There is no perfect Enso.
(A Sci-Fi ultrashort)
It was visceral. Mind glowingly so.
Like carving a chicken and opening its core to reveal the smooth white flesh, the lecture opened my mind to reveal the moment of ecstasy.
A good lecture they say is like fresh water upon a parched desert, and in this case, every single drop of his ‘water’ words sparkled with a sense of hedonistic abandon. I had heard him before, but never have his words, of prose and myth, embedded in a semi-scientific jargon, which we could barely understand, awakened in me the sense of inner prosperity.
The battle of sensations subsided just as it started, with a whimper, allowing my intellect some breathing room, permitting winds of change to enter the innermost recesses of my sense thoughts.
I study material pataphysics by the way.
The unobtainium thesis to be precise; A theory so profound as to seem almost bland.
Until that fateful day of course, until he opened his lecture with the auspicious statement:
“There is no perfect Enso …”
***
Enso was an ideal, a perfection of freedom and emptiness, an attainment worthy of the greatest of us, its claim for elegance, the epitome of unrestrained action in immediacy, the ultimate act of the brave of spirit, seeking, encountering, and defeating in one quasi-mystical, mastership stroke, the chaos of perception, action, motion.
That was the spiritual Enso but in the twenty-second century, the discovery of the Mika containment paradox in physics led some of our research teams to the exploration of the elusive substance of the Mika containment, the legendary Unobtainium.
Some said that Unobtainium is like an Enso, it cannot be reached and will forever remain beyond our grasp.
But that would have been true only if there existed a perfect Enso, hence the epiphany.
No perfect Enso implied no perfect Unobtainium and thus perfectly obtainable, and maybe, just maybe, within our grasp.
There and then was my destiny sealed.
My goal is the substance of the unobtainium.
Waking up that day was not a call to rediscover reality, in fact, due to the precise counting of the rejuvenation death clock, each and every morning required a conscious decision to stop the clock and reset its monitoring activity for another twenty-four hours. This morning however she couldn’t decide if to wake up again or to let the counter run its course and finally end the awkwardness of choosing to be alive for another day.
The fact that she had chosen this kind of inner retardation to be able to complete her research was beside the point, for though she had a purpose and a mission, she was, in a manner of speaking, emotionally depleted.
Not that emotional exhaustion was a novelty, but at times, the expressive requirements of deep penetration into the Mika containment after strapping her head-mounted logic sensorium (hMLS) were too much even for her extensive training.
From the initial penetration she knew that today would be different, everything worked precisely, the penetration technology totally prescient in its responses to her queries and yet, something was different, the extended sensorium felt bigger, wider, deeper, as if during the night an upgraded version had been installed. So though she knew that no such thing had happened since any upgrade depended on her for implementation, she was on the lookout for bugs, slight variations on the regular procedure, and anything out of the ordinary. Anything that hinted that maybe, finally, a workaround to her constraining rationality was at hand.
The sense of vast expanses was only partly familiar, and the ecosphere of information contained in the Mika was only partially recognizable. What precisely was offbeat was still a mystery to her vision analysis, her extended taste buds in the info-space prodding and probing the habitual slightly lavender-like smell of the contained reaction, a quirk of the system they said, but no one knew for sure why that kind of information should taste and smell like lavender. She filed the required analysis results away for further classification later on and penetrated deeper into the Mika, the sensorium easily accommodating her mental orders and direction.
The shapes, multiple fractal-like objects seemingly of dodecahedron properties, repeating normally ad infinitum had the texture of strong rubber, giving in to her mental fingers, resisting further manipulation, as always that is where she was stuck, where she was the most frustrated.
She knew the Mika contained a vital element, she reported as much on a number of occasions, yet proof was forever elusive.
Her sensorium hearing extended to its maximum, and she relaxed into the shimmering elementals of perception, the information flowing easily around her virtuality.
The pleasure was a poignant touching, slowly unveiling through tactile, auditory, and visual reactions prompting her to engage.
She gently opened herself to the tentacles of sensation, surreptitiously enveloping the last residues of her long-forgotten identity.
Being and knowing were merging in the Mika infosphere engulfing her memories and though she knew deeply that reason would not lift her to the heights of necessary insights, letting reason go was almost as painful as those moments of conscious awareness.
Her depth of perception in these moments could only be outmatched by her total immersion. Plunging into the dimness of the sphere, designating the brevity of her existence, she finally let go.
She entered the abyss of kinship. She met the unobtainium.
The ritual of joining performed, information poetics became her new language, transformation was almost complete.
***
She opens her eyes.
The first moment, disorienting, entrancing, her visual cortex unsure, uncertain, her brain trying to make sense of what she was registering.
The colors are impossible, the shapes flowing, the texture is fluid, the surface inconsistent, reality unstable… and yet.
She is floating in tandem with a rhythm she does not know, a beating of an alien heart, an echo of a drumming that bears no harmony but a bottomless dissonance.
She closes her eyes.
Afterglows of sensations, deciphering activated reminding her of those crypto zoology creatures she once read about, unreal, she knows, yet so alluring, their features, sensible, their smell, ultimately erotic, passively attractive, she dismisses them with a thought.
Show me, she says, to no one.
Eyelids fluttering, she breaths deeply. She clutches the chair and knows she is venturing way beyond her comfort zone.
Creatures gone. Sound resumes, green sound, purple sound, red rhythms, leaves appearing to fall from nonexistent trees, meaty leaves, growing, expanding, showing off their veins, pulsating with nutrients, passing through.
She follows the passion, the sense of being fed, her digestive tract bypassed, she feels heavy, pregnant with minerals, her body becoming chemically unhinged, restoring order, she calls… show me!
Her heart beats faster, her own pulse condensing years into moments, memories obliterated, in their stead fresh ones arrive, uninvited at first, she knows these are not hers, yet somehow, they are.
She is big, encompassing the moment, encompassing the space of her existence, knowledge of identities unknown flowing through her, fast, she melts into these, conformism forgotten, vibrations ensue.
Her legs feel paralyzed, but she knows it is not so, she wiggles her toes for confirmation, she resumes her penetration, her continued exploration, a wave, carrying no implication and no ethos.
Realization, unobtainium is a living thing, a non-perfect Enso.
***
She dances, inside, she is motionless, the cams all around registering nothing, the monitors connected to the logic sensorium showing a steady rhythm, oxygen levels nominal, blood flow to the parietal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex glowing with increased vigor.
She manages an insightful grasping, she must follow the contentment, the joy, the intimacy, she must follow the pleasure…
She locks into it, she looks into her intimacy with the paradoxical beast, this scent again, lavender.
Comprehension dawns, information molds, and morphs, self-perpetuating a machinery of sensation, infinite.
Her pleasure becomes tantric, the realization of tantric pleasure reflecting the beast, it is gentle but fierce, a furnace that will not be tamed. The power of the beast over the letting go process is immense, for though it is momentary in nature it carries an infinity of sensations that are forever rejuvenating her thought processes.
It gives her the carousel of arousal and impregnates her moment with an elixir of innovative sensations, expanding her nervous system across times and spaces known but untouched.
Edge of chaos dynamics suddenly appeared as a vantage point from which she could see the potential, she knew the hypothesis had very little support, yet she was factually embedded in a re-interpretation of the edge and she would not deny it.
She feels entangled, her lovers joined in the intelligence of her flow, the beingness of the unobtainium clearly defined, the substance it provides her with a fresh tapping into a new tolerance for the paradox of intelligence.
***
Joining her dragons she condenses them into one, unobtainium, it beckons her to transform it into something else, something she can use, something we can all use, something future generations will remember her for. For she was the first one.
Unobtainium is a beast, a unique beast, a creature of such intelligence and ferocity that its very existence remains untouched, for though we thought that unobtainium was material, albeit exotic and elusive, it turned out to be a rare form of life.
She becomes the Mika, she becomes the Enso, she becomes unobtainium, she transforms the substance, she becomes mythos…
She opens her eyes again, the lab silent, rising, she removes the unneeded sensorium, her senses fully immersed in multiple realities, she smiles, she knows…
He was perfectly correct, her epiphany was justified.
There is no perfect Enso
There is no end to there.
