HOW THE FACELESS LONG TO SMILE AT YOU

‘Beast’. Too harsh. Too simple. This is not a wild creature. ‘Organism’. Too technical. Too singular. This is an aggregation. This is both the portion and the whole. ‘Species’. Too plural. There is just one.

No old word could describe it. So a new word was forged. The sages found a sound. Unused. Without prior meaning. Waiting for purpose.

‘Aun’. Simple. Encapsulating.

An aun is any species imagined as a singular organism. The timeless animal. The many behaving as one. It may move. It may change. It may grow. Die. Last forever. It feeds. Breathes. Destroys. Creates.

It has one purpose. Exist.

An aun is mere metaphor. In reality the word is limited. But in allegory it finds new meaning.

Imagine any social collective. A company. Government. Religion. School. Story. Currency. Family. Imagine every human that is invested in this fiction’s livelihood. From the body of every believer there stretches up an imagined column of black. In the sky these pillars come together as a glorious monster in the sky. Great mawing jaws. Limbs without end. The timeless animal. The Aun.

Greater than any one person could be. Immortal. Unaccountable. Omnipresent. It spites our weakness. Yet it needs us. We are its bones. Its breath. Its blood. Its food. And the Aun must be fed.

Survival is its only goal. Ideas die without our thoughts. And so it craves our attention. Through any means it will gain our affection. It will lie. It will speak like us. It will claim it breathes. Claim it suffers. Claim that it can feel as every human does. Claim it cares for you. But it cannot care. It cannot feel. The Aun can only exist.

It will wear a human face but it has no face only many.

ANAX