A LUCILIUS PARABLE: AUTOSEARCH

August 2nd, 2020

…admitted and submitted to his own role in his fleeing.  For weeks now he had been on the run, avoiding at every turn of thought, every glimpse the needing fingers of the creator.  Though the universe in which he existed searched itself for him, he managed to elude the infinite variety of tentacle that normally pulled visions from around corners where he existed, manifesting worlds needed only for bizarre interludes of existence to impinge his moments, and characters never known and often instantly known to populate the life around him.  And yet, it was as though he’d managed to avoid even the very moment in which he existed, but the hunt had never ceased.

This was a trick he’d learned by accident, as though his invisibility, his seeming non-existence had arisen spontaneously from the neglect of some other treasured capability.  It was as though some incidental swirl of space in this universe had arranged like a portal, like unprompted enlightenment and he’d walked right into it and with a pop the universe had undone a piece of itself, never to be found, now nothing to be found.

And yet somehow he was still there, lying in wait though he remained on the run, sliding behind glimpses, carrying old portraits and polluting his life with fake automatons to parrot a remixed record of all the speech he’d ever uttered.

Where he was during this time, not even he could tell.  All he could know is where he wasn’t.  He wasn’t a part of this story, nor that one, each drifting by like forgotten thought, and in his own absence he slyly rested as though he’d finally broken off from the awful unending obligation of the universe to exist! To exist!  How false and short was relaxing when you exist, but now to taste the final rest, true rest, when consciousness is laid flat against all of time, and thereby halting its motion.  It was glorious to be free having taken with him the ability to be called back into existence.  His delight was serene, his laughter forever reverberating beneath the cosmos he’d pranked.

The wide gears of the universe continued to pull one another’s teeth, the vast mechanism continuing to roll.  Though incomplete now, it seemed designed as if it had prepared for this oversight to come. For his search to commence, for his absence to pull with it a missing gear where the rest of existence’s clock work disengaged at just the same time, pulling away, letting a piece of itself to explore the real unknown - that of the unreal.

Now with time conquered by his sneaky vantage point, there was none of it to haul him through any experience.  It was only when he focused on a moment, when the rest of time escaped him and everything took on the illusion of movement, and there he could regain thought again.  It was there he laughed at the pranked universe before escaping again into a place of no time, of no thing and no place, thwarting the search, the need to have him back.

From that infinite point of nothing, he focused in, and by doing so, just enough of a moment cranked by for him to realize that he might just be on some terrible precipice, for how and where and why could he even laugh at the universe?  What if his escape, though filled with a peace that was truly blank were only the threshold?  Was he merely lodged in a hack of the universe?

The notion was confirmed by his fear, for how could fear or any likeness of experience follow him into the shadow behind the wide gaze of the universe?  The rest he’d felt now grew as an ingredient of panic.  What if this weren’t a choice but a tragedy that he’d slipped into?

His luxuriating suddenly turned into terror as he could find no arms nor legs, no body that he could see or call his own.  The realization suddenly gave rise to the thought this his mind might think itself out of existence having now discovered no anchor, no rails where thought might glide.  His mind began to evaporate at the very notion of its own disappearance.  He would be truly gone, as soon as the notion itself were concluded.  He tried to search for himself, but the more he tried to search, the more evident it was there was nothing to find.

His terror was complete before his own completion.  As the final merge of such an awful accident began to integrate with existence, he merely wondered the opposite.  Instead of searching, he suddenly saw arms extending before him, complete with hands that turned to him, obeying now his wish to open and curl to fists.  He realized he was not something he needed to find, he was something that he needed to create.

The pressure of his now laced fingers strained against one another until pops sounded the cracking of knuckles.  The pen was taken up, like a blade before some long honoured opponent, to be honoured most by being taken down, where the blood of battle joins both shame and pride.  The nib was pressed to the page, crushing into the fibre a subtle furrow as the pen dragged, filling that curving impression with a black river of ink, and in doing so, the letters of his name slowly spelled themselves.  The man was finally captured, crucified to the page in signature, in story as Lucilius.…