Chapter 13b
Strudelday, Morch 9001, 1924
I am no longer a normal person. I am also not unique. I am the scribbled lines in the margins that struggle to make meaning from the actual text while having almost no meaning to themselves. I am neither the alpha nor the omega. I am a shoddy assembly line knock-off. And yet...I seem to be the last. I felt for so long that I would be the prime unit. Funny how that works, isn't it?
I've thought long and hard about what this means. I know death is coming for me soon. I can feel his icy breath on the back of my neck while I lay awake at nights. He is waiting for me to fall into my final sleep. How is this possible, though? How can I have a final sleep?
These are the questions I've been asking and they are not questions without answers. Quite the opposite, there are too many answers to know which one is right. I guess the question and I have that in common. Maybe I'm just another question with too many answers. Maybe that's the answer to my question.
Can a question be sentient? The obvious answer is no but that leaves so much unconsidered. A question with multiple answers must split the time line in different directions just as a person with multiple fates would. Does each answer not have its own ideas, interpretations and beliefs associated? These are obviously present in the mind of the observer first and foremost but if these are projected onto that query, does it not then have those qualities, the same one that makes a person think, vicariously?
I understand this is a stretch. Nobody asks if a rock can think. But can it? Is the Earth anything but a giant rock? Do the people, plants, animals not make up a total organism? Can the Earth not be said to have sentience this way, much like the giant Chinese brain on a larger scale? Maybe everything can think and feel and be. If the Earth is an organism, we are the tiny mutated cells that have turned into malignant cancers.
There are other answers. I am too easily distracted, even now, even in the silence of the final death, to follow a single line of thought. One possibility I have considered at length, what if the real me is dead? The reason the final self can die might be as simple as the prime being already dead. I could just be the unraveled thread that protrudes furthest from the core.
I think this is likely but not the most likely. I say this because there is one thing I did not take into consideration. A new self is created at each possible path but what if I'm just out of possible paths? If there is a chance of life and death then both will necessarily exist. But what if there's no chance of survival? What if I jumped into the molten core of a volcano? There's no way I'd survive that.
Bad example, though, because I would trip just before reaching the precipice and crack my head on a rock then awaken later back in some friendly native's home. Maybe not just that but something close, something equally inane and unlikely.
Better example might be, what if I'm one-hundred-eighty years old and just need to die? Maybe they've already given me a new liver, new heart, new lungs and brain and skin and they just can't save me, what happens then? Does one alternate me live on as a paradox? Or maybe they rebuild me so well, one piece at a time, that I finally have none of my original pieces. Maybe then, when there's no physical part of what I started as left, maybe then I can die.
Well, not me, but somebody. I know when my death will come and I won't have to wait for all that. The air has been completely silent here in my home for days. Death has frightened away the local fauna and I am helpless to do anything but wait patiently. I do, I was as patiently as I can, but I am so excited for the prospect that I jitter in my seat with expectations. Finally, this parenthetical existence can be closed.