Earth: A Tall Tale of Morality by Enrique

The man paused for a breather, leaning on his walking stick. As his chest gently heaved in and out, he scanned his surroundings. Dense underbrush and thick wood surrounded him on all sides, parted by a barely perceptible trail of matted grass stretching narrowly in front of him, just enough room for him to continue his trek. He knew these woods like the back of his hand, at least he felt he did, but for some reason he had come upon a new route and was on unfamiliar terrain. It was steep, taxing to even an experienced hiker like himself. He had lost track of how long the walk had been, and considered whether he should turn around and safely retrace his steps else nightfall might envelop him in darkness. But a bend in the path beckoned a hundred or so feet in front of him and he wanted to get a better sense of where he was. He waited a minute, then pressed forward.

Closing the distance to the spot he had set his sites on with an uphill surge, he rounded the corner and saw a distant patch of dim light from a clearing a couple hundred feet ahead. He couldn’t make out with any certainty what lay beyond, but was so close and just had to know. The forest seemed to level out, as if he had reached the crest of a hill, and the rest of this excursion would practically walk itself, so he hurried on with eager step.

He emerged and beheld a flat beach of the finest sand stretching in front of him some fifty feet, strewn with logs and lapped by a gentle tide. This was nothing compared to an awesome sight in the distance: a splendid sunset reflecting on layer upon layer of majestic cloud, showing reds, yellows, oranges, pinks with amazing depth and texture, frozen in that moment like a picture painted by God himself. He stood and admired the sheer enormity of the scene, then approached and perched himself on a log, setting his walking stick on the ground beside him.

A few moments passed and he heard a voice, uncanny, as if it came from nowhere, everywhere, engulfed him and emerged from within his own brain all at the same time, yet subtle enough to seem as if someone a few feet away would not have noticed. The voice said to him, “I am going to die someday”.

The man was wondering, “what do you mean?”, but before he could articulate his impression the voice said, “I will tell you something no human on Earth has ever known. Beyond the reaches of your solar system lies an inferno so fierce it can incinerate all the matter contained within and all presence of life in an instant. I hold back this inferno with the force of my being, and at the time of my death it will collapse upon you in a flash.”

The man regarded this statement with the utmost clarity, but lost in the moment he strangely felt no trepidation or perplexity, only uninhibited curiosity, an overpowering impulse to engage with the spirit, and quickly replied, “when will this be?”

“Sooner than you might think”, the spirit proclaimed.

The man’s mind immediately leaped to his wife and kids.

“I am sorry”, the spirit said. “This is painless, everyone would die before they can even perceive what is happening. I wish I could prevent it, but I can’t, and I will likely be incinerated along with you.”

The man wondered, “What are you?”

The spirit responded, “I live in hyperspace as a combination of light, atoms and more that your species has not conceived. I sense every organism on Earth as if it is within me. Every detail of your chemical structure, every nuance of your body is observed by me as part of my own existence. I am of course saddened, but the natural order beckons.”

“Natural order?” the man thought.

“We are doomed to die, it is an ineluctable reality,” the spirit said. “I have lived for billions of years, guarding the sun and planets, sheltering the evolution of life, protecting your species, but even I am mortal.”

The man’s interest was piqued by the idea that everyone is doomed to die.

The spirit went on, “It is unfortunate that all complex beings must suffer to survive. I managed to endow your species with rarified depths of feeling, and this allows you to secure your safety among much else. I love experiencing your pleasures along with you, but in order to avoid danger we must also feel pain. Suffering allows life to sustain itself longer. Without pain, we could not partake of much pleasure.”

The man whimsically wondered if bugs feel pain.

“Yes, bugs feel pain”. The spirit sounded as if he was smiling.

“Insects feel while lacking a sense of self anywhere near the complexity of human beings. They are aware without the richness of identity and personality that is characteristic of your species. Insects are smarter than most humans give them credit for though, a cognizing aptitude that resides in the domain of immediate perception, intuiting about the environment with superb quickness and consistency.

What they miss is a grasp of uncertainty, something brainier organisms such as yourself are blessed with. You can hold numerous possibilities in the mind at will and carefully reason to the most viable alternatives, then modify your behavior in a progressive way. Insights that insects require many generations of adaptation to be ingrained with occur to humans after brief periods of dedicated thought, and you are experts at building on prior knowledge. Decision-making enables your species to be a supremely efficient experimenter. Your recognition of uncertainty motivates you to outstanding feats of comprehension.

It is ironic, for the capacities of your intellect are instinctual enough that you do not even realize how creative you are, so absorbed in the moment that the greatest of actualizations can only fleetingly quell your restless pursuit of change. When you are free you are never satisfied with the status quo, always exerting pressure upon the boundaries of your worlds. This irrepressible desire for novelty in the presence of freedom makes human motive volatile, prone to risk-seeking as each challenge newly accepted grows insignificant, but it also draws your species’ members together into tightly knit communities, rallying around the quest for a mastery of the environment that only cooperative action of a collective can attain.”

The man’s mind lighted upon the idea of civilization.

The spirit continued, “Your species has come a long way. From clans hunting and gathering in the jungles of Cancer and Capricorn or the mists of primeval Eurasia, expeditions across treacherous ice of the Bering Strait, agricultural tinkering in the Amazon, Neolithic settlement, civilization, law codes, enlightenment, academia and high technology, humans reached grand heights that pleasantly surprised even an ancient spirit such as me, despite my integral ties to the workings of nature. You etched lines in the sand, scored rocks with ochre, drew animal figures in sacred caves, applied ink to papyrus, bound, sold and stored books of the most scrupulous detail, and finally innovated writing machines unparalleled by any species, at least any that you know of.”

A ray of light winked on the man’s face and then vanished.

“Your kinship circle has expanded from ecosystem, tribe, village, town, city, empire, to an entire globe of nation states intricately bound by the needs and prerogatives of trade, diplomacy and advance. Even I could not have foreseen how vastly industrious your species would become.”

The man wondered quizzically whether the spirit had created humanity and where the limits of this enigma’s knowledge might lie.

“I did not create the substance you are made of, but coalesced out of primordial heat and darkness sometime early in your solar system’s past. I remember the moments I started to become aware as if they were yesterday, seeing and feeling the matter of your world in a vague way for the first time, learning to manipulate the objects within me. This began the delicate balancing act I have had to perform amongst spirituality and the web of life. I was not the only being in existence as I materialized from the fiery chaos of your solar system’s origins, for many additional spirits began to evolve along with me. I was sure I could subdue them if necessary, and they respected my power, but they had wants, needs, desires as well, and I had to honor these so as to keep the peace, preventing disruptions while I furthered the natural order.

I remember with utmost sorrow the violent death of a spirit that I especially liked, then the worst case scenario, letting control of life’s destiny slip from my grasp. Billions of years ago I informed Earth’s spiritual beings of my plan to harbor the transition from chemistry to genetic metabolism and promised dominion over these peculiar carbon-based spirits once they evolved to the point of complex motive. I also gave my sentient spirits license to intervene in the evolutionary process provided they obtain my approval first. I engaged spirits of Mars in a similar endeavor, and what you call the habitable zone had soon turned into an amusing, engaging bustle of numinous science.

Evolution on Earth commenced in bodies of water and proceeded without a hitch at the beginning. After much poking and prodding alongside experimentation with adhesive materials, I managed to get membranes formed. I allowed my subordinates to tinker with various macromolecules once they received the go-ahead from me. We fashioned cells from membranes, and at key moments used currents to guide these cells towards new, nutrient-rich locations. I coaxed nucleic acids into the first primitive RNA, and we had great fun fooling around with both spontaneous and planned macromolecular ecosystems. After we’d had our fill of RNA, I expedited the evolution of DNA, and we got serious about macroscopic organisms. Prokaryotic colonies led to stromatolites, and I gave permission for my spirits to mold the first eukaryotes into ediacarans. They were a docile, rather dull race of fleshy blobs, but I assessed this as a flexible template from which more interesting creatures could be derived.

The majority of my Earthly spirits decided to focus on ediacaran evolution at the bottom of the ocean as expected, but a minority were more interested in a microscopic worm species that had developed in a small nook nearby. You could call this worm-bewitched contingent the hellions of our solar system, for they were fascinated not only by the mobility potential in this lineage, but also its display of carnivorous behavior. Their leader was the second strongest spirit in our solar system, also the most arrogant and bellicose, whom the most aggressive spirits had rallied around. He was not averse to intimidating a few spirits on occasion if events did not go as desired, but I kept him in line with some toughness and he wisely deferred to my authority.

The hellions would not have been able to perform the astounding feats of inventiveness that ensued without help from an unlikely source. One of my spirits, though not among the powerful in terms of force, was by far the most perceptive, displaying impressive foresight and a keen ability to find solutions for the most obscure engineering tasks. I esteemed his insights greatly. The priorities of this spirit were more akin to my ediacaran faction, for he was fully cognizant of his vulnerability and committed to peace while filling the role of mediator, relaying ideas with diligence to vastly increase the capacity of Earth’s spiritual population in designing, implementing and most crucially comprehending our strategies.

The leader of my hellion faction, though despising gentleness, recognized the value this engineering dynamo could have for his own group’s project early on. The power spirit tried to woo him with visions of privileged status and influence, but my innovator spirit was not particularly interested in reputation. He was, however, intrigued by the creative possibilities latent in a mobile species, and decided to collaborate with the goons on a periodic basis. His creativity was fantastic, evolving feelers into legs, a head with well-defined features such as eyes and antenna, a digestive system for efficient nutrient absorption and excretion, it all appealed to me immensely. The rest of the hellion tribe, thousands upon many thousands of spirits, enjoyed moving the little guys around with possession, guiding their reproductive choices, getting these tiny worms to sense, congregate, interact, with some hunting and annihilation thrown into the mix. I figured it better that the hellions expend aggressive tendencies vicariously through their creations then let idleness tempt them to fight amongst themselves, so tolerated this somewhat sadistic relationship to their organisms. The power spirit was satisfied with his leadership role as facilitated by ties to my supreme innovator, and the hellions deeply engrossed themselves in the minutia of their evolutionary exploits.

At the beginning of this grand experiment with carbon-based mobility, my expert engineer still spent most of his time with the ediacaran faction, planning what would likely be a more gradual evolutionary ascent, but these spirits were respectably capable on their own with my tutelage, so he started to spend more and more time with the hellions. A rich ecosystem of increasingly mobile worms and then arthropods entertained endlessly by walking around in pointless circles, pooping in each other’s paths, startling each other, chasing each other around, and the highlight of course was a little possession that brought them together to reproduce at the perfect moment so these lineages could advance. The power spirit and innovator spirit, despite their differing personalities, made an effective team and developed tight comradery, which was an excellent way to maintain accord between the ediacaran and hellion faction. My inclination was to keep a close watch on the power spirit for he was capable of much harm, but I placed value on the freedom that was making progress every day and felt confident in my ability to intervene if needed. My spirits had never failed to prove themselves, so as tens of millions of years passed I gradually became less vigilant, content to let events run their own course. I became complacent.

I diverted my attention away from Earth and focused on Mars. Though these spirits were less creative, we got something like a primordial metabolism up and running in the oceans, but I doubt Martian spirits ever managed to fabricate a cell. I wouldn’t necessarily know because I was spending most of my time away from creator spirits who resided in the habitable zone, instead working on the rest of the solar system by myself. I tinkered mostly on my own with carbon-based metabolism in the liquid water of Jupiter’s moon Europa, tried to get a species of carbon and gaseous hybrid going on the gas giants, and experimented with the possibilities quiescent in ice among outer planets. I continued to hold back the inferno that had materialized around our solar system, also breaking up a stray asteroid once in a while if necessary.

All was well until one day the ediacaran faction summoned me back to Earth with alarm. In haste I rapidly diverted my attention from exploits on Neptune and found a crisis brewing. My innovative spirit had long ago discontinued his role in guiding evolution of the carnivorous worm species, with my hellion faction gaining mastery of the intricacies involved in breeding. Though vast spans of time pass without inducing major evolution or ennui in the immortal spirits of hyperspace, changes to their disposition do take place. I underestimated the effect that a hundred million years of sadism would exact on the hellions, for they had evolved the worm species into a dazzlingly diverse ecosystem centered around pain and exploitation. What humans call a food chain had developed in the arthropod lineage, these organisms feeding on each other in a giant frenzy of death, while the hellions looked on in bloodthirsty obsession, perpetually trying to breed a yet more lethal species. The organisms stalked, frightened, poisoned, crushed, dismembered, eviscerated each other in anarchic pandemonium, and the hellions only worsened it by concocting situations in which fights to the death were immanent. Hellions delighted in watching millions perish each second when left to their own devices while participating in nearly as much massacre themselves, mutating the genetic code of arthropods to produce grotesque deformities and frying brains.

The ediacaran faction had achieved the impressive feat of getting primitive plant matter started on Earth’s land masses, and a few thousand square miles of continental space were occupied by the first lineages of vegetation. The hellions’ torture-based ecosystem covered a few thousand square miles of ocean floor and was always threatening ediacaran organisms with invasion, but the innovator spirit had enacted a compromise, allowing arthropods to inhabit primordial algae beds covering large areas near the ocean surface. Though the ediacaran faction and my innovator spirit strongly disliked the carnage, they were willing to tolerate escapades of the hellions as long as arthropods were kept away from land masses and out of vast ediacaran fields at the bottom of oceans, protecting billions upon billions of organisms from certain destruction. It was a constant struggle to keep arthropods from jeopardizing ediacaran safety, and not a few spiritual blows had been exchanged over the issue, but nothing catastrophic. However, the hellions were getting more reckless each millennium and had begun occasionally poaching clusters of ediacarans amid the most bitter spiritual squabbling, which I soon witnessed. This was the dilemma I had been called back to resolve.

The bond between my power spirit and innovator spirit had grown close from eons of collaboration. They had become like brothers, and I saw this was key in assuring that the ediacaran faction endured arthropod insanity while the power spirit kept his hellions under control rather than escalating the wanton destruction. My ediacaran faction, which had become considerably hardened by constant exposure to death and conflict, conveyed their disgruntlement to me in the strongest possible way. We convened with the hellions to bounce ideas around and come up with a mutual plan for the future, identifying weak spots in ocean perimeters and discerning how to contain arthropod expansion. My innovator spirit promised to oversee the algae beds personally, and the power spirit assented as long as no hellions were harmed. After a few thousand years of supervision the situation seemed stable and I returned my attention to Neptune, content to let events on Earth run their course.

Millions of years passed between these intercessions and my tinkering at the outer reaches of our solar system, until I felt some especially sharp twinges coming from the habitable zone and turned my attention back to Earth. A few hellions had poached an especially large cluster of ediacarans as if they were arthropods under the direct gaze of a rather potent member of the ediacaran faction, and in a rage he had blasted them to bits with a huge blow. A crowd of hellions immediately attacked, leaving a trail of ediacaran carcasses as they went, but their spiritual adversaries were stronger and began wiping out the hellions with abandon. As hundreds of hellions were blasted to oblivion, the power spirit in a fit of equally intense rage knocked away the entire ediacaran faction and gave the algae mat, which was tens of thousands of square miles in size, the most vigorous shake ever seen on Earth. Trillions of arthropods sunk to the ocean floor, then began scurrying around en masse. Ediacaran organisms were doomed.

I observed all this in horror as I rushed with as much force as I could muster back to Earth. The ediacaran and hellion factions were slaughtering each other in all-out war, carcasses of organisms everywhere. The innovator spirit attempted to intervene in desperation, but was seized by an incensed mob of ediacaran-tenders and dragged to a deep sea volcano nearby. The power spirit, who had apparently concealed much of his potency across the ages in order to avoid countermeasures, spread himself with the full force of his being to encircle the globe. I arrived just in time to restrain him with 10% of my power and 50% of my attention, straining in great effort against the inferno, and he struggled with every iota of strength he could muster. I gave a gigantic thunder clap to demand that the ediacaran faction stop, and they well understood my meaning, but in an instant had reached the volcano amid inconceivable chaos everywhere. I watched in horror as the ediacaran faction shoved my innovator spirit into the crater’s magma, and he was gone.

I had never revealed that this was my favorite spirit so as to prevent jealousy, but when I saw his death I withdrew slightly in shocked anguish and the power spirit escaped my grasp. He ripped the volcano from its very foundations, killing thousands of spirits and millions of organisms instantly, then I again seized him and in a rage ripped him in half. He recoiled from this mortal wound with all the strength he had left and shot through space like a lightning bolt, crashing into Mars. In his death throes, a monstrous wind emanated from his being, blowing the Martian atmosphere into space and eradicating all life on that planet in minutes. The spirits and creations of Mars were gone, the innovator and power spirits had met their end, and Earth was swept up in total war, my beloved creations dying by the billions. I raced around, subduing as many spirits as I could, but it looked like life in our solar system was coming to a tragic denouement.

It was at that moment I felt a force never encountered before, imposing with enough power to prevent me from moving an inch. I felt the spirits and organic creatures within me simultaneously stop their ravenous movements on a dime. It became apparent to us sentient ones that we were all absolutely still and unable to budge, the entire solar system and its remaining inhabitants frozen, like an ice cube as you humans say. It was then that we heard a voice, strange and uncanny not only because it came from everywhere, as if the entire universe was speaking to us, but also by virtue of the fact that none of us had ever spoken. We had always known what other spirits were intending us to think without the slightest verbalization, and we understood this gargantuan spirit in the same way, feeling its meaning, but what were these new vibration patterns of the most miniature kind?

We felt the ruler spirit say, “I prefer to let the universe run on its own power, for like many of you I place the utmost value on freedom, but this situation is dire, the worst I have seen in a long time, and I have come to rescue you from yourselves. Notice these vibrations? They are language, and I am going to teach you how to use this tool. It may be your salvation.”

Then a hundred year abeyance. The ruler spirit suspended us motionless for a century, exposing us to these vibrations in billions of variant forms, getting us to correlate an ever-increasing corpus of permutation with his meaning until we could mimic him. It was unnatural at first, like batting your eyelids more than a hundred times per minute, but we gradually caught on and began producing the same vibrations ourselves. The ruler spirit talked unceasingly about everything in the solar system, all we had ever done or aspired to do as if he had been with us, and when responding we made these strange vibrations. Oddly enough, an innate compulsion to simply MOVE subsided in stages, and instead of flowing through hyperspace like an irrepressible leviathan, perpetually active among matter on what humans might consider grandiose scales, we made these dainty little disturbances that previously, while free, would have seemed preposterously beneath us.

We talked and talked for decades until we had touched upon every conceivable meaning and were even able to invent new languages ourselves. Then one day we all finally paused. I took the lead and said to the ruler spirit, “we’ve mastered language, but what are we supposed to do next?”

The ruler spirit replied, “I suppose you’d erupt a volcano or tool around on Neptune, but you can’t move.”

I proclaimed, “I would keep those blasted hellions under control, but I can’t move.”

A hellion sneered, “I would fry an arthropod brain, but I can’t move.”

A member of the ediacaran faction lamented, “I would pay those blasted hellions back, but I can’t move.”

The ruler spirit responded, “I’m sure you would all move mountains with maximum arrogance, but…”

And we felt his massive energy flow through us, impelling us to say, “NONE OF US IS MOVING!”

It was at this moment that vibrations of the ruler spirit reverberated throughout the solar system, and he boomed, “NONE OF YOU CAN MOVE!” It was the first time we had ever experienced laughter.

I laughed like the ruler spirit and said, “I’m moving but I can’t move!”

The hellions began laughing with a bit of maniacal malice, “I’m moving but I can’t move, and neither can you fool!”

The ediacaran faction ruefully joined in, “We know we’d waste those damn hellions, but we’re all not moving so it really doesn’t matter.”

And we joked for decades, frozen in place along with the arthropods, speaking every irony we could think of, mocking each other, mocking everything in the solar system, ashamed of our predicament but at peace, possessing nothing but ourselves.

When the ruler spirit ceased jesting, and peals of laughter from us subsided, he declared, “Since you all liked worms so much, I have quadrupled the DNA of a worm specimen. Take great care of this creature and its mating partners because they are the template you need for biological evolution on Earth.

I interjected, “If the hellions destroy this worm lineage we will exterminate them!”

A hellion retorted, “I’m sure you would if you could move, but if you try we’ll rip a hole in Earth’s crust huge enough to exterminate all organic life on this planet, guaranteed.”

The ruler spirit interrupted, “The ediacarans might be doomed, but because of your poor judgment so also will be 99.9% of everything else. You are to guide the evolution of Earth’s organic descendants towards speech as much as possible, and language will imbue some of them with the ethic of restraint and self-mastery I have taught you. Ediacaran faction, guard yourself against degeneration caused by hate, and hellion faction, know that rampant injustice will make your chance of survival nil. The universe wishes you all as well as you will deserve.”

We had learned to feel, reason, exist without doing, to self-reflect, and with that the freeze was lifted. All of us immediately sheltered and molded this small worm with all our might. Though animosity between the hellion and ediacaran factions caused turmoil every single day, this worm became the vertebrates, the mammals, the primates, the hominids, and then you.”

At this, the spirit fell silent, and the man’s mind shifted from impressions conjured by this story to the panoramic beach scene. He observed a waning sun on the distant horizon for a few moments, its bright colors receding from below the clouds, then wondered about the inferno and what might become of humanity. The spirit again began to speak.

“Ediacarans, hellions and myself manipulate organic life with ease, but cannot figure how to get out of this solar system without perceiving the products of human industry first and assisting your technological development accordingly. I am feeling my age, and not enough of us exist to complete the task on our own, nor do we know how to make entirely artificial machines without a human’s prehensile facility. The spirits possess, but they do not construct. We would have to remake ourselves in consort with technology as you have accomplished. Evil may yet be the downfall of everybody, but with billions of humans and the species’ ingenuity at our disposal, we might find a way…”

The spirit’s rumination was broken off by a child’s voice whispering, “They’re going to think we’re hellions.”

What sounded like a crazed newscaster immediately jumped in at rapid-fire speed, “They’re thinking we’re crazy for doing this when we’re needed but if its not possible its not possible though neither you nor anyone know if that’s true which is why we’re trying to figure out how to get out of the solar system and its an issue of what is spiritually possible or existentially plausible…”

The man suddenly heard a ringing which jolted him and he opened his eyes. He muttered, “Damn, boss wants me at the lab by eight this morning, maybe I should just retire,” reached for the alarm clock on the nightstand and switched it off. “I either need to make sure the fume hood is working properly or start seeing a Jungian psychologist,” he quipped and rolled out of bed.