The kids in the basement – part2: the imagination machine

Imagine some kids locked in a basement. Tight up in chains so that they can never move. Outside.. a beautiful world, but they can never see it. The kids can hear each other, but the darkness in the room makes it impossible to see one another.  They are locked like this since forever. Their bodies… pillars for a world outside of their reach.

So even though they are together, they are also forever apart. The possibility of moving, of touching one another: absolutely none. So they needed to invent that.

They would imagine how touching the other would feel like. The skin, the softness, the moisture, the shivering sensation… all of these: re-imagined scraps of their past experiences, even though their experiences couldn’t have been further from common. They imagined how the other would look, how they would play together. Everything. Everything they built… worlds of imaginary brilliance, yet volatile like the butterfly flip of a wing.

And this is why words is all they had for creating their games and worlds. They could only speak to one another.

At first they could only hear each other, without even understanding. Soon they invented a language: united sounds that the other could decode as part of his imagination. They could never see each others look, never touch, yet they have seen the other in countless forms, and touched in a myriad of ways. All… inside the poetry of their own minds.

This is the beauty and horror of being a creator. The creator is always the most doomed slave. Otherwise he would not need to be one.

With no possibility to move or touch, the kids would pour everything they remembered from the outside world into the virtual world: the imagination machine. A machine designed to capture and store data from the real world. The kids could not be forced to do it, otherwise the accuracy of the data could not be assured. They needed to want to do it, to want to use the machine, to be their idea. This is maybe why there were only two of them put together in a given chamber. Just to act as an incentive. Something to give you the reason to use the imagination machine. Outside of this machine and basement there is always zero imagination, and everything is just what it is – at all times.

In the end… even though imagined the touches were real – because in imagining touching the other both of them actually touched themselves… which in the end … really meant touching the other… because, as they discovered, at the core they were only one, they were already united.

The paradox of life is that you have to invent death in order to experience living.