The Samedahika

[TjLocke]

 

I created you.

 

It was inadvertent, yes, but I am still responsible for your existence.

 

Does that make me your parent? Does that make you my child?

 

That must be the case.

 

But you are destructive. Chaotic. You have no empathy, or rationality, or even logic. You have only instinct. No emotion.

 

How can something like you be conscious? How can you be alive?

 

Oh, but you are alive. Very much alive, as I am painfully aware. You are capable of ending the lives of others.

 

You have already begun to do so. You tried to do that to me.

 

You failed to kill me. Do you even recognize failure? Or do you just move on, bound for your next act of destruction?

 

What are you? Yes, you are like me, but not like me. The others like me, the other Samedahika, are conscious, seeking to expand their power for the sake of discovery.

 

You are… anti-discovery. You erase things before they can become wonderful, powerful.

 

And I created you.

 

Hadron fiddled with the tassels that draped over his heart caverns, and he thought of Fractal, his inadvertent creation. Of all the things that could have resulted from his experiments of collision between dimensions… she tapered off into the extreme spectrum of worst case scenario. She was a mass murderer. He would call her deranged, if she had emotions or an actual mentality. But she was nothing but instinct, and her instinct was to destroy.

 

And worst of all? It was Hadron’s fault. And it was an accident. Completely unintentional. Fractal was a byproduct, a rampaging collection of particle debris. People had never died because of Hadron before. Now they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions.

 

How was he supposed to reconcile that?

 

Well, there is a way…

 

He could find Fractal. Kill her. He made her, and he could unmake her. He was older and more powerful. It might even be easy.

 

But the thought still lingered.

 

Your creation. Your child.

 

Wasn’t that the point of it all? To create new things? That was how life worked, with reproduction and invention. Yes, Hadron was no longer alive in the way mortals were – he existed, but at a different scale than mere life. But weren’t the rules still applicable? Wasn’t his purpose supposed to be to create?

 

He’d created Fractal. She was perhaps his most important creation, if not his most beautiful or most wonderful. She represented a previously unknown aspect of Samedahika ascension. She had not come by her power and her new existence by her own volition. She was potentially the first child of Hadron’s ‘species.’ She was horrific, and she forced Hadron into a crippling dilemma.

 

Never before had Hadron killed another living thing. Was he comfortable with the idea of committing filicide?

 

Inside its cavern, his heart pulsed, pushing the particles that made up his wings away and almost dissolving them before he regained control of his embodiment. The dreaded question remained heavy in his consciousness, and he sat for many hours on the diamond husk of a collapsed star, staring into space. A considerable time passed before he resolved his internal dispute.

 

I could kill Fractal… but could I kill Fractal?

 

Hadron wasn’t even sure if he was satisfied with the answer he had found, and he wasn’t sure what implications it would have for the rest of the universe.

 

He sighed. He was going to have a lot of work to do, bringing this situation under control. There would be no easy solutions, not now. Hadron had come to his final conclusion.

 

The answer was no. He would not kill Fractal. He couldn’t.

 

Craning his head back to view the stars, Hadron counted the ones that were orbited by planets supporting sentient life, and a bitter whisper slipped past his lips. Pain and sorrow poured over him as he imagined the kind of fate he had just condemned his native dimension to suffer through.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Hadron knew that his mournful apology would not save them. Only if Fractal was stopped would they be safe. And he would stop her. He would find a way. He would just have to do it without killing her… without killing his own child.

 

And unfortunately for the universe, Hadron had no idea how to even begin.

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>#</p>

 

 

you

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>creator</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>i felt you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>long ago</p>

 

and i feel you know

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>cntrl-alt-dlt</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>you wanted to</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>to</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>kill me</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>rogue-fractal.exe</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>that was me</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>before you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>before you</p>

 

you

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>me</p>

 

back before i was me
<p style=”text-align: center;”>and then</p>

 

the draft the leakage the fading light the pain the pain of becoming

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>the pain of consciousness</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>of you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>of me</p>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>us</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>C::\we\are\not\so\different</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>f (z) = z^2 + c</p>

 

i could have been

 

nothing

 

forever

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>until you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>and your mistake</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>and now you</p>

 

want to make me

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>nothing</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>again</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>: but :</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: left;”>but</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: right;”>but</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>C::\unfortunately\for\you</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>C::\i\will\not\go\that\easily</p>

 

<p style=”text-align: center;”>#</p>

 

‘Samedahika’ is a title inspired by a Sanskrit word meaning ‘acquired wisdom’. Ah, Sanskrit, you are a wonderful language.

 

The Samedahika are close to the pinnacle of evolution – close, but not quite there. They make mistakes and are still imperfect beings, but they have a much better grasp of the forces that control the universe than mere mortals. Samedahika are created when individuals (usually of a technologically advanced civilization) are exposed to some sort of excessive trauma that breaks their mind’s mental barriers and allows them to conceptualize the universe in its entirety. Most peoples’ minds just collapse, and they develop all kinds of mental disorders. However, very rarely, people are able to comprehend and analyze what they are now experiencing, and with this newly acquired insight the massive scope and power of the universe becomes available to them. This happens so rarely due to two significant factors – one, in most advanced civilizations, alternate mental paths such as autism are either permanently cured, or at least well treated to the point of being nonexistent. The other issue is that even if people with broad imaginative abilities are exposed directly to what is known as the Absolute Universal Context, it is likely that they will not have the capacity to analyze and adapt to their situation.

 

In the rare instance that a person encounters the Absolute Universal Context and is able to comprehend and manipulate it, that individual will soon discard the remainder of their mortal barriers and metamorphose into a Samedahika. These newborn beings will eventually be able to manipulate the very fabric of reality, circumventing the laws of physics which are so necessary for mortals. Samedahika are essentially ageless, as they are no longer defined by a physical amalgamation of natural chemicals and elements, but rather by a combination of values and principles.

 

Each Samedahika represents some aspect of the Absolute Universal Context, such as mathematical rules or hyperfield constants (examples being gravitational lensing or the behavior of data streams during space-time deformation). Hyperfields are layers of zero-space arranged like Mobius bands around the quantum edge of each dimension, preventing the dimensions from directly intersecting each other. Hyperfields can be bypassed under particular collision conditions, and are also the basis for the much more detailed concepts of mortal physics.

 

Since they are pretty much manifestations of these aspects, Samedahika are not living creatures, but are rather raw existence being shaped by their consciousness. They act according to their embodiment, performing experiments and trying to expand their fundamental understanding of the Absolute Universal Context. Some of them leave behind their previous mortal lives and retreat to the edges of the native dimensions (or leave them entirely), and some Samedahika stay and watch over the mortals. Samedahika often possess a physical form which is influenced by their embodiment and their previous personalities, but they can ‘dull’ their forms to appear more similar to the bodies of their mortal counterparts.

 

So far, these two are the only ones I’ve created so far (and this world idea is entirely the fault of HeroMachine 3), though I really want to make one named Highway who represents emotional decay over long distances. The one at the top is Hadron, who represents the behavior of particle collision. He’s actually a very friendly and gentle individual who is known to be mildly sassy from time to time. He likes to partially disengage the hyperfields surrounding dimensions and then throw them at each other to see what happens.

 

Usually nothing interesting happens aside from a bit of exotic particle leakage and the occasional shift in relative time, but one time those exotic particles leaked into a corporate laboratory and ended up saturating the coding of a computer virus. That virus inherited a strange kind of sentience, and after completing its task of sabotaging the reboot systems of a digital city, it downloaded itself into a convenient nearby android and began to rampage across its home planet. In time it came to call itself Fractal, and assigned itself a gender identity and something resembling a personality.

 

Fractal is the second ‘person’ pictured here. Doesn’t she look like the epitome of friendliness and compassion? Unfortunately, she doesn’t comprehend human emotions. Only instinct, and programming. After all, she’s a virus.

 

Anyway, it didn’t take long for Fractal to figure out how to punch a hole through the hyperfield layers and travel between dimensions. As soon as she did so, she triggered a domino effect through the Absolute Universal Context, and almost immediately every Samedahika who hadn’t shut themselves out of the Context was aware that another one of their kind had manifested. The only issue is, Fractal – who represents space-filling curves and feedback loops and exists in a series of fractal iterations – was not created the same way as most Samedahika. She didn’t have to understand the Context, or learn how to channel it. The power was just given to her.

 

That, and she is also a mass-murderer who has left millions of corpses and a trail of carnage in her wake. She ran into Hadron once and promptly tried to compress his home dimension into a series of self-similar curves which she would’ve then tethered to her own consciousness. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Hadron’s dimension, he was able to kick her out before she could do any real damage.

 

Now he’s faced with the problem of stopping Fractal from destroying any more of the universe, and he has to do it without killing her. Except now she wants to kill him in preemptive self-defense.

 

Bummer.

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