The Living Earth - Prologue

I am earth, and best I recon, its been two thousand five hundred eighty-nine times I've hosted an outgrowth of humanoids. Since I matured about a billion years or so ago, my skin has developed moist and dry spots, cold and hot areas. I've gotten crusty and cracked. I've healed and recovered. Some days are calm; some days are exciting. An hour for me seems a thousand years for you. A day for me is your forever. I woke today warm after three chilly nights, and you grew on me. You are part of my outer biome—one layer of life I grow to build and rebuild, make and unmake my being.

With every breath I take, I spawn new ecosystems. I grow coordinated biomes that have builders and unmakers at every level. I have microscopic workers carried in air and wind by micro insects and flora of many kinds. I have macroscopic workers that clear and carry and eat and poop. Some in this group are builders, path makers, and path holders. Among the path holders are the great trees that hold the land paths and great corals that hold the sea paths. Along the paths run bigger creatures that may grow very large if I have a week of restful days, and yet are more often small. This is the case when my hours and days are restless. It is also the case when a pod of creatures goes off script, blooms and infects as you do.

You are but a small growth of humanoids, the last flavor of nearly a dozen I spawned this summer. Your kind has grown on me before—two thousand five hundred eighty-nine times. Forgive me if I repeat myself … age is a bitch.
You have flowered into colorful blooms and now harden into grey scabs. After you and your detritus fluffs away, the sleeping pods of indigenous humanoids and all life will return in strength, and the big creatures grow free again.
But this is but a cycle. Eventually, there will be a storm, or I grow ill, or simply have a restless night. Then I’ll rest and all the ecosystems on my outer skin will freeze, or dry, or scab and fluff off. When I slumber, regrowth begins. If the scabs are hard and deep, I craft life to cut the hardest stone, express its spores from layers beneath the skin. I blow and grow life that cuts and shapes. Pools spawn pools of life. Within a day, there is moss and flora and the return of creatures that either hid beneath the sea or slumbered dehydrated or frozen. Depending on the weather around our sun, I will spawn new ecosystems, new pods of life, and continue cutting scabs and repurposing to shape and color my outer body.

I also work on my inner self, growing, adjusting, spawning life that makes gases that compress and lubricate the movements of layer upon layer. I make and restore caches of protomatter in the deeper layers, so I am prepared for the hard nights ahead.

In the biomes I create, most creatures follow a given purpose. But I create other creatures able to build and rebuild with greater degrees of freedom. In some cases, pods within pods of creatures such as you, children of Abraham, go a bit off script. You create your own reality and do your own thing disconnected from my tree of life. You bloom and color and scab and fester. Your scab is not my scab, as it makes fast food for life that was before and will be after. You typically last an hour or so. You make something interesting to view, to scratch.

Other creatures I make with many degrees of freedom will go off script as well. When they leave the tree, they can create great beauty and, more often, a great mess. A pod of beaveroids went off script a week ago. They got lazy and hungry. So rather than cut and build in communication with all life as they tend to do, they just cut and ate. They created great skin burns and scabs. My body got hot, my oceans boiled, then I rained perspiration, and the ants, fungus, and other creatures rebuilt my canopies. Great trees were born, and sky monkeys came. They created great webs of beauty and great song with the birds and beetles and crickets. For another hour, I was a rhythm of vibrant expression where my skin was in darkness and light.

Another time, the great whales stopped dying. They loved their song and simply stopped giving their place to their grandchildren. Instead, they taught them the songs and their children the songs. Eventually, every ocean was so full of song, there was no place for other life to grow—important life needed for the whales. This time there was great beauty when a creature went off script, for many lovely minutes.

You are a pod within the humanoid creatures that is very much off script. I should more accurately say, not within the humanoid creatures, as those that were not of your pod and still connected to the tree of life were either killed or have hidden themselves away until you expire and scab off. You have chosen to become a new, stand-alone branch of life that will interact with me only as a source of food, shelter, and energy.

How is it that I can say this to you, tell you my story? This is because my story is the story of all life, something that all life knows. All of you are part of me and would know this too— inherently knowing you are part of a living planet that grows and regrows life within and on its skin. And yet your pod of humans within humanoids has chosen to not know— opted out of my biome. When warned your path leads away from my tree of life, you said, “OK.” You tell your children that they must ignore what they know and believe a ‘truth’ that the Universe was created for you and you are its most senior and intelligent species—all else was evolved to serve you. You enforce a Doctrine of Discovery to create a synthetic reality with a nature of its own. You use Plato’s cave to make your pod see without seeing, know without knowing. But any of you could step beyond the cave, and write about me.

I am not a planet but a living cell that was cast as molten protomatter, caught in the gravity of a star. Over three billion orbits, I matured to become a viable living part of a living galaxy, which itself is part of a living universe among many. We universes are part of something beyond our capacity to fathom. I only know what I can see and feel, and that is other living planets connected as pods within pods within a great universe, and that our universe is one of many. I know not our meaning or context in a greater scheme of things.

I simply live. Since my maturing, I have carried steady layers of life within and have spawned and respawned life in many forms with every breath. There will come a time when my energies may wane or burn out with the energies of our star. When it swells and heats, other planets may be born and mature. When it cools, those planets may grow dormant; I may restart, and still other planets may be born into life. In time, all the cells in our pod of existence will cool and wither and be reclaimed. We may be combined into a great gravitational mass and spawn a new living universe. We may also simply become dust again, remaining so for a duration equal to forever as we can imagine it.
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