The machine
There is a machine in the center of the world. You can't find it, but if you could you couldn't grasp what you are seeing - the obscure belts that are powered by its rusty, squeaky wheels reach beyond the horizon, and you can't identify the fumes that are rising out of it's many chimneys - whenever you try the scent will change. Parts of it are seemingly ancient, some of them defunct, some of them new - but as a whole, this machine will never stop to work. Whenever it jolts, the stars of the world bursts out their energy, and planets move a bit further on their path. Wind does blow, and leaves do rustle while turning water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen. Calories are burned in countless organisms. Doors do open, trains depart. Shots are fired, arrows fly forward. The uncountable lifeforms that form your organs do their labor, empowering your metabolism, your thinking, your being - and you, in turn, do whatever you do and thus conduce to the great hustle of the world. Structures sink deeper into the ground. Contracts are signed, wars are declared. Markets expand and consolidate. Species go extinct and develop. Music is played and dies away. Clouds drift. Fungi extract the minerals from organic matter. Then silence falls, and everything halts - no one can tell how long this pause between the jolts does last; existence self lies frozen, waiting for the next tact of the machine to go on, and when it comes, its impossible to measure if quarters of seconds or millenniums would have fit between it and the last one. Is the world that moves then even the same, or does every existence end with its moment, and keeps to exist in waxy motionlessness behind us as the cohesional waste of the world machine while entirely new things are created and perpetuated as perfect likenesses of the short lived, preceding frame? Some say that we shouldn't even need to care about the previous or next jolt; others say that it is mere illusion - that the machine doesn't thrive existence, but is moved by the things and their volition to exist - that the collective wish to go on is running the endless belts that heat the countless furnaces of the machine that will die if the world would one day decide to stop, but eother way there is no escaping from it; we and what we are has no choice but interaction as long as we are, and when our current form and consciousness ends, our matter is still forced to partake in the machines eternal dance that goes on reshaping us as it did during our days. One day, this Moloch will have reached a size where it will become unable to bear itself. Will it go slow, and we notice that things aren't as before while its giant wheels begin to wobble and the belts begin to elope? Will a sudden chaos break out when the things aren't timed through its pulse? Or will the world suddenly stay rigid and cold in its eternal wait for the next jolt of the machine that scattered unnoticed in its lonely, unlocatable center?