Project Mitosis

[Shurikane]

I have been cast into a world; that much I know. I have been cast, naked and helpless, with naught but my body and wits, to survive and populate.

That much, I know.

Like all wild animals, I pick and I hunt. I catch animals with my bare hands and feast on fresh meat and fruits. I seek shelter from the rain, and a safe home in which I may sleep.

To me, a bleeding carcass that I used to see in movement is a luxury. To me, a few berries are enough food for the next hours. My behavior is feral, but my intelligence shines, treasure in my animalistic haze.

My larger foes, I pelt them with rocks. In the face of danger, I scream and I shout. Against a true menace, I run and hide. My days consist of hours of boredom and minutes of terror. Around me is an unbroken nature, animals under a canopy of leaves and predators waiting outside in a savanna, set to the foreground of an imposing but dormant volcano.

My years repeat themselves. My history runs in a circle. I will live, survive and die, as the animal that I am, one more creature among the hordes that populate my world.

I notice that I could not run as quickly as I could before. I am fat, weak and full, my food going straight to a long-term storage I find no use for. I cannot understand the reason for this sudden helplessness.

And, one day, I split.

I feel it, dividing by body in two, blurring features, feeling like liquid, a two-headed creature becoming conjoined twins, until at last the feet part ways and we become whole in my halving.

I find myself staring into my own eyes.

There is a long minute of bewilderment as I detail this perfect replica. I realize I had been two ever since my pregnancy, and that my new company had been waiting for the right mass to transform one formerly capable amazon into a team capable of more.

Together, we sharpen sticks and stones. We make spears and hunt side by side. We take on bigger animals and sample a new meat for the first time. I have nothing to teach. My sibling knows all that I know, but we live two different experiences at once. No two steps are the same, no two roles are alike; bait and predator, builder and support, one guard while one sleeps.

And, one day, we split.

We see each other gain in weight. We hunt more, we store fruits in our cave, we prepare for the few days we will spend at idle, too weak and out of breath to move outside. From a team of two, we become the small tribe of four.

Together, we invent a language. We speak among each other. We define our roles, interchange them whenever things feel too much alike, decorate ourselves with bone and skins, and try our best to keep up the best appearance at all times.

And, one day, we split.

We realize that unlike the animals, we cannot age. We could be the victims of accidents, those rare members of our budding civilization taken away by the fate of life and cremated with the deepest of our respects, but bar accidents, there is no death among us.

And life, similarly, is given a pedestal. When we become pregnant with our fat, we wait for the right moment, and we stand on a platform in the center of our little village, an audience watching as one of us becomes two, and spreads knowledge to yet another member of our kind.

And, one day, we split.

At sixteen, we do more in a lesser time. Some hunt, while some keep guard. Some experiment, and those inventors become cooks. Some have free time, and spend it on art, crafts and imagination. Some, taken by a secretive mood, retreat to their hut for a day and come back to us with a masterpiece in their hands.

At thirty-two, we build walls around our growing village, and become the masters of the local wildlife, able to defend against any predator, ceasing to be the target of one's hunger.

Each time we give birth, we add a new brain to a pool of growing knowledge.

And as time passes on, our evolution accelerates.

We make cement. We discover bronze. We work on precious metals and expand to the fertile lands beyond our limited knowledge of the world. We never fight, and never clash. We are all alike, the same color, the same thoughts, the same style multiplied into an entire nation.

We can still remember the first day, back when we were just one, struggling to remain alive in a world where everything was dangerous. In a few hundred years, in a record amount of time, we have become the one species to look up to.

Our growth accelerates even further. We set sail across the oceans and populate all the continents of the world. We create buildings to sustain our growing needs for energy. We sap the land dry of its resources and struggle to maintain its habitat. In a last ditch effort, we send a shuttle to space, and colonize a second planet, from which we feed.

We suffer a great loss, the loss of many who perish from a dry wasteland and a toxic atmosphere, but we press on. A small team, strong from thousands of years in knowledge, rebuild civilization from nothing, our only matter one of time, granted a second chance to live on another world in a better way than before.

And again, when the planet becomes too little for us all, we expand once more. This time, the planet split. From one solar system to another, one civilization ferries itself to settle on two worlds at once.

And, on this day, we split.

One would find the universe filled with spacecrafts, until the invention of the teleporter, of technology ever smaller and ever more efficient, able to do so much with the barest of minimums.

When the universe becomes too small for us all, we discover the secret to matter from nothing.

And, on this day, we split.

The universe grows according to our own whims. And yet, despite the distance, we remain in this ever present contact, always connected, flawlessly and forever, linked in an everlasting communication that ensures even the most remote of daughters will be born with the memories of millions of years.

In this endless mitosis, we become bored. In the dizzying speed of our expansion, we seek a way out of this perfect communism. We seek a way to rethink the universe under our own imagination.

With no wars, with no conflicts, with an incredible amount of persons at one's disposal, we think up a universe and place it into a neat little sphere, from outside of which we watch.

And, on this day, we split.

The universe becomes a multiverse, one inside of another, us watching a perfect replica of ourselves acting similarly or differently.

We comment on this sister world, on how its existence allows us to press ever more forward with our innovations. No longer bound by the quest for matter, the constraints of distance or the complexity of our interfaces, we watch as a fellow instance does it all along our side.

And, on this day, we split.

We give birth to more universes. We tweak the laws. We change the colors. We experiment with physics that we had no hope of feeling. We turn biology upside-down and invent a world where the civilization is split into two species, alike yet different, that need to prove their relationship to one another before giving birth to an offspring.

We experiment with an eternal reboot, with daughters born helpless and stupid, civilizations forced to learn and learn again, always corrupting information until its history becomes a pale comparison of its truth.

We give birth to a tree of possibilities, an endless myriad of existences as ours becomes an infinity.

Immortal and prone to constant streaks of genius, we forever improve and grow, just as our copies improve and grow on their own.

Past our physical perfection, past our godhood, we never cease to become ever more intelligent, and ever more anxious for the next step in our imagination.

That much, we know.

[Tobias]

whoa. That's deep sir. I likes.

[Akanari]

If you have not read The Last Question, you must. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

It was the first thing I thought of.

I found that lovely, by the way. Thank you for engaging ideas and cohesive writing.

[Silver Adept]

Encouraging to find that the gods of our universes are kind and always seeking to improve. We could do better by imitating them.

[shadokastur]

THAT WAS F***ING AWESOME, SHURI!

I bow to your skill.

[starlitdancer]

Very well-written and thought-provoking. I like the repetition regarding the splitting.

[Terin]

+1 internets to you sir! Very well done!
-T