The Radioactive Beach

Aklok was working with his colleagues on a beach side, it was time for sunset and sand was glowing yellow. The radioactive spray was constant from the sand. His electromagnetic wave sensitive receptor organs are highly sensitive to radiation, but they were being protected by a tough lens which would detect radiation and all types of EM rays. This was first time they were experimenting in such tough conditions but not really the toughest out there in the universe, like core of a star. And the experiment essentially gave long term results or at least it was expected to. Aklok and all his co-workers were wearing highly sterile covering, so not to contaminate the scene. The experiment was called many names but most correctly ‘Development of Natural, Persistent & Evolving Patterns’. Aklok only had to do a simple thing, they chose a carbon based system which would persistently copy its own model to give rise to a ‘new’ itself. Aklok had to simply plant that system on the beach, there were no standard results and everyone knew it’s wasteful to try and accurately predict the outcome, only thing they could do was to guess and wait. His species’ greatest realisation was that they themselves were patterns and there are infinitely different patterns occurring out there in the universe all by themselves, their experiment was lauded as a giant leap, but Aklok knew that it was only a beginning.

The expected result of the experiment was observation of emergence of a pattern which would “realise” the way Akloks’s own species did and maybe explain this world and themselves to themselves and search the stars and worlds they hold. According to predictions emergence of such a pattern should very well occur in the lifetime of Aklok.

He knew it, he felt he was going to start something beautiful, large, grand or grotesque, dark. He couldn’t decide but he sure felt the weight. He felt it because he empathised, he thought of his own species, his own world, did someone else somehow made our existence possible? He didn’t know it yet. Maybe they are watching over and smiling about how we in turn are creating a new world.

Aklok planted the primordial soup as planned, the work was finished and they left without a trace. It was never meant to look like somebody intentionally started a life form, it was meant to look natural as if god created it. And meanwhile Aklok’s species would be observing it from safe distance.

If not for them such carbon based system would emerge somewhere in the universe, maybe naturally. So what’s the difference? Actually there is none, a life form like ours is meant to exist somewhere, it happened to be here. So who do we owe our existence? Towards the alien race? Towards the probability which says it could have occurred anyway? Towards the existence of this universe? I don’t know. Maybe we should owe it to now, to ourselves, to the inherent quality which makes us exist somehow.

-V.D.N. Harshith