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 t...

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