, it was here again. He thought back to him in college trying to force the puzzles of the world together as now they just seemed to fall into place. He thought back to him as a ranger right before he left on his mission and the deep sense of honor he had at being alive. He even thought back to... Her. 

He held her willingly in his mind for the first time as it stung a little, but the pain was now no more than the beauty. He seemed to know within his bones that it would pain him all his days to be away from her, to leave her, to have her not there, but not anymore than it was sacred that he ever got to be with her. 

His chin began to quiver as warm tears streamed down his cheeks. He thought to think of this as no more than a chemical reaction within the ape just coping, but not now, not this time. It seemed with a surety past words or reason to be more than that. He blinked to let the tears continue their journey on and so he could see the galaxy more clearly as his whole life as a story seemed to fall together into nice little chapters right before his eyes. 

Some chapters were enjoyable and hopeful, and some were climactic and painful, but all were meaningful and all were needed for the very important book that they made up. His tears sped up as his quivering jaw was an open mouth as he tried desperately to soak in all that he felt now, the honor, the gratitude, the peace. He held on to the emotions as tightly as he could as he stared into that beautiful galaxy. 

“You are so beautiful. Thank you, thank you my friend. My heart, you have done something good, something real, something I will never forget. Thank you.” He said in a voice so shaky with emotion the words barely found themselves past his lips. 

“I am so grateful, so honored, so touched that I get to exist, to be, to do all the things that make that up, trying and failing, hurting and hoping. Thank you.” He tried his best not to collapse to the floor of his rocket to the artificial-gravity as he soaked in every moment of that sacred galaxy, whether or not it had a soul or a galaxy within it. 

The thought chanced his mind that this was all something in his head and not something in the universe, but he corrected the thought by saying he was in the universe and therefore the thought was in the universe. In all its gorgeous splendor, like everything does when the time is right, the galaxy passed from view as he kept pushing his head against the glass to see it for one last moment.

In his new found bravery, he turned and ran from the window to the galaxy, to the window into himself. As he finally came face to face with that shaving mirror and its beastly occupant that scared him so. He closed his eyes as he walked up to it and braced himself for what he might see and the flood of anger, dismissal or judgment that may come. 

With a strong breath out, his eyelids rose to show him a face, a face he forgot he knew so well, a face that seemed to be more than what could be seen. He saw the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and everything that had evolved from lower life-forms all the way back to the first random stirring and shocking of biochemicals, but he saw something more, something good if there were such a thing, something wonderful if it could exist. 

If these sentiments existed outside of him, he no longer fretted because they at least existed within him. He reveled to see that the eyes that he saw out of, the head he thought out of, and the mouth he attempted to speak his experiences into words. 

Still, now and forever, there would be doubt and fear of the unknown, but there was a sacred idea that it was possible, maybe even true, that he was more than a hairless ape in a cold-death Universe. 

The end

About the author

Samuel Bird was raised in the rocky mountains of Idaho and Wyoming on cattle ranches and farms. Coming from humble and troubled circumstances and having little access to formal education, he spent his time thinking about how to make sense of his world and the world around him. As he moved on from his past, he found a deep passion for philosophy. Outside of writing and philosophy, he is a musician and person of faith. With a dark sense of realism, a bright view of hopeful optimism, and a love for all people, Samuel seeks to engage and invite others to think those same thoughts that helped him make sense of his worlds. 

Bird Publishing