Cups and Cakes

"Before the sky had finished darkening to navy, the tide had risen to whisk the shell from the atoll, allowing it to continue its progression east. The man’s mind finally blanked as he stared at the slowly passing stars. A meteor flashed across the sky, appearing to slice open the night with the tip of some phalanx of light. The man’s eyes tracked it to the horizon, where it disappeared beyond a plume of smoke. That struck him as odd: a column of smoke, shining white in the rising moon’s light, amidst the waves of a seemingly endless ocean. As the shell approached the smoke, the man recognized it to be steam, not smoke, and realized that this spout of water vapor was a volcano bubbling just beneath the surface. Liquid stone shoved itself forward to the surface, piling among itself and building a new island that animals and plants might someday live on. This realization startled him: the world was changing, growing, perhaps even restarting. The world – the very planet, in and of itself – was forging a new beginning in every moment, in every waking second. The world was healing. The world was moving on from wounds dealt in the past.

It seemed as though infinite peace had tunneled to him through a haze of starvation and released some sort of internal pressure. He felt as though he could finally understand the world, could understand humans, could understand those damned – what had the cheerful one called itself, a Visual Intellect? He felt as though he could never have failed anything prior to this moment. He couldn’t have failed Jessica or Charran or his family or his crew. Not because he was perfect, not because he was lucky, but because nothing up to this point had counted. It was as if his life were some epic tale, and this moment marked the end of its prologue."

[Little did he know: it was, and it did. Well, that last portion is mostly true.]