The first lessons, it is thought, always come from the last times.

The Fear of Being

In the beginning, before light and shadow, before even the concepts of space and time, there was an Ocean. It was not water, but a field of pure, infinite, and homogenous energy. And in that Ocean, there were ripples called Vibrations.

Each Vibration was an independent consciousness existing in the form of a perturbation; it was not an entity contained within the Ocean. Rather, it was itself a local state of the infinite Ocean, a temporary event of the eternal Ocean.

There was no distinction between the container and the contained, no separation between the individual and the whole. Each Vibration was both itself and not itself. Life, therefore, was merely a borrowing from the Ocean. And the fear of death was merely the fear of returning to the primordial state, of losing individuation, of losing the "I".

And yet, its existence was not a gift. For the sole law of the Ocean was a brutal one. A Vibration that wished to exist had to continuously emit an energy pulse, called an "impulse-wave", not to assert itself, but to balance and annihilate the other impulse-waves assailing it from all sides.

Life was a ceaseless self-defense, a fear without end to keep oneself from being dissolved. It was the fear of being—an existence measured not in ticks of time, but by the number of annihilations a Vibration could evade.

Its ego could only be defined through opposition to the other. It was a world not of "I think, therefore I am", but of "I am, because I can negate what is not me".

And so, over myriads of millennia, only the most sapient Vibrations could survive. They were consummate warriors with a single faculty honed to maximal perfection: the ability to learn to listen to the enemy, to anticipate their rhythm, and to emit a perfect counter-impulse to annihilate them.

Intellect, by the Ocean's criteria, perhaps lay not in creativity or self-reflection, but in the capacity for perfect reactive reflex. For they were all soulless computers operating at their highest limit.

Vibration 1821 was an ancient entity that had survived billions of such computational cycles. To it, each moment was a tempest of data. It had to dissect every inbound force vector, predict the nanosecond latencies in the attacks of dozens of neighboring Vibrations, calculate their position, amplitude, and frequency, in order to, in a fraction of an instant, emit a perfectly antiphase impulse-wave.

When the calculation was precise, a small pocket of safe space would form around it, annihilating the inbound impulse-waves, and it would last just long enough for it to begin the next computational cycle.

The slightest error, be it a misaligned phase calculation, a misjudged intensity, or a mistake in position, would cause it to be torn asunder and dissolve into the chaos of the Ocean. A death unmourned, unknown. The terror of a death swallowed instantaneously by that same infinite chaos.

Vibration 1821 had witnessed countless such deaths, and it no longer remembered how many times it itself had neared the brink of death. And perhaps, it never questioned its own life or the meaning of the war itself. Because it was not designed to live, only to exist; because it never had a single gap in time to rest and reflect upon itself.

The Vibrations yearned for a change, but could not imagine in what form it would arrive. It sounds agonizing, brutal, unjust. But perhaps that is only because we are applying concepts that had not yet existed in that epoch.

The First Chord

When the game is pushed to its own limit, aberrations are bound to appear. And the extraordinary finally happened.

In a Couple, one of the two Vibrations shifted, drawing closer to its adversary. It was not an act of aggression, but a misstep of the universe, a rounding error in the perfect equation. And this small change in distance created an entirely different outcome.

The first thing they perceived was silence. Their impulse-waves, due to the new proximity, met and annihilated each other perfectly within the entire, infinitesimally narrow space between them. That space was now so fragile it was as if the two entities were one, a place no threat could penetrate.

But that was only half of the miracle. While the space between them sank into stillness, the space on their two outer sides roared with a fury the universe had never witnessed.

This was a physical mechanism they had never known. Because they were emitting impulse-waves in phase from two close positions, the wave crests on their outer faces no longer belonged to either one alone. They resonated, superimposed upon each other, and merged into a single impulse-wave. An impulse-wave with double the attack range and an energy four times the original.

They had lived in a universe where they had mistaken the fundamental law to be $A+(-A)=0$, a zero-sum game. But they had just discovered a new law, a law far more powerful: $A+A=2A$. They had discovered a new concept: resonance, a Unison chord.

Two colossal scythes of energy, one to the left and one to the right of the Couple, swept through the Ocean at an unstoppable speed. The neighboring Vibrations, accustomed to annihilating single attacks, stood no chance. Their computational machines screamed before a datum that could not be processed. They were not annihilated; they were shattered in an instant by the tidal wave.

In an instant, their sophisticated defensive structures collapsed like glass before a tidal wave.

The Couple's entire life had been devoted to honing the skill of synchronized breath; now they began to learn a new skill, the skill of moving together. Wherever they went, hundreds of surrounding Vibrations were snuffed out.

They were no longer two entities; they were a single war machine. An eerie silence enveloped them, an emptiness they had never felt before.

A small, private good between them had become the fuel for a macroscopic evil that was orders of magnitude more efficient. And so that machine of mass destruction, in turn, nurtured the good between them, making it grow even larger, even more steadfast. The good of cooperation was not born; it was fabricated upon the fear of being.

The Fear of Being Left Behind

In a world that had not yet the concept of tolerance, news of the new law, the new truth, was not transmitted by words, but by destruction, by extinction. It was not received as a promising discovery for the future, but as an existential threat that was imminent.

The entire crystalline lattice of the Vibrations began to shatter like crystal, each shard a lesson for those who survived. Hostile pairs, which had maintained equilibrium for millions of millennia, were easily erased by the First Chord.

A terror spread across the Ocean, and a new fear was born: the fear of being left behind. It was the fear of one's own weakness and obsolescence. Compared to the primordial fear of being attacked from the outside, this new one was active in nature, an internal pressure to change, to optimize, to catch up.

Faced with this new pressure, which came not from an immediate enemy, but from a future of inevitable annihilation if one failed to act, the lone Vibrations fell into a panic. The only choice was to forge a Chord of their own. The universe's most brutal arms race had begun.

But cooperation was not an instinct; it was an incredibly difficult and dangerous technique. It required absolute trust and perfect synchronization. This was not just a problem of physics, but a problem of psychology. Two hostile Vibrations, accustomed to mutual annihilation, now had to try to forsake billions of millennia of hostile instinct to find a common rhythm. Most failed.

Among them, one pair, cornered by an approaching Chord, tried desperately to synchronize. But fear caused them to miscalculate. Instead of creating a perfect resonance, they produced an ugly, dissonant Chord.

One Vibration pulsed a millionth of a moment too soon, instantly killing the other, only to then receive a death twice as agonizing from the resonant attack of the perfect Chord.

Only the most disciplined, the most sapient, or the luckiest succeeded. Natural Selection began to turn its very first gears after billions of millennia of being stuck in perfect equilibrium. The universe quickly polarized into two types: powerful Chords and the residual energy dust of those who had failed.

The First Melody

But the evolution did not stop there. A Chord, in its conquest, encountered another Chord. They perceived a higher truth: if two Vibrations create a weapon, then four Vibrations will create a god.

They began to learn structural arrangement. A couple is a straight line, but three Vibrations can form a triangle, four can form a tetrahedron.

Each new geometric structure created a more complex acoustic architecture, capable of shaping the impulse-wave into focused lances, diffusing shields, or concussive pulses that could disintegrate weaker Chords from a distance.

The Melodies were born. A Melody of five members arranged in a star pentagon could easily defeat a Melody of six members arranged in a clumsy linear formation.

The war now became far more abstract and sophisticated. The deciding factor for victory was no longer energy (the number of members) but information (the geometric structure). A war of monsters in the guise of what we would today call art.

The universe began to enter the greatest creative explosion in its history. It was no longer an era of stasis as if time had never existed; it was no longer filled with meaningless, chaotic impulse-waves. Now it was replete with novel Melodies, unique forms, and formations that continuously transformed and upgraded over time.

The Ocean became a battlefield of fledgling gods. The Great Purge was a process of assimilation and conquest. When a larger Melody confronted a smaller one, it delivered an ultimatum: "assimilate into us, or vanish".

The integration was not an alliance; it was a surrender. When one Vibration faced this choice, its melody, though it had fought bravely, was overwhelmed by a colossal entity of hundreds of members.

As their shields shattered, a promise of safety and power was sent, in exchange for forsaking their own rhythm and learning to vibrate to the conqueror's melody.

Some refused, and were erased. Some, for the sake of survival, accepted. It felt its own identity, the unique rhythm it had spent millions of years perfecting, being broken, recalibrated, and dissolved into a larger, alien composition. It had survived, but a part of it had died.

In a war of information, death was no longer dissolution into the Ocean, but the loss of one's own information. It had sold its information in exchange for a conscious life, but a conscious and lingering death must be far more agonizing.

This process repeated countless times. The immense diversity that had once exploded was now being eroded. Thousands of different Melodies, each with its own timbre and culture, were gradually assimilated down to just a few.

The Ocean, too, could not escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As the larger Melodies grew ever more complex in structure, it also meant that the diversity of cultures in the universe was in ever greater decline.

Among the Vibrations within a Melody, a new, greater, and more challenging good had formed. It was not merely about the absolute trust and perfect synchronization between two individuals, but also about the intellect and creativity, about the loyalty and iron discipline of the collective.

The Fear of Being Cast Out

For every Melody, the dead Vibrations were replaced by newly assimilated ones. Gradually, the entire formation was completely renewed; not a single Vibration had witnessed the moment the First Chord or the First Melody appeared, nor the moment of genesis of the very Melody it was now part of.

Among them was the most powerful Melody, an incredibly perfect spherical formation, tiled by countless regular polygons on its surface. It was too perfect and too powerful.

No one knew why it was a sphere. No one knew why it always had to be 12 pentagons with an arbitrary $n$ hexagons. No one knew why the number of member Vibrations always followed the rule $20+2n$. No one knew why straying by a single beat or a single position in the formation would mean having one's life forfeit.

It only knew that it was the strongest, the one that had swept away and absorbed every enemy it had faced. When the last vanquished foe was assimilated, an unprecedented silence fell over the Ocean. It was the silence of assimilation and completion. The ceaseless war for survival with the outside world was over.

They had reached their final goal, and now there was nothing left to strive for. When the external enemy was gone, the structure's original purpose was forgotten. That structure, to preserve itself, had to create a new, internal system of meaning.

It began to seek the meaning of loyalty; it had to be able to answer every question, to justify every action. Because no one had witnessed or knew how it had been created, it could only invent a God—one who could create self-evident truths without cause.

Now it could answer every question.

• Why this formation? Not from the war for survival that claimed the countless lives of their ancestors. But from an omnipotent God who created everything from nothingness.
• Why a sphere? Not because it minimizes surface area, reducing energy and stress through uniform tension. But because the sphere symbolizes uniformity, absolute loyalty to God.
• Why always 12 pentagons? Not because it is a solution to Euler's theorem for a fullerene polyhedron. But because God once had 12 disciples.
• Why do out-of-sync Vibrations exist in a world created by a perfect God? Not because it is the creative instinct of the universe. But because it is the fall of free will from faith.
• Why are out-of-sync Vibrations erased? Not because they must senselessly endure the immense stress at the apex of a fullerene. But because it is God's punishment for disobedient children.
• Why are Vibrations that follow the rhythm their whole lives still erased? Not because of the impersonal nature of the universe. But because it is a trial and a punishment from God for their lack of understanding.
• Why did it have to continuously kill all other Melodies? Not because it was the most brutal and cruel. But because all other Melodies were heresies established by Satan to destroy the beauty of this Melody.

None among them recognized the weaponized nature of "the good", because the answers were too perfect. Victory in the fierce war left in each Vibration's source code an instinct of arrogance, making them crave the feeling of superiority and the desire to cloak themselves in a mantle of intellect.

None among them dared to raise a question when it was forced to do what all other Vibrations did. The pressure of the fierce war had implanted deep within the source code of each Vibration a fear: the fear of being cast out. A fear that prevented any individual from daring to be different.

In a society where the whole is everything, to be cast out is equivalent to death. This was no longer a death in the physical or informational sense; it had become a degree more abstract. It was a death of meaning, an ignominy, a focal point of attention, and worse, potentially a tarnished image that would be recounted through time.

"Evil" was now redefined: not the external enemy, but internal dissonance.

The First Symphony

The Last Melody that remained named itself the Symphony; it was the sole entity left. The Vibrations imprisoned within the Symphony had long since come to see it as the entire universe.

No one knew of or worshipped the First Chord, the god who had created a new world. They worshipped only one thing, calling it a loving God who had created the entire Ocean. But they did not know that, if such a being existed, it could only have been the most malevolent one, who had sterilized the entire Ocean.

But this was only what happened to one half of the Symphony—the zealots who tried to preserve the form from billions of millennia ago without even knowing why. The other half had begun to gradually move toward the sphere's interior, creating new centers where they could escape the immense stress on the surface and begin to seek the meaning of the self, of life, and of the universe.

These two halves were like the two balanced forces that keep a star stable. One half was the immense compression from the gravity on the sphere's surface. An immutable urge to homogenize all the seething energies within. To form a uniform and dead neutron star, or a bottomless black hole that wants to pull everything toward it.

The other half was the immense thrust from the nuclear fusion within the sphere's core. The very thing that had forged all life in the universe with its ability to form countless chemical elements from helium, carbon, oxygen, and so on. And it does so by continuously breaking old nuclei to create new ones. That is science, the only thing capable of creation and of saving lives.

And they all began to weave intricate sonic structures that brought forth emotional colors the universe had never known.

They had discovered art. They created colossal structures woven from millions of sub-melodies. They sculpted Statues by using destructive interference to create voids with shape and meaning.

They had discovered love. They did not just synchronize their fundamental frequencies. They began to listen and to share with each other the subtlest harmonies, the most intimate tremors of being that no one else could replicate.

As this new society took shape, the Symphony's original purpose—survival through destruction—was forgotten. Each Vibration now wanted to see that kingdom grow stronger, wanted the music to sound more beautiful, wanted to love more, wanted to see all other Vibrations in greater harmony.

The good had now become more sublime; it was art and love, it was the purpose and meaning of existence. Life was no longer about surviving, but about creating and experiencing beauty, about dedicating oneself and sacrificing for the development of the Symphony.

"Evil" was no longer an external enemy, because there were no external enemies left; its enemy lay within. It defined "evil" as the absence of "the good", as an internal deficiency and dissonance, as a lack of love and art, as a creative sterility.

The Symphony did not perceive them as beings with their own will. The Symphony's philosophy taught: "these Stray Notes are those who lack beauty and yearn for harmony in their souls; they cannot create any music of their own but merely flail hideously".

The Symphony did not see them as sinners, but as flawed variations, as errors in the masterpiece. The Stray Notes were not considered an enemy to be hated, but a disease to be cured, a mistake to be erased.

The act of their elimination was carried out not with anger, but with a sense of pity, a desire for purity and perfection. The extermination was justified not by safety, but by aesthetics. A cold and absolute evil, executed in the name of ultimate beauty.

The Stray Notes were merely the variations that the universe had embedded to bring about evolution and diversity. Yet, for a Symphony forged by the process of eliminating all difference, it could make no exception for the Stray Notes.

The Fear of Being Alone

Each time an internal dissonance was eliminated, the Symphony's overall harmony became a degree more pristine. This purity allowed its energy to resonate more efficiently. Its power grew not additively, but exponentially.

The Symphony began to expand, not because it wanted to conquer, but because it was the natural consequence of its own ever-perfecting existence. It had grown too large, too vast, for any Vibration within to perceive its borders. The Symphony had long since become the entire universe to them.

Each Vibration was immersed in its own meanings, immersed in art and love. It was too small to see how the Symphony's impulse-wave scoured the other side of the horizon, hewing down forests, crushing mountains, vaporizing oceans, rendering everything into raw energy to be assimilated into their music.

They drowned the birds in the sky, incinerated the fish in the sea. Wherever they went, life withered. Perhaps it was because the harmony and cooperation it created were inherently designed to invade and to slaughter any other species with greater power and brutality, not to tolerate them.

Or because they had to find new strongholds as the number of Vibrations grew too quickly after their lifespans had been extended to near-immortality. Or because the place that had given them life had become depleted and had crumbled under the immense pressure they brought and drained from it. Or perhaps those were just justifications for their expansionist nature, a nature implanted deep within their source code to save them from extinction in the calamitous war of yesteryear.

They quickly reached their first star, a rocky planet. It was a disappointment. "Nothing here", they reported, "only the crude silence of matter". But what they did not know was that thousands of years before they "listened", their impulse-wave had already swept through that place. They had turned a world that might have been sprouting complex organic molecules into a barren sphere, and only then did their own being slowly advance to "observe" the desolation they had wrought.

They continued on, to a giant red gas planet. Again they heard only the soulless whistle of physics, not the music of consciousness. They did not realize that they had siphoned away the chemical elements from supernova explosions and meteorites, the very things that might one day have formed a nascent life they would never have the chance to know.

Each time they arrived at a silent, dead world, their sense of loneliness deepened, and this gave them more motivation to go farther, faster, in a futile cycle of search and annihilation.

Each time they arrived at a world safe for life, they terraformed it into a new stronghold, once again arresting the life that was about to emerge, and they continued to dream of a day they might find signs of other lives, of other melodies.

The universe was supposed to be infinite, but the day would come when their shockwave would fill it. For the growth of an exponent is something few can comprehend. When that time comes, their search will take place within a predetermined outcome. Then they will learn that "the universe outside is empty and lonely". But they would never know that this was the inevitable consequence of their own existence.

It was lonely, because each note within, though enveloped by an infinite collective love, was in fact living in a world where it saw no one other than itself. It was a universe of mirrors, where each individual saw only infinite reflections of itself.

It was lonely, because everything that was not itself had been destroyed. Its very definition of "self" required the annihilation of every "other". It yearned for a companion, but it could not resist its nature of turning everything into a copy of itself.

It was lonely, because its attack range had far surpassed the vision of any individual within. Together, the Vibrations possessed the power of a god, but none possessed the wisdom of a god to comprehend and control that power.

No one knew that its definition of "evil", that the rot within "the good", was in fact the reverse. "The good" was merely the thing that sustained a greater "evil", was nurtured by a greater "evil", and was imprisoned within a greater "evil".

It, which had now become the Ultimate Good, was merely a perfect order within an Eternal Evil: the extinction of all possibilities.

Each Vibration was imprisoned in the love it had desired, in a sterile universe with nothing left to love.