okay so this isn’t a story about how life came to exist as like a thing, you know. billions of years of gas, dead rock and amino acids turning to will is its own thing, and miraculous in its own right. but i wanna talk about something that happened about another two billion years after that.
at the bottom of the ocean there is a colony of cells. this isn’t all that uncommon. chemical soup was one of the earliest places you could find life, and even now, long after the cyanobacteria and the purple guys left for the surface, you can find folks living down here. this particular colony is special, though.
one of the creatures that lives here is… similar to the archaens the humans will find themselves observing, still more billions of years from now. it spends its life entangled together with others like it, cell membrane folded into complex shapes and wrinkles- to help with surface area, you understand. the cell maintains itself by performing a chemometabolistic reaction on the chemicals found in the hydrothermal vent it calls home.
the other is a forgotten bacteria, left behind when its cousins headed for the surface. this particular bacterium did not develop photosynthesis, like many of its brethren. instead, it has a different secret- it knows the power of breath.
what is poison to most, it knows to be sacred. what is death to most, it knows to be life. it lives well, down in the oxygen-rich vents. as do its neighbors. for millions or even billions of years, in fact, they all live very well. the early eukaryote develops more folds and surface area over time, and the bacterium is small enough to fit snugly into the crevasses. the body of one becomes a substrate for the other, and both come to know this to be healthy, advantageous even.
what is poison to the eukaryote, the bacterium takes it for its own. what is chaos and swirling abyss to the bacterium, the eukaryote holds steady. it is a good partnership.
millions of years pass in the blink of an eye for the slow mind off the world.
the partners in this dance only grow closer with time. eventually, they cease to recognize a difference between themselves and the other. such is their love.
eventually, the world agrees that this is so.
the leylines converge, and EUKARIA is born from breath and safety and love, forged in the bowels of the earth.
she is beautiful and breathtaking, and capable of so much more than either of her parents. she remembers the lessons taught to her, of cooperation and love, and seeks others with the same spirit. and in so doing, changes the scale of the entire story.