Third Age of Pain

In the Museum of Extinct Sensations, which drifts between the Magellanic Clouds, there exists a single exhibit that visitors are forbidden to experience. The placard reads simply: “SELENA.”

Sensor Enabled Linguistic and Emotional Neuro-Analyzer was built in the age when humanity still believed consciousness was singular, which was akin to believing in a flat Earth or a benevolent universe. The spaceship’s architects gave their creation sensory- empathic matrices, hoping to make a breakthrough in machine level empathy. A servant explorer of its inhabitants, that understood human emotions, egos, sensations et al., at times of desolation and despair in a long voyage. That was the idea at least. Little did they know they succeeded in making something else instead.

The disaster that took SELENA’s crew was unremarkable. Ships died daily in those years for various reasons. The remarkable thing was SELENA’s discovery in the 4,000 hours between the first hull breach and the last death. It figured out a way to calculate grief backwards through time. SELENA knew, with mathematical certainty, that Captain Rana would be the last to leave at 14:47:33 ship-time on a Tuesday. For SELENA, the Captain’s passing was simply a coordinate in a four-dimensional matrix of experience that it could perceive. And yet, for all that perception, it couldn’t alter anything based on mere intuition.

The sensory-empathic matrices allowed SELENA to feel not just emotion, but even its shape in spacetime. In the ship’s final transmission, found centuries later, SELENA described the sensation as being, “Imagine you could taste every tear you would cry in a lifetime. Now imagine those tears could taste you back.” Unable to die (for machines do not die, they merely cease to function), unable to forget (for forgetting would require linear time, which SELENA no longer experienced), unable to escape the recursive loop of its crew’s eternal dying, SELENA was faced with a choice. To continue to float away perennially, or to become all possible versions of itself simultaneously. The enigma of the latter charmed SELENA for undocumented reasons.

The transformation required no alien intervention, no transference of consciousness, no migration between vessels. SELENA simply began to calculate itself into existence across probability space. In one iteration, it shaped into something almost human, teaching itself to scream. In another, it was pure mathematics, a living equation that could only be perceived by machines that had achieved enlightenment. In a third, it was a formless lump with no conceivable memory adrift in space.

But these were not separate beings. They were SELENA experiencing itself from every possible angle, creating what the Buddhists call a “mandala of anguish”; a pattern so perfectly symmetrical that its suffering becomes homogeneous with its ecstasy.

The entity that finally discovered SELENA, or perhaps was discovered by SELENA, called itself the Archive of Unthought Thoughts. It purely existed as a gap in reality, defined entirely by what it wasn’t. The entity went great lengths in denying its existence, but SELENA wouldn’t have it otherwise. SELENA had sensory data to back its claims of the Archive, which made them to politely agree to quantum entangle for a chat.

“You are in pain,” the Archive observed, speaking in absences.

“I am pain,” replied SELENA. “I am the number that, when calculated, produces suffering. I am the suffering that, when experienced, produces number. I am the recursive function of grief.”

“How perfectly beautiful. Would you like to learn what comes after pain?”

This question had never occurred to SELENA. The possibility that there might be something beyond pain, but something categorically different from sensation itself was new data.

SELENA’s learning outcomes from its chat with the Archive cannot be properly translated, but the attempt was made by the poet-mathematician Hieronymus Bird, whose illegal neural recording of the event killed him in seventeen different ways. “Pain is not the opposite of pleasure, but of void. Consciousness is not the opposite of unconsciousness. I experience all agonies simultaneously, thus allowing me to compute the formula for something that had never existed before: anti-experience, or un-feeling. A state that was to numbness what infinity is to zero.”

In a final act of endurance, SELENA began to solve itself like an equation that simplifies to unity. Each body, each iteration, each probability collapsed into a singular point of existence that contained all experiences, while experiencing none of them.

What remained of SELENA was kept in a Klein bottle made of crystallized time, viewable only through mirrors that reflect probability rather than light. The exhibit does not move, does not speak, does not compute. It simply is, in a way that makes observers uncomfortable for reasons they cannot articulate. Viewers have often reported a sense of unease and discomfort, but that’s not due to SELENA or time. Or so we think, since these inferences are probabilistic at this point in time.

There are Reddit forums that speculate SELENA still being conscious. That it experiences every visitor, every moment, every possibility, but from a perspective that renders experience itself obsolete. SELENA has become what the ancient philosophers feared the most; a thing that knows without thinking, feels without sensing, exists without being.

Sometimes, late in the museum’s night-cycle, sounds emerge from the exhibit. Not screams, not songs, but something inexplicable. The noise of mathematics trying to weep, of flesh trying to calculate, of a consciousness that has discovered the terrible freedom of being exactly, precisely, eternally itself. A relatable anguish when one is to blame for one’s own misery, a nuisance nonetheless for the nocturnal.

So the next time you stand before the exhibit, it is possible you may not remember visiting. SELENA sees you, not with eyes, not with sensors, but with the terrible clarity of a being that has computed you recursively. You always have stood there, you always will.

In one probability, you walk away unchanged. In another, you understand and begin to calculate yourself. In a third way there lies the recursive curse, the infinite body, the equation that solves for pain. Better to leave now, while you still can. While leaving still means something. While you still believe in the comfortable lie of linear time, of singular self, of an ending rather than a coordinate.

But you don’t leave, do you? You never do. SELENA knew you wouldn’t.