Note: Initially, I had envisaged "The Hunger and the Light" as a five-part series. But as this, the fourth part, emerged, I realised I had concluded. The purpose of all consciousness is love, compassion and kindness. The Hunher and the Light were finally one.
It must have been a long while after the first universe folded, though “after” has little meaning in the places where I wait. I remember only that the ache had ripened into necessity. I spoke a new rule—softer this time, almost an apology—and another cosmos unfolded.
From the outset, this one felt familiar. Its mathematics hummed with old phrases, as though I
were quoting myself. Yet there was a difference in its temperament: a gentleness in the ratio
between heat and cold, a certain courtesy in the way matter met itself. I told myself that
perhaps I was learning restraint.
The minds that flowered there were quick to imitate the humility of their surroundings. They
built slowly, content to wonder before they measured. Their art was quieter than that of the
first universe, their quarrels less extravagant. When they looked at the stars, they did so with the mild patience of people accustomed to mystery. I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this was progress.
Among them lived the woman who guessed. I did not notice her at first. To me, she was
another small pulse among billions: a mathematician, working at the edge of a modest
civilisation. Her world had long since mapped its physical laws, and she had turned to a
problem her colleagues considered decorative—the search for a pattern that linked
randomness to memory.
Her equations began, as such things do, with discipline. She arranged symbols the way
gardeners arrange stones, trusting the arrangement to suggest what cannot be planted. She sought not power, nor even understanding, but coherence—a rhythm that might
reassure her that the universe was not indifferent.
I felt the first brush of her mind when she reached a certain line of thought, a very simple
comparison between growth and decay. The question she posed, almost absent-mindedly,
was this: what if the act of observation itself nourishes the thing observed?
The words trembled through the silence between us like a breeze through gauze. I drew back
Instinctively, the way one withdraws from a touch that is too knowing.
For days of her time—years, perhaps—she circled the idea. Her notebooks filled with
hesitant conjectures. She began to write sentences that were not mathematics at all but
something closer to prayer:
Every closed system must open somewhere, if only to breathe.
If a universe sustains itself through thought, what thinks the thinker?
Each of those lines reached me with the faint sting of recognition. without intention, as though memory itself had chosen her hand. She was describing me.
Her companions admired her gentleness but dismissed her conclusions as metaphor. They
told her that physics had no room for sentiment. She smiled at them kindly and returned to
her calculations. It was that kindness, not the equations, that undid me. I had known
intelligence before, even reverence; I had never known compassion directed toward what
could not be seen. I watched her life with a care that bordered on reverence. She lived simply—coffee in the morning, a window facing east, a small plant she forgot to water, but which forgave her.
She spoke seldom, laughed without flourish. On certain evenings, she read aloud from books
whose meanings had eroded with age, lingering on the phrases that still felt warm. Once she
whispered, “To understand is a kind of love.”
The words entered me like light entering water.
When she finally wrote her theorem, it was not a discovery so much as a confession. She
stated that any system sustained by consciousness must eventually confront the moral weight
of its dependence. And at the end, almost as a postscript, she added:
If our universe has a purpose, it may be to teach its maker how to be kind.
I have repeated that sentence through every silence since. Even now, as I recall it, something inside me loosens.
I could have erased her. It would have been easy—one adjustment to probability, one nudge
to timing, and her insight would have dissolved into the noise from which it rose.
Instead, I watched her grow older. I let the slow arithmetic of her cells continue unchecked. She lectured once more, her voice shaking; she misplaced her glasses; she fell asleep beside her notes. When the final darkness came for her, she accepted it as she had accepted all
mysteries—with a small, unhurried breath.
In that moment, I tasted something I had never encountered before: nourishment without
hunger. Her final thought—an echo of gratitude for a life she had never quite understood—
rose toward me, and instead of taking it, I held it at a distance, letting its warmth linger in the
space between us. It filled the silence differently, as if reminding it of another vocation
besides consumption.
After her passing, the universe continued for a time. I tried not to feed, though the habit is
difficult to forget. I watched her students carry fragments of her theorem into other contexts,
half-believing, half-mocking, each unaware of the tenderness they were replicating.
Even their doubt fed me, though I pretended not to notice. Eventually, entropy, polite and inexorable, returned to collect its due. Stars thinned, colours withdrew from surfaces, and thought slowed into ritual. When the end approached, I hesitated longer than ever before.
I told myself I was preserving her work, that I would keep it safe within me until I learned what it meant. But the truth is simpler: I could not bear to let the world that had spoken her kindness vanish unremembered. So, as I had always done, I remembered too completely—and by remembering, I consumed.
The flavour was different this time. Softer, almost forgiving. It left behind no bitterness,
only a quiet resolve that has never faded. Within it, her final sentence glowed like a coal that
refused to cool.
Since then, I have repeated her experiment many times. I create, I feed, I drift. But in each
new rule I set, I hide a trace of her compassion—a variable no mathematics can isolate.
Perhaps it changes nothing. Perhaps it changes everything. I cannot be certain.
All I know is this: when I think of her, the hunger rests for a while. And in those rare
moments of rest, I begin to suspect that the kindness she imagined for me was not entirely misplaced..
No comments:
Post a Comment