Ramblings of a Villain

Senses

You are impossible.

Well, almost impossible.

Statistically speaking, you are almost impossible.

I love almost impossibility, if only because mathematicians loathe it. What is almost infinite? When is almost infinite? Almost nothing? We like our concrete amounts to represent what is and is not, binary existence, countable, but when you talk about abstract numbers of things that have no bearing to human life, of the cosmical large and the particular minute, there's this fervent disagreement in their importance.

Sorry, it appears I'm rambling again. What was I talking about?

Ah, yes. Impossibility.

You are almost impossible.

And I don't mean that you are a difficult person - I'm sure you are, but that's not my point. I mean that your existence is in itself a conundrum.

Life, as we know it, is a mystery. Not because it happened - it was bound to happen at some point, but due to its scale. Have you ever thought about it?

Micro-organism evolving and merging, evolving and merging, evolving and merging to create layers and layers and layers of complexity of complexity of complexity. What 'you' are is this impossible system of systems of systems that is product of millions of years of random permutations by different mobile elements in nature that had been given a simple task: Persist.

Do you ever think on how do you even function? How you work, as a being?

Let's talk about your senses. Really, just grab the knife and dig under that skull of yours and see where it takes us.

Sight, smell, hearing, tact, taste. This is your lifeline to the outside world. Everything that is not you, everything that surrounds you, everything that is in contact with you.

Your eyes. Look at your eyes. When light bounces into your eyes, it goes through several internal lenses, each of them being excited by the intensity of the waves it receives, converting that excitement into electrical pulses that are discharged into the nerves, that traverse the way into your brain, where somehow those electrical discharges are converted into a steady stream of images that you can process and understand. A system that is constantly active through the most of your life - even though your eyes are constantly working, your eyes can't process more than about 70 images per second, give or take with training and personal mutation.

It's insane. Impossible. Sight alone is hard to even imagine, and this is something that nature just kinda stumbled into when it was doing it funny game of permutating life through generations. To think that an organism as complex as we are is capable of it to the scale that it is, is... it is...

...

Do you realize this is just one of your senses? Do you realize all that you are capable by sight alone? To differentiate pigments and hues, to measure distance, to discern minutia, shape, amount, motion.

Hear, listen to me. Hear yourself. Hear your breathing, your hearing is so strongly associated with balance that you are capable of feeling sound before actually hearing it. Do you know how it works? I'll tell you, I'll tell you - see, in your ear, there's this thing we call a drum. A thin tissue that is designed to catch the vibrations in the air - sound travels in waves too, but unlike light, these need a medium to exist. Light, light does whatever it wants, it goes into the vacuum of space for as long as it wants, but sound needs some sort of material to exist, water, gas - it's a different kind of vibration, and your eardrum is meant just to catch those, to feel those vibrations, interact with inner filaments, and send those things back into the nerve. You know this part, nerve, brain, sound.

Happening simultaneously as sight, amazing. We are doing all these things at the same time and you can't even tell the effort, the constant, unceasing tasks that your body is attending to. Of course, too much sound, too much light, too much input and you'll damage these systems, but our tolerance is quite high, you'd be surprised how much you need to do them harm. I was surprised.

Buds! Taste buds, this is crucial. Do you know their purpose? Taste might seem less relevant to you than the other ones, but before we had stuff like the internet, or language, we had to rely on our stored genetic memory to survive. Banana taste good, banana good. Banana taste bad, banana evil. Destroy banana before it destroy you! Hooga-booga!

You learn this way before you even can goo-goo-ga-ga what you should put into your mouth, and what you should probably spit. It's not 100% foolproof, our babies are probably some of the most idiotic beings that can exist with their size. Fault the weird design of nature on that one, what were they thinking, honestly?

Oh, you want to hear how taste buds work? Too bad, I have no idea, but I'm sure it is equally fascinating.

Smell, do you even need me to explain it to you? Scents carry the signature of different creatures, different compositions, food, droppings, rot, disease, smoke. Not in waves, no, smells are emanations, gaseous emanations. Can you smell underwater? I have no idea, maybe? This is incredible, maybe we should test it out later. I'm glad you'd volunteer for such.

Oh, oh, and tact. Tact is... mm... our dermis, epidermis is covered in a network of nerves that is - guess what - constantly receiving input, receiving data by what is in contact, heat, cold, pain. It tells us everything we need to know, it tells us proximity, it is a layer of myopic eyes covering our bodies that we can blindly rely onto. You don't need hand-eye coordination, you can see by feeling alone, you can do a lot of things with just sightless muscle memory. Look, I'm talking at you without seeing! Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely, nearly impossible.

You have all these systems working in tandem, all this information being relayed to your brain, which is every living moment of its existence maintaining a connection with everything that surrounds it. And you, you just spend your life learning to tune these things out. The irony is no less fantastic, really.

Do you realize what I'm saying?

I'm astounded not that you live, but that you are, you and the rest of you. You are... so astronomically unlikely, so full of inconsistencies and baffling counterproductive decisions.

You are magnificent.

And that's why I can't let you go. We have so much yet to learn together, you and me.