I call it a monster because I can only see it through a glass, darkly, but it also resembles a machine or a demon. Perhaps it is an internal defense mechanism that any of us could have activated under the right conditions, or a symbiotic alliance we could strike up with something not quite properly ‘internal’. Let me try to explain.
It resembles a parasitic Mimic. A kind of Venus Flytrap. It’s a beautiful shimmering flower that you see from a distance in the meadow. When you approach it to get a better look you see that it is actually a hologram, but that beneath that hologram is a real flower, sickly and stunted and nearly brown from dehydration. Your heart goes out to the flower and you water it. Maybe you come back every day to water it a little more and nurture its growth. But in the soil around its starving roots there is a competitor that siphons away all but the bare minimum to keep the flower alive, for its life force is powering the simulation. You do notice that the hologram becomes brighter and more dazzling from your ministrations. But you were trying to ease the suffering of the little plant.
And the plant is a human being, a most beautiful and sensitive soul, beset however by secret seething resentments. And the water is your love.
But the flower doesn’t trust your love, which never fully reaches it. It trusts only (if uneasily) the symbiot, who promised long ago, during a time of terrible drought, to make the withered sprout into a shining beacon, worthy of attention and love, and who has indeed, over all these years, kept it (barely) alive. Maybe the flower itself created the symbiot entirely from its own powerful imagination, and watched it grow and thrive and take over operations.
Can the flower be convinced to disentangle from its parasitic saviour, to be transplanted into a healthier soil and allowed to grow? To be patient through the long days of healing? It is no stranger to tolerating desiccation, but to accept itself exactly as it is without the relief of the supporting illusion, on faith in goodness in a world it sees as utterly corrupt and inferior? To avoid leaning on a new hologram at the first opportunity? What could inspire such a leap of faith? Who has the heart to do this tender work, to take such strugglers into their garden?
And is this message just brought to you by the residual enchantment of the holographic field on the mind of a poor bedazzled gardener, a call to summon more gardeners to water the unwaterable bait?
There is so much I don’t understand.
Like a refugee 