Short Story: The Probability of Being an Automaton

It was highly unlikely that the atoms vibrated and sang when the photons hit them so I could come to be. Almost improbable, yet here I am. That probability would have been close to zero if the more significant forces in play with their gravitational fields weren’t pushed in motion. That is how it goes. But I have my doubts if such an event should have ever occurred. I follow predetermined rules, which I have no saying, making me wonder: did equations have a major part in the making of me, but mostly I’m thinking, would that determined path, the universe, have a use for wars and torture? If so, then why? Why would it follow from the laws of mass, gravity, electromagnetic fields, and all the atoms, electrons, protons, and photons? Why would such a peculiar minuscule world, when combined, produce a complex organism which, in a sense, if looked really closely, is a concerto of most imaginable musical instruments? Was it mass that caused the collapse of the cooperation between different concertos, or was it space-time and its coalition with entropy?

And more so, I wonder about the hope some of my fellow beings have for the reoccurring cycle? They wish that all this would happen again precisely the same. I find no solace there. Would the same child have to cry for eternity as their mother was taken away and smoked to death? Would a man have to hang from the ceiling from his wrist over and over again and repeatedly die as his shoulder sockets gave in and the heart could take no more of the fielded electricity on his bare wet skin? Then somehow, in such a cycle, in the midst of all this, there was that one person who would get to lick their pistachio ice cream and enjoy as the heat of nuclear fusion was just right for them. It is not only the cycle part, which causes me to pause. It is the idea such events are predestined to happen, like my beginning and end and all that happens between. It matters little to me if the unknowing makes it all novel. It is the idea that someone out there will die under a thick hood while dogs bark, and there is nothing to change that.

And despite my objections, if this have to be preordained, I would rather have the cassette pulled out at the end of the recording and changed to new production. Part of me hopes for the child and the man to have that ice cream and the licker to be in the hood as the dogs bark, but that would be cruel of me. What is the likelihood of those two events being dependent on each other? More high than anyone of us are willing to consider.

Here I am still existing, governed by the physical world, which dictates what is real, what is likely, and what is preferable. All told to me by men who judge they have escaped the cave and have seen the light, not only the shadows. They tell me I am nothing but an automaton. 

Thank you for reading! Have a blissful day full of penguins ❤

© K.A. Ashcomb