Friday, August 29, 2014

The Infinite You're Loop.

You're an infinitely looping complex system, straining at the seams by trying to be. You're out for a walk to clear your head in the crisp winter air. You had sentimental reasons for the walk, now you can't remember them, sentiments are beginning to feel alien to you, everything appears to resolve into cost-benefit variables on some energy landscape. You feel the return of an unwelcome, yet, familiar numbness, an inescapable attractor made of synaptic impulses. It's not all-encompassing though, it never numbs the dull ache and weariness of being, nothing does. You remember how this will go, you recognize the inevitability of it, you wonder how you could stop it, but the neurons doing the wondering are the neurons dragging you into this. You see flashes of yourself in various states of - unbeing, almost tranquil, morbid beauty marred by your presence. Branching thoughts recognizing the cognitive short-cuts, the failure in pattern-recognitions, built in error checking you suppose. Your own face has long ago ceased to be a coherent set of feature vectors, it's all a reflection of the ache, you don't see anything human simply a collection that caricatures real anatomy.

You're a collection of racing neural impulses in a bid for dominance, forged through millennia of ruthless evolution, an unseeing algorithm's attempt at survival. Patterns that enabled preservation were reinforced, self-destructive instincts weakened but not killed, you can't be completely risk averse, even algorithms are aware of local minimas. The arbitrary mutation that will allow you to end the ache fights against instincts that were born of natural selection and tempered by time. You're all too aware of the implications of this internal conflict, withdrawing from pain like a bleeding limb reacts to an open flame, despite its need to be cauterized.

You're a cell in the emergent automata of the city, an aberrant cell that the numbness will scrub. Disconnected from everything around you, you'd be at peace if not for the ache. Traversing crowds as though you're flowing through them, like a stone through molasses, your thoughts as languid as the imagery would suggest. You feel alone even though you're surrounded by people, you feel separate, isolated, you've tried to drown in the company of people before, it never helps, they're never enough. The urge to leave wins in a sudden chatter of activity, you turn abruptly and weave your way through the sea of alien others and their alien concerns, attempting to catch the next bus. The traffic light provides a constant dull stimulus of red, and you see the bus closing in to the stop at a distance, the red shows no sign of changing to green. Feet tapping, fingers fidgeting a sudden itch on the sole of your feet the urge to leave has become unbearable, the thought of having to wait those fifteen minutes before the next bus arrives tears at your insides. The decision is made for you, you react as you're intended to, run across the street, the bus screeches, but you're across now, senses sharper, the feeling of being heightened, having survived your system's flooded with adrenaline, cortisol or serotonin, you can't remember and you don't care, you try to hold on to that feeling of not caring as the numbness reasserts itself.

You're a recursive Ouroboros like subroutine in a tangled higher dimension, knotted and twisting, contradictory and seemingly intersecting with yourself if observed. Having barely made it across others are staring, internally questioning your sanity, little do they realize how close they may be to the truth. As people look at you the mask descends , it's natural, the lips curve upwards, eyes get a crinkle around them, the cadence of your voice changes increases, all are meant to imply upbeat. You look around, trying to appear sheepish, hoping to offset scrutiny, blend in. The bus driver is enraged, you would have been a dark mark against his driving record, he asks you what you were thinking. You wonder how best to answer the question. You consider the correct lie end this quickly. Your thoughts race after one another like the ouroboros attempting to swallow themselves and suddenly: insight. Looking into yourself you grasp the tail of the recursive animal and you begin: "Imagine You're an infinitely looping complex system, straining at the seams by trying to be".

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