Quinten Pheonix

A very long time ago, on a planet vastly different to our own, there existed two beings who occupied the same continent. I say ‘beings’ because they were greater than mere humans are. Far, far greater. So much greater, in fact, that despite the fact that they had an entire continent to themselves, they nonetheless kept on getting in each others way and stepping on each other’s toes.

The man’s name was Beta. He wore a silver robe and was bald with two horns protruding from his frontal lobe with which he was capable of doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things. For example, he could control the weather with them, brewing storm clouds and making lightning or increasing the temperature of the air to the point where it was melting. He could pick up radiowaves and all kinds of other waves besides. He was also able to use his horns to stimulate himself to mind blowing orgasms that made him go temporarilly blind. And still, he hadn’t probed his horns abilities all the way to their limits.

The woman’s name was Dalet, and although she couldn’t do the kinds of things that Beta could do with his horns, she knew something that he didn’t: she was the smarter of the two of them. Beta believed that due to the fact that he had horns and she didn’t, that made him more intelligent than her. I mean, he knew how to make earthquakes and cause volcanoes to erupt and create soundwaves that made the giant leathery fire-breathing beasts fall from the air, and she didn’t, so how could she be smarter than he? What he didn’t realise was that just because he was able to do these things, that didn’t actually make him more intelligent. The simple fact that Dalet was aware of this and that he wasn’t was one of he reasons she was the smarter of the two of them. She kept this knowledge to herself, being smart as she was, but even if she had have made this fact known to him (which she eventually did), Beta’s intellect still wouldn’t have been equal to hers. Maybe if he had have realised that this was the case after having been told (which he actually eventually did when it happened), then he would have taken a step up in his intellectual strength. So Dalet didn’t tell him and instead kept this intel to herself to use against him at the best possible occasion.

Her superior understanding allowed her to communicate directly with the planet. When Beta got into one of his furious mindsets and raged out of control (less capable of controlling his emotions as he was) and raised the temparature until the oceans melted, he wasn’t aware of what he was doing until the cause of his actions had borne their results. Vena, on the other hand, heard the planet when it cried out from his actions, saying, “It’s getting too hot! The water’s running dry! I think I’m going to faint!” And so she was faced with the unpleasant prospect of having to try to reason with Beta to get him to stop his raging, a doubly difficult proposition due to the fact that not only was he not so clever as to understand how and why his anger could cause the ocean to melt (which seemed like crazy, irrational, and just plain bad-sportsmanship from his perspective, a thinly disguised personal attack), but that also his emotions were so hard for him to control. So she’d have to sit there at first and watch futilely as Beta brought the planet to the boil and then had to make it rain afterwards, leaving him exhausted. It took many, many occasions before she was able to demonstrate to him that she was right about these kinds of things before he was able to make any progress in this regard and put his horns to more constructive use. And if he didn’t, she’d find ways to use it against him, like find a waterhole and let him suffer harder than she did, even though she was angry that she had to suffer at all.

This was the way their relationship played out, in the main: Beta would do something, and Dalet would react to it. She could control and choose the way she reacted, but Beta couldn’t control or choose what he did. That was the starting point and general mode of the operation of their relationship.

When she saw how incapable of understanding and how dangerous Beta was, and after he responded with animosity to her attempts to try and get him to put his horns to some contructive use, she plotted to kill him, despising him all the more for his not realising quickly that this was what she’d naturally be wont to do. She’d figured out well before he did that they couldn’t go on living on this world forever without things changing to a very, very large extent, and that if they couldn’t live together then one of them would have to die. So she waited patiently, riding the waves of Beta’s emotions, listening to the planet and learning the ways that they affected it, and devising ways to kill Beta using what she knew when the oppurtunity to do so finally arose. She was aware that if Beta knew that this was what she plotted that he could use his horns to kill her, so she kept it a secret; and a great fear arose in her that the day would come when he would realise that it may come down to only one of them being able to live on the planet, and that because he was too stupid to think of a way for them to co-exist, there’d be nothing she could do to prevent him from trying to kill her. She was therefore forced to change her strategy, and gently try as best she could to infuse the kinds of ideas she was having for their co-existence to be a viable option should it come down to this, while at the same time not letting him know that it well indeed may. Despite her superior intellect, then—or perhaps because of it—she found herself to be in a constant state of unease; restricted in her freedom. There were times when she thought maybe it would be best just to tell Beta the whole truth instead of keep it too herself, but depending on what mood he was in, there were always parts of it that he was blind do that got in the way of her communicating her understanding succesfully.

Beta, on the other hand, resented Dalet for her constantly being on his back about what he was doing rather than just doing her own thing and leaving him alone. After all, he didn’t try to control what she was doing, aware as he was that they had to share the planet, so he made extra sure that he always stayed out of her way so she could do what she wanted, just as he would naturally want her to do for him. He thought her dumb for not realising that the only way problems could arise between the two of them, now that they’d encountered one another and learned that they had to share the planet, was if they got in each other’s way and prevented each other from being able to do what they wanted, just as they had been before. Didn’t she realise that he could kill her with a simple focussing of his horns? Despite the fact that her continued encumberance upon his freedom increasingly gave him the irrits, nevertheless he told himself that it wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t as intelligent as he was, and that it would be unethical of him to kill her for it. After all, it wasn’t as though she was trying to kill him, it was just that she couldn’t help being jealous that he was that much superior to her. For him to kill her for this would be unethical and would lower him on this standard to a place beneath her, so for that reason he put up with it.

The game-changing moment came when Beta finally realised that there were forces outside either of their control that were inevitably dictating to them that they were going to either have to learn to live together in perpetuity, or else one of them would have to die. It was shortly after he realised this that he began to wonder whether or not Dalet had already figured this out before he had, and that that may have explained her behaviour hitherto. Beta’s behaviour changed profoundly after that. He became confounded, frazzled, discombobulated, and eventually overcome, his power muted, when it finally became evident to him that she had already figured this out long ago, and that she was way ahead when it came to the matter of how she was going to make this world work for her, long term. He realised that he couldn’t keep on going on letting loose with his horns and expect the planet to continue to support him, so he was faced with the prospect that, far from her being little more than a nuisance that he put up with, that he in fact would definately die, and the planet along with him, without her. So her protection and safety shortly became his number one concern. At least until as such time as he could figure out how to keep the world on going without her. But then he’d get sidetracked, thinking how she probably already knew that he’d be thinking this and had thought of something else that he hadn’t yet thought of, and so he began to head on down the road of becoming completely inept, and Vena found to her happiness that her superior intellect and good use of it in striking a balance towards the beginning of time was beginning to pay dividends.

Beta became depressed to learn that there were some things in life that his horns couldn’t help him with; Dalet sensed that an oppurtunity to kill him or two was going to arise in the near future, but, now that she saw that he may finally be smart enough to realise that she knew better than him, she became less inclined to do so, and her moral compass urged her to not kill him and rather put his horns to good use for their mutual benefit. And so she clung tight to her faith that she could trust him to not allow his emotions to get in the way, and to yield his emotions to her intellect, and only refute it with the same reasoning powers of his own intellect; that it would be stupid and a grave mistake for him to use his horns in any way to harm her. She trusted that he would see, after she didn’t take the oppurtunity to kill him, that there would never be any good reason for him to kill her (so long as the world didn’t utterly force this upon them, which she was confident it wouldn’t because she could communicate with it so well), and that they’d be able to live in harmony forevermore thereafter.

The difficulties continued, however, along those same lines that had been problematic before. Dalet was able to communicate with the planet and know what it needed for them to continue to live on it, but she wasn’t able to communicate what she knew with Beta in a way that gave him the freedom that he required in order to go on living. After Beta became so depressed that he let his guard down and she could have killed him but didn’t she began to talk to him as to a dog, barking instructions without explaining why and demeaning and ridiculing him should he voice his emotional unwillingness to do so. He eventually became angry, and roared at her that unless she cut him some slack, he’d kill her, kill the planet, kill everything and take his chances as the only thing left in the universe, rather than live like this, even though he couldn’t possibly deny that this amounted to outright suicide and highly unethical conduct on his behalf. And so they entered this second phase of their mythological evolution on this world, and by gosh did it go on for quite some time, verily, a very, very long time indeed. Ages. Aeons. Yonks and yonks and yonks, with this same limits, these same principles, these same problems dictating the terms of their relationship and the evolution of their mythos and hence the world, with progress only being made in tiny increments after interminably long intervals; barely discernable ones at that.

One of the big changes that occured at this stage of their evolution was when Beta realised that despite the fact that they both knew that his highly volatile manipulation of the environment was bad for the world and that Dalet proved herself as a greater and more worthy being than he was when he was unable to keep his emotions in check enough to control it, that nevertheless there was a part of her that enjoyed it as much as he did, and that everytime he did so she became less and less able to use her intellect to defeat the tide of his raging emotions. He regained a sense of childish joy in life again, knowing that he had the ability to make them both feel incredible, rapturous joy together, to bring them closer together and experience greater happiness than they ever had, even if it meant the death of them both and destruction of their world if he was to do so. The fact that the option was there for them to experience true happiness together, even if they weren’t able to sustain their world, gave them something that they were able to work with, to reconcile themselves with, in the times when they thought of killing one another or when it seemed the world would make itself unlivable to them both. It gave them a gaurantee, some firm ground, a sure footing, that they could use to say, “Let’s go another day, and if things haven’t improved, we’ll do that.”

This then led Beta to discover, for the first time in his life, an ability that he had that he didn’t require his horns for. It may not have been an ability that actually improved the situation at all—all it did was improve their mood enough to choose existence for another day rather than end it all right away—but still, it was something, something that he had that was worthwhile other than his horns: humor. Dalet’s faculty for humor had always been there, but hitherto there had never been anything in the world sufficient to arouse it. But now that Beta knew he could make Dalet happy despite herself, the faculty of humor finally developed and arose in his mind, and he began to exercise with ever-increasing enthusiasm, all the way to the point where it began to be distinctly counter-productive. For the first time, Beta developed a faculty of intellect that eventually became greater than Dalet’s, whose sense of humor was led by his.

Dalet, on the other hand, was finally able to develop a method of manipulating the raw stuff of the world they lived in that Beta lagged behind and followed her lead in; she found a way to use her smarts to do things to the world, things that didn’t require much emotion. She learned alchemical methods that combined certain parts of the world with certain other parts in certain times and places that yielded results beneficial to her and Beta’s continued evolution and existence. Methods that, unlike Beta’s random results, consistently and reliably brought the world into harmony with themselves and were conducive to their livelihood. Beta followed along, and slowly but surely he began to get it—the three of them were one. His emotions had never really even been his own to begin with; they were always placed in a position that filled the gap between the world’s and Dalet’s, therefore their emotions were just as relevant to him as his; in fact, they determined them completely. And so he became buoyed by these new, non-horn related skills that he’d developed, and they could both say that they were entering a new, happier age, and that those bad years they’d previously had with all that uncertainty and abrupt and unpredictable change were finally behind them….

Quinten’s sci-fi

Birth of Luna

Memetic Alchemy

Apocalypto