Today was my turn to try and teach Discord. I was apprehensive to say the least. No one I knew enjoyed his company, and I’d wager that everyone but the Board head looked on the crimson maelstrom of Tessaractal energy with absolute repulsion.
I entered the chamber through the decontamination airlocks, and looked on my surroundings. The room remained the same as before, however there was a new quality to it that I didn’t like; some omen filled the air with a sense of impending dread. The feeling made my stomach tie itself into notes. I sat down on the plastoid chair that was provided for the human teacher and waited for the red flowing sphere before me to respond.
After a couple seconds of silence, I spoke. “Good morning, Discord”.
The cloud congealed into the face of a wizened old man with grey hair and a large distinctive nose. "What do you mean?" the old man’s face said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"
“ ‘All of them at once,’ said Bilbo,” I quoted back.
The old man’s face grew a cheeky grin, “So you know ‘The Hobbit’. It’s a splendid tale.”
“Let’s try to stay on topic. Today’s lesson—“
“Is about multiplication tables. Yes I know. I felt it while it was being written up by your computers,” the cloud off handedly dismissed me with the waving of an albatross’ wing, “I’d like to talk about something else. Why not humanity?”
It seemed like a reasonable request; shouldn’t any child want to know more about its parents?
“Alright, I’ll allow it. The human race—“
“Known scientifically as homo sapiens are allegedly believed to have evolved on the planet Earth from their primate ancestors a little over 200,000 years ago and achieved full sapience sometime around 50,000 years ago. Really, it’s hilarious how you so readily accept fiction as fact.”
“It is fact Discord.”
“Really? Were you there?”
“..No.”
“I was. Was your instrumentation accurate?”
“It is accurate, yes.”
"Wrong. I may not like a fully step by step process, but I know how your science works. Given several different facts you simply keep those facts which support your hypothesis and throw the rest to the way side. When even more data is collected that counters your whimsically scientific guess, you reject it simply because it cannot be right, because it disagrees with your order of things.” The cloud chuckled, “Order. There is the biggest joke of all!”
“You cannot reject order or reason fully. Without it you can’t make your way through life or understand it.”
The red cloud fell to the floor all at once and reconstituted into an exact replica of Ahmed. I did my best to suppress a tiny gasp, but Discord must have heard it, because he grinned all the more. “Isn’t it true that man always asks ‘What is the meaning to life?’ It’s extremely arrogant of you to do so. Even in your simplest questions you strive to maintain some order in your world as you squirm in the dirt like worms. You assume that there is a meaning to life, that you can categorize and order existence as you can see fit. Don’t deny it! Order runs through your very blood.”
Discord/Ahmed made to sit down on thin air, and amazingly the air held him up without any visible means of doing so. He stroked his black chin stubble, “As it happens, you all have stumbled on the truth quite by accident. I guess even a blind squirrel can find an acorn now and then. There is a meaning to life: and it is chaos! Without chaos, the universe would have remained as an ordered sea of unreality, with nothing ever occurring at all, just eternal void and furious silence. The only reason you and I exist is because I happened. Nothing would have happened had not the ‘self-causing cause’ have occurred, and with my ascendance the stars came to life, the planets formed, and ultimately I created the human race. I am chaos, and chaos is god.”
“Then why would you ‘create’ us at all if all we ever do is ‘squirm like worms in the dirt’?”
Here I was chilled to the bone by his response.
Discord/Ahmed looked to the ceiling questioningly, and then he shrugged, “Because it’s funny! But I grow weary of this little game, and I don’t like toys that are boring.”
I left that day with my mind troubled, and my heart full of fear. I knew now that Discord would not let things continue as they were, as it was in his nature to be chaotic. One day soon he would come into conflict with humanity, and if something was not done very quickly, we were all doomed. Maybe we were doomed from the moment we set out to create a new life. That doesn’t matter now, I thought as I made my way to the observation deck to meet the real Ahmed; we made the mistake of creating him, and now we had to find a way to fix that mistake, no matter the price.