A Tale of the City of Angels

A TALE OF THE CITY OF ANGELS

This city was a city of angels. A city of light. It had its beautiful buildings with admirable gothic architecture and everything a truly great settlement with a rich history needs. This was the core. Many people lived there and thousands of destinies intertwined and interacted. It was a city of angels - a city of a thousand possibilities. A city of opportunity to start over perhaps an unlimited number of times - at least that was the idea! The motto was - "You always have other opportunities!" And wasn't that Yahoo's backronym that was cleverly hidden, or at least that was the idea? El-Yahoo¹!

The city was particularly important and was a crossroads of many other roads that circled the globe. What a wonderful place! It was like being at home. From there you could go wherever you wanted and end up turning around and being back home. Yes the world was very big, huge even, but it was still best at home. Every thing felt close and home there.

A little girl saw me and I gave her a coin - basically it's a sign that your destiny is marked with an angelic sign. I mean, we're all kids and everything is a joke! And your life is beautiful and you live it as if through rose colored glasses. And were you missing out on the most important things? How was this universe even supported? And how did it continue to exist?

The wind of change ruffled our hair, our eyes sparkled with the ideas of youth, music filled our senses, we were ready to die for each other, we swore allegiance to each other till the grave, and our ears listened to political slogans that were loudly broadcast through various channels, dropped on us by the gods in human form - the so-called god-anointed. They were untouchable. More accurately, they cleverly hid their own fragility. And they necessarily claimed that their right to rule was sacred. And eternal! Each one of them had truly earned to be exactly where they actually were - they were usually well-educated, extremely smart, sophisticated, well-mannered, handsome (so what media-embellished and inflated character didn't look truly capable and great, even genius!), and their heart was full of love and hope. And so it was all over the world. The wind of oblivion was in our minds - it helped us survive longer in this reality that was created as if just for us. To be happy! The period of erased memories. But it was just a mask! And when it came off, it was obvious that there was nothing behind it. And weren't we all passengers in a transient world? Fictional characters of our own lives?

In this city lived a child who loved to look at the beautiful bodies of the angels, their hands sent up in prayer, and the tears in their eyes for the lives of their earthly charges. He was impressed by their unearthly beauty and grace and wanted to know where their strength came from to deal with the problems of so many tormented souls. They were made of powerful granite that could best withstand the tests of time. The child reached out to touch them, but could not. They were located high up on many of the buildings, and this attracted the attention of those who happened to stop by the place even briefly. Strangers believed that perhaps they could get their blessing, or at least enjoy them.

The years passed, and a sadness had gathered in the child's soul, and it poured from his eyes - he cried for the people and wanted to help them. It burned with ideas of patriotism, science, enlightenment, national interests, cosmopolitanism, a new world order. It wanted to see the world and keep up with its ideas of progress. To develop and to live.

The groans of the people seemed to it fabulously beautiful, not because it had no eyes for them, but because it considered them necessary. Those were the rules - everything was connected, after all. Nor could there be success without a drop of sweat. Wasn't there a logic, wasn't everything ordered and just right in this perfect world?

But the years passed, and the child realized that the formerly beautiful place was like a set - there was no life in it. The law of survival was one of moving as fast as possible, and otherwise it remained non-existence. It was an artificially maintained system that existed against the laws of normal physics. It was stunningly beautiful, but dead. Why? What had happened? Where was everyone? Where was the world and the universe going? Then he realized that every consciousness in this seemingly vast universe was interested in its own survival. And was it even guaranteed?

The child looked up at the angels, but there were none there for a long time. He decided to check what exactly was going on. He had realized that he could see the truth with his own eyes - he was old enough.

Humans had long used rockets to reach the heights of space, but the speed at which they moved was ridiculously low. You could tell they barely moved from their spot. Most rockets barely developed speeds in the range of 25000-30000 kilometers per hour, and that was nothing for open space. Some faster spacecraft could reach 60000 kilometers per hour, which was still too slow. The universe remained inaccessible and we didn't know where we were, but the kid wanted to know. He wanted to ask questions that would reveal the Higher Meaning to him. It was that simple. So aren't children the closest to the Most High? Wasn't humanity going in the wrong direction, trying to reach the unreachable.

Human civilization was reaching its apogee, the child was discovering the most interesting and all kinds of ways to prolong his life - through medicine, through cloning, through quantum consciousness transfer, through what have you - and all just to survive and have continuous growth. And the level of civilization was rising, and that was expanding the level of consciousness. On Kardashev's scale - first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, even seventh level. In the beginning the child was learning to master the energy and material resources of his own planet, later of the whole solar system, even of the Galaxy. Mankind was developing different types of civilization - mostly to realize that more was possible. It reached the eighth, ninth, even tenth level - that was the level of God. The universe changed to the Multiverse, then to the Megaverse, then to the Hyperverse, and finally to the Omniverse. And what was there beyond? It was the transcendent, which in turn had countless combinations. Dimensionality here bordered on the impossible. This beyond had a variety of possibilities, and each one was a bubble that, if it collided with another, it meant an unimaginable level of chaos. It was there that the entity called the Guardian of the Fifth Wall was located, no more powerful than the Creator, but responsible for the integrity of the Transcendent.

It was then that the child realized that surviving the Beyond with all the myriad shifts in realities would be possible - even if he was a very skilled traveler - but only for a very short time. And he decided that he should still be grateful for his time in the City of Angels - maybe there he had a chance to at least get a taste of life.

But then what did it take for the child of humanity to really grow up?

Then it realized that, although Planck's constant indicated the size of the smallest possible objects in the universe, and was even hard to prove, something much more was needed for anything, anywhere, to exist for a duration of a zeptosecond. Something beyond even the wildest notions of the most impossible impossible. Then it bowed its head. And disappeared. Forever. Into nothingness. It had lived enough!

1El - the hand of god, Yahoo - You always have other options!