THE CONSTRUCT: AN ALLEGORY
In another dimension, so that neither time nor place has any great relevance, there is a nexus to be found.
I could have started this trans-dimensional tale with the respectable formula, 'Once upon a time…' but had I done so you might miss the point of this story, so please forgive both this word of explanation and delay.
After all, it's the story you want, isn't it?
Let me take you to the relevant then and there.
In this other plane of existence, there was a mansion, a wondrous construction of strong, defensible materials and light and airy aesthetics.
Originally thought of as The Mansion it had become known to every being, whether corporeal or not, as The Construct.
She grew, apparently organically, from small and humble beginnings, into a massive, amiable, artistic conglomerate.
She became an instrumentality, but in herself was never an institution.
Her oldest part was a fortress, durable and decisive.
She held down, through her massive presence, a sizeable surrounding area of the locality.
She projected continuity into the locale.
Her towers and flying buttresses emitted defence and definition.
Another area included a pavilion, light, ethereal and graceful. Its fabrics were fragrant, its colours pleasing, its texture soothing to the touch. This plane was the Zephyr, and was more phylum than place.
There were rainbows of heat, remarkable for their actinic emanations, and liquid bridges of lambent translucence, connecting one time zone with folded space, and transmitting spices and sensations.
Another area was an arena.
Yet another zone was a blend of scented garden and boudoir. A being could move in easy transition from one to the other, but the Garden was always an oasis, a refuge, held at the centre, safe and secluded.
And at the very centre of the garden was a source, a vortex of unimaginable wellbeing at the heart of The Construct.
This well was a strange melange, a blend of vulnerability, fragile in its beauty yet a source of replenishment for all who visited The Construct. Whether weary travellers tired of humdrum bone-jarring journeys, or intrepid explorers who set out for distant realms of danger and delight, all who touched the well were refreshed and invigorated.
Indeed many came in as wounded and fatigued voyagers, needing rest and recuperation, only to later depart as the Vital, strong and empowered emissaries.
The Founder had been at the very beginning of The Construct, and it was his vision that had called into being the prototype edifice of the Mansion.
It gathered a number of entities fascinated by its projected portrayal of What Might Be, who then busied themselves in giving life, shape and flow to the amalgam of What Is, resulting in The Construct; semi stable but always changing, a five-dimensional organic dynamo with many moving parts yet in large part driven and made mobile through non-time and n-space by non-moving parts.
She was beautiful, maddeningly full of potential, exotic and tautologically enticing.
She inspired sagas and sung elegies. She birthed belonging and spun dreams of wholeness and integration.
The Construct was thus device and refuge, blender and barrier.
Her existence was sufficient to engage the attention of the deeper denizens of that dimension, and over the years some probed her defences, deploying conspiracy and intrigue when direct attacks failed.
But despite some losses, some damage, and several casualties, the Construct survived, and indeed flourished over several cycles. Each time The Founder was involved, usually decisively and powerfully, asserting its authority through the foundational structures, utilising its intimate knowledge of the melding realities to expel invading influences.
Two assaults were repelled in this way, though each time the Founder moved slower than before and with increasing reluctance to act.
Each event involved its reaction being a little slower, its response to its Wardens warnings a little more distant and sceptical.
So it decided to delegate, but made neither real provision for uplifting nor training for its new delegates.
The Founder fell in love with The Construct, and her intricacies.
It was enamoured, and lost focus and perspective.
It had invested its life force into The Mansion, as had many of its adherents. Some stayed, some left, but each added shades of light, flickers of power and existential energies and thus in some way, however small, scented the Construct with its contribution.
Even the Founder was from time to time surprised at what The Construct had become, contained, and could become.
It spent an Age establishing maintenance policies, and brooding on her future direction.
The Construct involved huge amounts of life-force energies to maintain her existence, and over the intervals several Maintainers burned out and left. Others took umbrage that their sacrifice was insufficiently appreciated, and after philosophical jousts with the established Protocols and with the Wardens who maintained them, exploded outwards, often thereby damaging both the Construct and themselves.
They should have known better, but somehow it always seemed to happen that Maintainers, having sunk their identities into The Construct, failed to realise that their departure literally involved their leaving parts of themselves behind, as well as removing their potential and fragrance from the lattice-work matrix, sometimes to the hurt and damage of the main fabric, more usually to the sub stations
I'm sorry to inform you that this de-metamorphosis incurred and involved excruciating pain.
The combination of their wounds and the injuries inflicted upon the Construct excited the hidden Deep Denizens to a feeding frenzy and they circled, like sharks, seeking ingress. Yet for all their efforts, the Construct continued, and indeed recovered, though not quite to her previous shape and performance.
The Founder brooded on these events, and as it did so it gradually changed. Its vision turned inward, and its delight became focused on the Construct itself, and it gave less consideration than before to The Journey, for which the Construct had been envisaged.
It devised arcane meta-mathematical formulae for the preservation and growth of the Construct.
It grew with the Construct, and it sunk several toroid and helical parts of its very essence, its data codes and flow into the Mansion. In so doing it lost aspects of self-awareness, its consciousness becoming so intertwined with that of the Construct that for it the two were often indistinguishable.
The Founder thus could no longer tell where it begun and where the Construct ended. And when it thought about it at all, it thought that this was good.
Some Wardens were Maintainers, others were Seers and Auditors, watching and listening in various spectra for the basic Codes and wisps of Universal Field Theory. It was all maddeningly complex, with groups and sub-groups, bowing, dancing, coalescing and entropically ending, all such events flowing in and out of many instants.
The Founder, although often irked by these endless cotillions and gavottes, found delight in solving some of the more abstruse problems and dilemmas that The Construct presented.
Many others who made up the Construct also imbued her life with their own. They responded to her chords, her harmonies, and together attempted to create outré symphonies of dark matter and numinous energy.
In this fashion the Construct existed on many planes for a considerable interval, becoming semi sentient and with a rhythm and aura peculiar to herself and which no other construction duplicated.
It was into this universe and situation there emerged an entity called, in its own mode of communication as translated into English, X.
X had left its previous arena of existence, what we might term a country, in this analogue, and moved to this other.
X saw the Mansion, and after inspecting it from a safe distance, boldly strode to the Portal, and requested entrance.
The Construct, detected nothing untoward in X's constitution, permitted entry. Within nano seconds, X met with some Wardens, and disarmed them both metaphorically and literally. Afterwards, it presented itself to The Founder and soothed its inquiries and appraisals.
The Founder was distracted by its reverie as to the nature of the Construct, being then fixated upon her rotations and trajectories, so The Founder enjoyed X's novelty, and lowered its guard in the face of X's self-promotion.
X presented blandishments of power and interest, and represented itself as having knowledge and influence in an existential plane, the Weird, that the Construct had never visited.
The Founder was a little jaded by its long-standing meditations, and was intrigued by X. Brightness! Newness! Effulgent radiance!
It was all too good to be true, as indeed some of the Wardens detected and communicated, radiating their anxieties to whatever and whoever would pay heed.
But The Founder was entranced by the vision of a new path, and fascinated by the possibility of a new zone to be added to The Construct.
X was granted access beyond the Zephyr, even into the Garden, though the latter was not really to its taste.
Its experience in The Weird meant it craved action and performance. It neither desired nor understood inwardness.
What did attract and keep its attention was the Founder.
The Founder's power excited X's admiration and envy. It soon devised, in a sub-routine buried below the medulla of its own consciousness, so that not even X itself was fully aware of its plans or likely modes of operation, that it would add its own directives to and then siphon off and operate its own part of the Construct.
This, you observe, is in itself a type of construct, with an interior machination with external consequences. X had thus chosen, whether consciously or not, a schemata and mode that included a deconstructive agenda.
You hardly need me to tell you how dangerous this was, both to The Construct and to X itself
Two wardens warned against what they noticed as dark energy within X, and specifically identified 4 nodal points of hard-wired foundational motivation and proto-genetic imperatives.
X's response to them was a swift and deadly counter attack, brutal and direct. The Construct had not experienced such an onslaught for eons. She had forgotten how to defend herself, and in any event the onset was launched inside her own structure, far deeper than the perimeter defences, and weeks within her early warning alarm nodules.
The Wardens, retired, wounded and reeling. Other Wardens rushed to understand, but were diverted from resisting X by their own programming which insisted upon their trying to heal and comprehend the victims instead of opposing the aggressor.
So great was their nicety that in their own reality they could not bring themselves to believe the wounded Wardens' warnings. Sadly, their innocence was only exceeded by their naïveté.
Into this emotional and procedural maelstrom the Founder stepped, applied its own accelerated ingestion procedures that had previously stood it in good stead, and thus unfortunately gave X's project only a cursory inspection.
It liked the project but failed to read the persona.
It sensed the scheme but missed the schemata.
So it again misread the signs, decided it must have the outworking of X's promised chambers as an addition to The Construct. So it imposed a strict regime of watch and guard upon X, and believed this would suffice.
And then returned to its deep contemplation, clearly satisfied that all would be well.
But the same inability to grasp the true bases of X's actions dictated that the Wardens would not and indeed could not apply these strict protocols to X. Such work was extremely distasteful for the Maintainers; the Seers were still looking outward and to Far Off and the Auditors had enough to do to manage the continuation of the existing phases of the Mansion.
Disaster beckoned.
Distribution networks were curtailed, mutual sustenance no longer assured. Moving parts, previously smooth and peaceful, now started to whine and grate. Light dimmed.
Bandwidth tumbled, and psycho-location produced random results.
A malaise gripped the Construct.
Worried Wardens lost their tranquillity and made maintenance mistakes, thus compounding the problem.
And like a pre-vocal infant she felt pain, unable to understand the cause of her unease.
The point of all this, as I promised you at the beginning, is that nothing is quite what it seems.
The complexities of the interactions of all the entities involved is far beyond my abilities to explain.
The greatest Estimators and Surveyors of the Universe would have been (and indeed were) perplexed by the Construct's conundrum.
It as if you were to stand in a large room with many crumpled pieces of newspaper lying in heaps upon the floor.
One ignites and you stamp it out.
But while you focus on this, another bursts into flame.
The wounded Wardens did not help much, for their increasingly desperate efforts to enlist concurrence from the other residents of the Construct, so as to persuade The Founder, were in large part counter-productive, as they merely started fires elsewhere and elsewhen.
The Founder found itself jumping around like a whirling dervish, leaping from one conflagration to another, apparently surrounded by combustible materials.
Whenever it extinguished one fire, another broke out.
The damning mistake and cardinal error, was that no one asked the Construct herself what she wanted.
The quality of her own existence was at stake, her purpose at risk, but no one thought to inquire.
After all, she was only a construct!
Consider the astonishing inconsistency of this.
Entities had given their existence to her creation and spent themselves for her supply and provision.
The Founder had sunk its identity into her.
Others sought refuge within her corona, for to some she appeared as a comet, a luminescent blaze across the apparently purposeless and trackless Void.
She existed on several planes, and her train was multi dimensional. She moved, yet was still.
She excited action yet was at rest. She kept the Deep Denizens at bay yet was susceptible to inward weakening and attrition. She beaconed the Journey yet served the entities that travelled with and in her.
Yet no one thought to ask her!
Consider!
Your shadow shows you are more than you imagine.
Your past has not disappeared, it is merely now lost to your sensorium, invisible to your perception save through lenses of deletions and distortions.
Your past is an impression, more than an indent, in sacred space. It is akin to a crucible, a mould, but also a cradle for What Comes After
Your future is imperceptible to you because you are the subject of a cause and effect universe, time being the necessary ingredient to preclude chaos, and produce meaning.
No entity can truly observe itself, or its selves, for the object impacts upon the observation. Your purpose mars the work.
Yet even so, the account of your being is more than the visible, more than your experience, and far, far more than your hopes and aspirations.
You are a true trinity of past, present and future: three tenses in one person.
So too, but multiplied by many orders of magnitude, The Construct.
Truly, the sum of The Construct was, is and ever will be greater than the aggregate of her parts, if you'll forgive the inelegance of that old truism.
I leave it to you to compile the moral(s) of this story.
I'll confine myself to pointing out that there is always a key to hand when one asks the right questions.
I stumbled upon the relevant question, in the end, almost by accident.
My query was of course addressed to The Construct.
"What is the best question to ask of you in order to receive the answer that will most help you?"
Try it for yourself!
And so I end this cautionary tale, in this strange moment we share.
If you need to know what transpired after the events I have attempted to relate, you'll have to revisit that Other continuum with me, some other of our days.
Bye bye!