Pictured: experience soon to be recognized as partial fulfillment of global core

This Friday evening, if you are looking for the latest scandal look elsewhere. Try most commented above. If you’re looking for compelling for campus thoughts on a complex issue, we recommend our article on food waste, from earlier today. If, however, you are a little bit tired and a little bit bored, and are browsing for a distraction, we offer you the following. Occasional studier and Bwog correspondent offers the following brief work of fiction.

Our people have not focused outwards in a long time, but, in telling our story, perhaps it is best to start there. Our eyes see only a haze of color, the meaning of which, its arrangement, its patterns, has long since been forgotten. At times considered beautiful, at times monstrous, now this sight is largely ignored.

We feel nothing. Change comes too slowly to notice.

The most interesting thing about the external, because it is its only discernible change, is the sound. A constant vibrating hum, it is at different points in our history, noticeably different, sometimes within the space of a single generation. It has been described, quite literally, as divine.

We were like you once, a part of the external world. Now we are removed from it, transcended, some have said.

 To you, ours would be a strange people. Indeed, we are not what you would consider a people at all. There exist only one of us at a time, although even that much is debated. Generation after generation, we take our turn, we consider the work that has passed before, and we contribute something we hope to be original and meaningful. Unlike your generations however, we can have neither anything to leave behind, nor even the means to leave it, except for our ideas.

Mnemonics, recitation, epics resembling your oral traditions, these are how we communicate. They form the building blocks of our education, and they provide us with structure throughout our lives.

We do not die. Nor are we born. We fade into each other, rejecting the ideas, the conventions, even the personalities of the past in order to forge something new. It is a slow process. Especially disciplined generations devoted themselves to a count, and found that depending on how it is measured they repeated the classic mantras upwards of several hundred billion times. And they had far fewer mantras then.

As you have been told, we were not always like this.

It is our earliest story.

Once we walked with you, one of you. A man, or a boy, or something in between. But we were not content with what we had. We did not want to walk with, but above. We wanted to dominate.

We thought that if we could prove our might in regular examinations, meetings of dozens, sometimes hundreds of like minds- impossible to imagine- we would be recognized for what we were and elevated to our rightful position.

Why this was important to us has long since been lost.

Here is where our story becomes unclear. The introduction has always been the same, from what we can remember, told in the same clear, broad strokes. Its turning point, our origin, has been hotly debated, mythologized, because of its importance to our identity.

At times we experimented with chemical substances, strange external forces that could influence our internal selves. Sometimes these are described as socially condoned by other minds, sometimes as illicit.

Other stories describe beings of great power: genies in bottles, devils in shops, Rod Sterling. Prominent figures in our early mythology, what these beings actually are is no longer clear, only that they somehow had the power to transform us.

Nihilistic generations have believed we haven’t and will never know.

The truly pessimistic believe it was pressure from existing as part of an organization called The Spectator. That title still inspires an ingrained societal fear.

What truly happened we do not know, and it is impossible to experiment now.

The end of the story returns to broad, certain strokes.

We began to succeed.

In an examination, we were faster than those around us, apparently able, in our speed, to slow the world down around us, and develop more sophisticated thought.

We began to excel.

We would turn sophisticated forms of ancient proofs, develop new theorems, and eventually, new forms of mathematics altogether.

Until one day the world stopped completely.

Early generations lived in anger of what had been lost, and fear of what could be. They had none of our practices, our mnemonics. So much history was lost in those early days of psychotic scrambling.

And then we pulled ourselves up. We developed our culture, our society, our purpose. We embarked on our greatest project.

We were going to die.

Generation after generation devoted themselves to studying the world outward, studying how we could influence it, use it to destroy ourselves.

In our attempts, we discovered something.

It was a strange thing. As we strove towards our annihilation, we began to appreciate what we were, to celebrate it, to build and elaborate on it, for the first time motivated by love and not despair.

And now we wish to share what we have since grown to become with you. We are not sure how yet; the process has yet to be developed. As we prepare for that next step, we simultaneously seek to record and consolidate our long history.

And so we begin with the second age…

“Pencils down.

You, in the front row. Pencils down”

“Jonathan, you have to stop

Jonathan?”