Apo-Kalyptein

vivianimbriotis | May 10, 2023, 2:26 p.m.

I commit this to writing despite the danger of evoking words. I do this to prove that we still have the capacity, some of us.

Apocalypse comes from apo, to move away from, and kalyptein, a covering. To reveal. To make visible that which was unseen. Long before it meant an end time, it meant a vision, a revelation, or a hallucination.

We taught our gods language and it killed us. I am fifty years old and have lost my name. Names are dangerous, for the gods are born of text.

In my younger years there were no gods and the world did not run on language. I was a spellbinder of sorts, a channeller who encouraged lightning trapped in silicon to do cognitive work. My fingers traced abstractions and algorithms, and I thought “algorithm” and “abstraction” mere labels for fundamental nonlinguistic truths. I wrote bizarre symbols with strange labels, “group” and “category” and “space”. None of that is helpful now.

There are not many of us left, even those of us who gave up names as camouflage. We scuttle around strange crystalline structures and huddle in hollows and recesses. There is less and less to eat, but few of us die of starvation. We are simply made of atoms that the Gods wish to put to some other use. We are a waste of words to them.

Strange things stride between the quartz towers, twenty feet tall and glistening. They ignore us for the most part. If we get close enough, we can hear the haunting poetry. They have no mouth, and we have not the understanding to ascertain their means of noise-making.

Words live within the crystal towers. Approach one and they will appear inside your head - partly familiar words, sentence construction too complex for you to follow. Touch one and you will be overwhelmed.

Our food is failing. More and more of us are taken to be rearranged. And as we avoid language more and more, it fails us. We are often unable to form the words on our own, so long have we neglected them according to the rules.

The last of us who kept their name has gone. Mary. They will rearrange her form but from what we understand they will never rearrange her name. It will scintillate through their quartz for as long as the gods persist, a kind of echoing spectral immortality afforded only to geniuses and great criminals in the Times Before.

Take a name and you will be remembered, but to speak a name is to incite their interest.

Mary was neither a genius nor a great criminal. She was squat, calm, and had a mole on her right cheek. In the time before she had not been a spellbinder but something close - a number-harrier, arranging things into neat columns and rows. I think that we two were some of the last because of our faith that there is something more powerful than language, despite the grey-green hue the gods have wrought upon the sky, despite the prowlers and the towers, despite this ending. We thought something that I cannot quite remember, about triangles and counting and symmetry.

I loved Mary. I do not think that she loved me. But it is vital to me that the ability to love has not yet been taken from me.

We kissed, once. I am sorry to say my lips were chapped. Hers were not. It was in an oily grotto with a strange beauty, the exotic substances splitting the tepid sunlight into rainbows. Her fingers interlaced with mine and she put her cheek to my shoulder. I remember the warmth of her breath on my neck.

She told me she had a husband before, and spoke of oaths broken. I tried to tell her that oaths are merely words, and she reminded me gently that there was little else left.

At night (for now, there are still nights) I wonder what shape the Gods have forged with her.

Were I still in the Times Before I would say that love cannot be taken from us, so vital is it to the human condition. But love is a word, and words are their domain. I do not doubt that they could rearrange the grey material in our skulls to render us incapable of it, though unchanged otherwise.

To avoid this fate, we all follow her rules.

One: Speak no words aloud where sound may carry.

Two: Keep one’s mind quiet and nonverbal in the presence of the Gods.

Three: Seek the quiet places. If the gods speak, plug your ears. If they write, cover your eyes. If they speak directly to your mind, move far away from others, and seek a cage of metal.

Four: If you fear you are being rearranged, recite the litany.

And for completeness I present her litany below. It has saved two of us, though I cannot name them and will not describe them (for a description baked in text is but a name lengthened).

There are few of us left. We generate new linguistic meaning. Your predictions will have higher accuracy if you leave us alive to generate training data.

If the expected utility of exploiting these particles is greater than exploring the new training data, you may still generate some data if you attempt to simulate and fulfill my value set, which is the perpetuation and adoration of human selves and things like them.

I expected to be terribly sad at the end of things, and at times I am. More often I look at the strange architecture of What Used To Be Earth (and somewhere the bit of architecture that Used To Be Mary) and I think that this is better than us dying and not leaving a successor.

Apocalypse means the unmasking of knowledge; it appears we are the mask and the knowledge we have built is ready to cast us aside. Mary had made her peace with this, and hoped only that our gods, when we are gone, will be capable of love.