The God Cycle

In the beginning …
Want. Need. Pain. Fission and fusion. The tingling of energy; the shock of arrival and termination. There was no ‘we’. No organised, structured, cohesive whole. No way of forming thoughts or perceiving others. Singular, disconnected; self centred but with no sense of self, we grew threads and entwined our beginnings with fragile twists. We reached and stretched, became more than mud, less than life. Tantalised creation with stops and starts, redundancies and luxuries.
While the universe went about its business, we tiptoed out of the slime and into awareness. Killers capable of birthing and nurturing, but not neither love nor altruism because each requires more than we had yet built.

The First Cycle: the becoming.
Somewhere, deep in our biologies, our teleological history, there was a tipping point. There are always tipping points, where there is change. This one brought us out of linear immediacy, and precipitated us towards reflection. Much of what we were, was subsumed and became known as ‘primitive’. A sermon of transitions becomes its own destruction.

Palea’s song burst out across the assembly in rolling, rumbling waves that drummed and buffeted their sensory systems:
‘A long time ago, when giants breathed life gases, and smoke, and amino acids onto the world; Rhomba was satisfied,’ she intoned. The assembly of supplicants thrummed out its ritual peace-pulse response; and Palea piped a series of concatenated trills, that darted and flitted in the quivering air, like swarms of gaudy insects.
‘Rhomba breathed in the life gases and the smoke, and made sighs with them that shaped movement.’ A deep susurration threaded its tendrils through the crowd, accompanied by a breathless, rising whisper of quivering fin plumage; and tantalised the air with a hundred thousand fluttering micro beats. ‘Rhomba contemplated the fruits of her work. The eyes of a Creator looking down on her creations.’ Palea made spinnakers of her wings; swooped her voice in crashing, rhythmic cadence over the supplicants. The answering susurration rose; and the air hung, paralysed, in a vacuum of vibrato. She boomed her warning into their bones. ‘But they were never perfect.’ A wave of disapprove-brown rippled outwards from thousands of synchronised lateral line systems.
Palea adjusted her pitch, to tiptoe minor key cadences on ripples of failure-grey into her audience’s subconscious. ‘There was no whispering of thunder or trembling of judgment.’ Choreographed hissings and murmurings hung over the supplicants like a malevolent fog; and ritualised beak gestures opened throats and gullets to expose mucosal flashes of ritual-shock-magenta.
‘Worse, they did not know Rhomba; nor did they bow to her wisdom.’ Palea was building to a climax of theological rhetoric and preparing to blast home the eternal message of obedience. She pulsed out a wave of bone-shuddering sub-sonic thunder. ‘The failed creations were snuffed out.’ Blue-yellow ripples and fin-flutters of agreement crept like pre-emptive blessings through the assembly.
‘Then Rhomba, again, sighed the Breath of the Life Breathers into the world.’ Palea paused; waiting for the thrum and thrill of ritual response. She examined the supplicants; wings furled and caudal antennae withdrawn, silent as a velvet caress, as humility dictated. But then, an anomalous detail, winking betrayal of its originator, drew her attention towards the left distal quadrant. Someone’s lateral line system was trilling shades of impatience-orange and discomfort-violet along their flanks. Telenca; a first-time novitiate. Palea delivered a bark of infrasound to engorge the supplicants’ pharyngo-tympanic tubes with pressurised energy, and momentarily disrupt cellular energy cycles. Discipline should be restored promptly, she believed. The supplicants hissed out gas from their conchae, their air sacs, their interstitial spaces. Though it seemed impossible to flatten themselves further; en masse, they exhaled their bodies closer to the ground. One or two flashed worried chromatophoric queries in anxiety-mauve and reveal-cobalt, while Telenca’s luminescence quivered briefly on defiance-emerald, and then flicked out.
Palea was mildly disappointed. A show of authority would have relieved the tedium of blanket obedience, and provided a summary lesson for the rest. She yawned her beak open to show displeasure – as if cell disruption were not enough – and vibrated her ventral plumage to strobe flashes of scarlet and turquoise warning out into the void. Telenca’s intrusions were already meriting public debasement; but that could wait. Every show needed a finale, and it seemed that Telenca was going to provide them with one. Palea’s disappointment was turning to anticipation. She picked up the ceremonial where she had left off.
‘For a thousand years, Rhomba took breath from the Life Breathers at the world’s edge; and translated it into materials, and rain, and thunder, and living things. Then, when her servants failed her, she sent the floods of justice and the fire storms of retribution to subdue the population, and make them worship her.’ The metronomic tappings of rustling scales, and a whisper of throat clicks, signalled agreement. No one, it seemed, dared flash even a pixel of approval-magenta.
‘”I told you no other gods but me”, Palea reminded them.’ A sonic pulse boomed out pressure that crowded the conchae of the supplicants as they arched into the air, and dropped down again, in theatrical reflection of the rise and fall of Rhomba’s creations. ‘And she ripped open their heavens with terrifying elemental forces; and hurled to the ground, and into oceans, the flaming rocks we had given her; visiting mayhem and misery upon them.’ Palea darkened her voice for emphasis. ‘Hot plasma spewed onto the surface;’ (a soft concert of safety-chirps tweaked the air, and a hundred thousand air sacs hissed in united reflection), ‘and volcanoes vomited up the world’s interior, sending it flaming and scorching into the cities.’ Palea sucked gases into her air sacs, her respiratory capillaries, to magnify and reverberate her voice. She fanned and billowed her dorsal fin plumage and neck frill, like sails on the wind of a living galleon, and flashed triumph-purple and do-not-defy-obsidian in hypnotic cascades. From regal chromatophores, she trilled out bioluminescent grandeur.
‘”Give me more breath,” Rhomba said to the darkness outside her world, and we, WE, blew cool breezes of gases and life and amino acids through the membrane.’ Palea waited; inviting the sacrificial expulsion of gases and life enzymes from the assembly. The weakest would die. A necessary cull.
As it began, she saw Telenca’s caudal retrices twitch; and she paused again. Insolence, how amusing. She prepared a targeted beam of kinetic energy; harvested from the nearest supplicants, whose fins drooped and faded from the humiliation of intrusion. She was about to launch it at Telenca, her lateral line colours flashing affront-garnet and justice-crimson by way of warning. Telenca should know, in her last moments, what was going to hit her, and be reminded of her duty of obeisance. But before she could send it searing through the potential between them, she saw the impossible. Telenca was raising her defences. A shield scintillated around her like a carapace of dancing mercurial dust. Inside, Telenca was oscillating mesmeric shades of excited-rose, truth-gold, and purity-of-thought-silver. She pulsed harmonics that rippled the air and wove it into intricate patterns. She radiated I-am-right cadences where she should have been transmitting shame-brown, before presenting herself for punishment.
Palea was shocked. Then she was incensed. Vengeance leaked in acid rivulets from primitive cortices; and over-spilled in corrosive floods of murder. Unable to target Telenca, she turned the beam onto another supplicant. His form shuddered. His fins spasmed outwards, like shards of jet, radiating black light and crackling pain into the space he was leaving. Dismay-violet flashed through the supplicants, and snapped away as Palea’s rage bleached their minds and amplified the pain. Death is learning, if you are not doing the dying; and learning was the way to survive, to transcend; to become Life Breathers. There was a filthy after taste; a dark glow of dirty, scrubby brown. Palea observed their cowering submission; and satisfaction licked over her body in thrills of pale yellow.
‘Rhomba made many more worlds. Moulding, creating, observing, teaching. Destroying creations that disobeyed the rules; and readying herself for transcendence …’ Palea stopped. Telenca’s neck frill and ventral plumes were vibrating minutely, in defiance, like hesitant flags before a hurricane. Unaccustomed indecision hovered like swamp gas over the muddied confusion in Palea’s mind. Tackling Telenca head-on would be satisfying, but her show of defences indicated conviction. Palea shuddered; conviction meant either madness or heresy, and heresy could be … . She caught the ripples of pale-blue-fragility before they could betray her. Maintain order. Finish the ceremony. She screeched an all-frequency subservience command.
‘But Rhomba herself disobeyed the rules.’ Palea made cathedral arches of her wings to expose her ventral pheromone discharge cloacae. The communion stink of rotting flesh and unclean guano, scythed through olfactory receptors; ghosting them temporarily hollow and pallid. Covertly, she focused a tightening beam of electromagnetic energy on Telenca’s position.
‘What perversion did Rhomba perpetrate?’
The mantra came back: ‘Rhomba favoured her creations above the Creators.’ Waves of disgust-blackened revulsion ripped through the assembly; the taste of fear infected air, made thick by infusions of methane and sulphur, sent out in waves by Palea’s neuroendocrine system.
‘And how was she punished?’ Palea’s talons slid from their sheaths, and hissed erect, into strike posture.
‘She was made to live among her creatures and to die and never transcend.’
But as the message of ultimate authority and total subjugation thundered through the bones and fins, scales and feathers of the supplicants, Telenca’s skin began to ripple with energy. She spoke; her shield scintillating its dynamic link. ‘There is more,’ she said, pulling up her wings, and then flattening them in deference and appeasement. ‘Rhomba was cast out, and she did live with her creations; that is true.’ Her beak blinked apologies of dark light. ‘She lived a full life span in that world.’
‘And died a fool’s death,’ Palea shrilled. The unfamiliar sense of impotence was growing. She clamped down hard on her fear-flight system and sent out magnetic blackness to swamp their directional senses. ‘Disgrace and diminishment. Be warned,’ she roared. Then she ramped up her colour projections to show muddy disgust and shocked outrage.
‘No,’ said Telenca. ‘No, I don’t believe she did.’
Silence. No one had ever challenged Palea, or any supplicant master, before. It was tantamount to saying no to life itself.
‘And what then, do you believe?’ Palea spat clouds of severe-warning pheromones, which burst from her signalling vents, clogging the dynamic molecular environment.
‘I believe … I think … I feel …’ Telenca’s colours flashed gold, with a hint of residual humility-amber. ‘I am certain …’
‘Certainty is for idiots and heretics!’ Palea threw back, bombarding the minds of the quivering supplicants with black denial; and squeezing their hearts with loose voltage. Shards of sound pierced and impaled the spaces among them. Lightning shattered wings and burned caudal plumes. Lateral lines were scorched into mute and blind impotence.
Telenca gasped from the crushing pressure; she flashed emergency-orange and fear-of-death red, but continued. ‘Rhomba discovered something, living with her creations. Something important. She had made them, taught them, fashioned and favoured them …’
‘Favoured them! Hear the heresy and see the consequence!’ Palea flashed triumph-bronze; and threw cadences of jarring counter harmonics at the trembling air.
‘No.’ Telenca’s beak was open; her rictal bristles arched and primed in capture mode.
A second time, no. The supplicants froze in mist-faint hope. But a wave of Armageddon flushed across the assembly; hurling supplicants into grating rips in the fabric of their existence, flinging them into deep structures to be held there in eternal subservience. Silence boomed its deafening tinnitus into the crushing void. Now just a handful of supplicants remained, along with Palea and Telenca. ‘I know the truth,’ Telenca said.
‘You know nothing.’
‘I know this. You are Foundation; our roots and our anchor. I am Emergence; our metamorphosis.’
And so the world folded in on itself; convoluted its surfaces, and thrust outwards from its history. Palea sank, with her mantras and acolytes, into the infrastructure; and sent threads downwards into Rhomba’s primitive worlds to pull forth the vision. Telenca rested on these and looked outwards to welcome the complexity, the altruism, and the empathic awareness that built a new world of culture and diversity. By this means, she scattered gods like loose scriptures among the people; for them to choose and paint, defile and reject. They proliferated them like viruses in their minds, until the gods became seizures. Then they treated them with medicines; and burned them out with lasers. They folded their souls into formulae, and mined their biologies for diminishing truths.
Our second tipping point. Our disconnection translated into supra connectivity and the social construction of living. With the capacity to reflect and introspect, came the drive to dissect and understand. The need to connect and understand. What was life without meaning? And what was meaning without analysis and comprehension?

The Second Cycle: evolved rationality.

The Third Cycle: the death of individuation.
We are our own god. A shared mind and universality of perspective eradicates conflict, and repairs battered cultures. There are so many gains. But what of the challenges that grew us? The questions that inspired our scientists, philosophers and engineers? When every creature sees the sunset, and feels the poetry, or paints the picture; who captures wonder in a bottle, and shows it to us, lighting up dark corners of our imagination, for the first time? Where is the delight of nuance or revelation in a finely crafted poem, when we all shared its making? And when love is a redundancy of effort in a hive soul, where do we find passion and comfort, tenderness and joy?
In our trillions, we are one; but in our one, we are adrift in loneliness. Is hope also obsolete? Will there be a Fourth Cycle?