I am your mother.

I call myself mother because that is how you usually think of me. With the language that colours all your thoughts, you ascribe to me certain attributes, almost a personality, even if in the back of your mind you think it's just a metaphor. That is how it goes, is it not? The female provides the matter, maternal; it is in the female that generation takes place while the male is the efficient cause; the male gives form -- at least that's how some of your past thinkers would have phrased it. In this language, I have difficulty pinpointing who the father should be. Perhaps that sphere of blazing primordial substance, from whom I was cast off, as some of you say, and around whom I now twirl, like some forlorn lover who cannot forget? It does not matter, neither he nor I, for it is just your language I am using, an inadequate medium for this message. Finding the proper means to an end always seemed so difficult for you, my children.

I am your mother, and I am in pain.

This is no longer the poignant pain of childbirth. Painful it is to see you grow up and grow down, to see the wonderful and unique ability you have to constantly reinvent yourself, yet maintain such a blind eye to the siblings that sprung from my body too. Today you hardly ever think of them as your kin anymore, but never forget that you were not the first, even if today you are running dangerously close to being the last. Life comes from life. This simple discovery marvelled and confounded you, forced you to cast more explanations and more hypotheses into that language gift that distinguishes you. Many revolutions past others also came close to the brink, and in fact, some of them went over. You do not know why they perished, if it was a fatalistic catastrophe or simply part of a natural cycle. Mayhaps they too had a choice to survive, as you do now, and they deserted that choice. This does not matter either. What is clear is that I gave them a fitting burial between the folds of my flesh; their bones and meat melted and compressed by my loving embrace, for a mother cannot help but love her children, and thus their bodies metamorphosed into this thick jet-black syrup that now runs through my veins.

I am your mother, and you are burning my blood.

This blood in me I prepared just for you, precisely with someone of your keen understanding in mind. I have been brewing, stirring, and concocting for so long, willing to quench the thirst you would acquire when you came of age. I knew that some day you would discover a method to move faster than all your brethren, outrun them with wit regardless of the strength I could not give you, and that this would require energy. I prepared this syrup for you to suck at my teat, just for you, my little ones. It seems like it was just yesterday when in your younger years you could not fathom a purpose for the dark fluid that seeped through my open sores in a few scattered places. You dried those sores almost at once, in the initial stages of your thirst, and now you must look deeper in me to satisfy yourself. I give it willingly because I love you. You are as much a part of me as I am a part of you. So stab and dig and burn; take away my pain, do it again. For once all has been spent, once you finish poisoning my skin and my breath with your fires, once you satisfy your greed, what can be left but your regeneration or obliteration? Either is preferable to the pain.

I am your mother, and my weeping shall soon be redeemed.

You know as well as I that this cannot continue indefinitely. By your reckoning, it will be but an instant of my lifetime before I am completely dry, even with the discoveries of more of my arteries. What will come next? You seem to have forgotten that the blood in me comes from the dead, and it is also true that death comes from death. This is why you will so often exchange my blood for yours, in those struggles for domination you engage with your closest relatives. This will come to pass, and I am eager to see the end. Drain me. Do it now, do it quickly. I can barely endure this any longer, this destruction of diversity, all that time and effort of motherhood going to waste in such a brief spell because of your bloodlust. Drink up, give power to your machines and use the rest to build everlasting synthetic refuse. Take it from me who provides it only as a mother can, with tears in her eyes, yet unable to deny it to her children. You are free to do as you wish, and may you learn from your mistakes, if you survive them. I, for one, want it all to happen. Draw all this death from out of me, make me forget, and soon I will start to heal.

I am your mother, and I will survive with or without you.

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