Not long after this conversation, of course, I became the Immortal Pi. The transmogrification occurred, as I said, in the year 1863 on trip to the marketplace in Tanakpur to sell wine and gather the few essentials produced outside the monastery -- a few fruits and spices unsuitable for growth in the climate of the region; and women, who were seemingly unsuitable for growth up there, too. Too much Yang and not enough Yin, or something like that. We left as a group at daybreak, twelve monkish men loaded to the hilt with rice wine, me and my two orphan brothers, Klesha, a hefty, olive-skinned Hindu; and a thin reed of a Nepalesian mute, Chitta, both my elders by two years, both abandoned under conditions similar to my own. We all wound up discarded on the doorstep of the White Lotus monastery. We were three very fortunate orphans, indeed. Klesha and Chitta had been together since infanthood, and as such coexisted with extreme affinity for one another. Klesha acted as Chitta's interpreter, deciphering his whoops and whistles for the entire group, and spoke for the two of them as a single unit. They had the happiness of a bond beyond that of blood relation. They shared a kindred spirit. I was the odd-spirit out, as it were. So as the two boys raced about together in the forest alongside the trail of monks, more confident in their bodies, I walked alongside Fa-shun at the head of the group, contemplating the sticks and rocks and undergrowth laid out along the less-trodden path to Tanakpur. These were my last hours as a mortal, and I would soon make the greatest discovery of my brief childhood, just footsteps away from immortality, which what this: Mud is fun! Indeed. I came upon by sheer coincidence when I slipped along a muddy spot on the path and landed on my butt in the dark, fecund muck, much to the amusement of the group, and myself as well. The sun broke through the clouds, and pushed a few beams though to the base of the forest, the wind blew soft over the luscious greenery of the woods, and the monks all laughed at me as I wiggled the viscous soil between my fingers. Chitta whooped Klesha grabbed his belly and howled with laughter. Toddling myself upright, and brushing off my butt, I wiped my hands on a part of my haik that wasn't already soiled, and bobbled along the trail, trying to keep up with Fa-shun and the rest of the group, who made a bee-line for my destiny. The remainder of the trek went smooth, and we made Tanakpur before midday. The marketplace alive with people from all over the area doing just what we were doing, picking up things they couldn't produce themselves, and selling what they had in surplus. The clanging of oxen bells kept an offbeat rhythm with the febrile music of the street performers adorned in brightly colored robes and tunics, playing their hearts out for whatever coinage people chose to toss in the fedora on the street in from of them. Merchants cried out to the masses, decrying the quality and affordability of their goods. Thick fatty odors of meat frying on the spit wafting amongst the overbearing musks of man and beast crowding close together, and the smell of the fish, freshly captured from the Indian Ocean, mingling in unison, singing the stories of the marketplace in four-part harmony. The marketplace, the first gathering of the tribes. The first homage to social living. I was enthralled. To keep us from getting lost, they bound us together at the wrist with a soft, sturdy cloth about five meters long. The chaotic pitch of the activity overwhelmed my senses. I took in everything. Nepalese housewives and harlots, gypsies, errant journeymen and wandering ascetics, minstrels and magicians jumbled amid heartless merchants with the lime green luminance of greed in their hearts, and as well men of stolid character who produced and sold quality goods of value. Everybody's here. Wild-eyed fakirs dance and wiggle about politicians spouting pedantic rhetoric from marble-plated pedestals, beggars with broken bodies, pleading with any who will listen, singing the sorrows of the damned. The marketplace, now and forever. We move through this mayhem towards the merchant who would by the wine produced by the men of the monastery, trodding the last few steps of the epoch unbeknownst to all except Fa-shun, who walked along at the head of the group as though hypnotized, leading us toward some specific point far beyond the aged Chinaman just down the street who managed the sale of the wine, yet but footsteps away. It was a perfect day for enlightenment, a perfect day to begat the End of Time. _ _ _ I first saw the man I was destined to become, as I said, standing next to the fish. He looked out of place there, with his long white ringlets of hair adorned about the gracile line his head and shoulders, the light around him to reflecting, radiating with a somewhat celestial glow. Svelte of frame, long arms leading to slender fingers, he stood with his back straight near the edge of the slime covered fishcart, seemingly unaffected by the odor of dead sea creatures and the corpulence surrounding him. Looking ahead into the oncoming flow of denizens, gazing into the crowd and beyond, as though they proved a mere paper thin veil of mist attempting in futility to obscure from him the object of his quest. Amid the chaos he shone out like a diamond, stood out like a thumb from the forefinger. We came through the street and I saw him standing there; then WHAM, as Fate would have it, I was jolted forward by a midget who'd lost his balance during an acrobatic street performance, sending me into my two brothers, sending us all sailing. He was a big guy for a midget, I thought, flying forward toward Chitta with the speed of gravity. We tumbled through the dirty and hay and manure, which I found not nearly so enjoyable as mud, and I wound up on the bottom of the pile, face down in the street. When Klesha and Chitta got up off me, I rose, dusted off my haik, and looked up right into the waiting eyes of the God before me. There was a vitality, a serenity I saw there that went beyond the depths of simple mortality. You could see the light shining bright, the resonation received from the source and amplified for all to behold, so I beheld him for a moment. He looked me deep in the eyes, and sent a copper coin flipping heads over tails in my direction. It landed in the dirt at my feet. Heads. It was a bright Indian Head penny, though I didn't know it at that moment. Right then it was something I'd never seen before. I picked the penny up. The world exploded. That is to say, that the knowledge of the entire existence of the Universe in perfect completion, its Alpha and Omega, it tendencies and eccentricities, its quirks, quarks and cosmic correlations, pinhead sized black holes containing the compressed mass of galaxies awaiting a passing burst of scalar radiation in which they might blossom -- super novas at cynosure from mass to energy, elders of the universe now clearing the path for younger more vibrant stars -- and the understanding of the Arbitrary Constant, the only force able to alter the entropy in a bounded, infinite system, was made known to me right then and there, and it was fine. Darn fine, in fact. It was my destiny. The man spoke with me, though I never saw him move his lips. We stood there, frozen in the fluid of time. He said: "Greetings, Pi and welcome to the End of Time. With this, the twelfth of twelve incarnations, do I pass on to you the torch for which you were crafted, created for that which was I many centuries prior. I have been in the Americas setting the stage for the dhrama destined to arise there upon the ascent of the new millennia. This is the rite of passage passed on unto you, as you will do the day you create yourself anew, as now create I. Ascend to the sky, for now you are Pi! Arise, awake alive! revive and survive as Pi before I , and the same as the Pi who will still be alive when the universe reaches the ultimate size, and begins to contract in undaunted reprise, will again Pi devise some avatar prize who with radiant spirit all odds he defies in order to find that one state of mind, that manner inclined toward the pure and refined, with a vision reflecting a point of perfecting a resonance clear in align with hum and the ring the spheres that binds blinding white light unto cosmic debris, a fresh breath of life from a scalaresque breeze blowing raindrops and dustspecks, birthing babe galaxies, we scatter like seeds these clandestine deeds thus that all mortal ills might for once be distilled, reduced like the change at charge of a bill, to a moot metered meme once considered extreme rendered hence to the realm of a dream serpentine, and forever a folly in the ultimate scheme. Venture forth now, Pi, all you that was I, and bring forth those souls who are given to rise, wake them up from the dream and in the like fashioning the Tao to them sing this divine offering, igniting a light shining forever bright in the timeless quality of all that which is Pi," he said, then vanished. I looked around. No one had noticed anything, or so it seemed, except me. Apparently, nothing changed. Nothing that is, save for a new God toddler standing in the street staring wide-eyed at a penny. I was that toddler, of course, and I had changed, without a doubt. Omniscience is not a subtle thing. You know it when it hits you. You feel the difference, before and after. And me, I felt very different. _ _ _ I was mistaken in assuming that no one noticed the event. Fa-shun had noticed. "You look different," he said. "I feel different. Did you see that man standing there?" I said pointing towards the fish cart. "Yes, I saw him. He gave you something." "A penny." "More than that, I believe." "I suppose so." "May I see the coin?" I handed it to him, he took it in his hand. Nothing happened. "It only works once on one person. The right person." "How do you know this?" "I just know." He nodded, and the group began to move forward. I moved along with them, yet now things were different. I felt no fear, no apprehension, no overwhelming stimulation at sight of the market. It all made perfect sense to me now. Everything was clear. I allowed the tug at my wrist to keep my body moving with the others, but my head -- every dendrite and neuron and synaptic connection was charged a resonance once obscured, now so clear that the vibrations made it almost difficult for me to remain in my body. There just didn't seem to be any reason to stay there. Why should I? It was now possible for me to travel throughout the cosmos as a single undifferentiated band of light, were I inclined to do so. Why remain in the cage when the door is open? Because, as I realized right then and there, it was my job. _ _ _ After that day, life around the White Lotus was never quite the same. Omniscience remains a difficult concept for mortals to grasp, no matter how open-minded their cosmology. To actually live with a deity proves challenging, to say the least. Mortals prefer their deities distanced from the reality, not living in the cut just down the cave, as it were. It's not that immortals are offensive, really, it more a matter versus energy problem. Especially in a case such as mine. The immortal who would otherwise be my mentor just dumped the whole thing in my lap, leaving me to sort out the details. Omniscience is a tool in and of a state of mind. It doesn't necessarily solve your problems, in fact, it tends to make them more complicated. Every decision a God makes to take action, if unfocused, can result in a dastardly, cosmos crushing blow, if handled improperly. For example: When I was three-and-a-half, I accidentally farted in the wrong direction and blew one of the younger monks, Sung Yi, to Kingdom Come, literally. He wasn't wholly ungrateful. Life in Kingdom Come beats life on planet Earth, without question. He just said that he wasn't ready yet. I tried to blow him back, but it was useless. It's easier to create a God than it is to return them to mortality. It's an inertia thing. It can be accomplished but it requires a whopping load of anti-scalar energy. Now, of course, it's not a problem, save for the fact that Sung Yi enjoys Kingdom Come more than Earth. Go figure. Indeed, I was just a babe back then, learning to use the tools of my trade bestowed upon me sans user's manual, operating instructions, or the like. It was all there, but it takes practice to harness, to focus, to discipline the release, just like it takes effort to learn to ride a bike, to learn juggling, or surf, to do math, anything like that. You have to practice. _ _ _ So, I practiced. I began with simple physical things in close proximity, like myself, and the objects in my room. Levitation, matter morphing, interdimensional travel, astral projection, proper time tripping -- everything seemed like common sense combined with balance. It was a cinch once you got the hang of it. And fun, too! Even better than mud, which is pretty darn fun. _ _ _ Over the course of the following six years my power grew logarithmically as I became familiar the constant state of aeternitas . My physical being was that of a young boy, aged four, five, six and seven, and so on. Yet I existed in a constant state of learning to experience the entire 120 billion year history of this particular universe, which was creating a proportionate number of synaptic connections throughout my entire nervous system, bestowing upon me enough capacity to simultaneously consider every event throughout the course of the expansion and reflexive contracting of the universe. Which, as I said, gave me quite a great deal to think about. I realized this: we were not the first Big Bang. Such events were actually rather common, cosmologically speaking; that in fact this was one of many universes in various states evolution towards its particular eschatological nature, evolving towards its ultimate future, evolving towards becoming God. That is the bottom-line: become God or die in the Heat Death of entropy. It works like this: In a matter-dominated universe, all mass exists as energy, moving slowly, capable of housing a relatively infinite amount of information, which stems from a Source, bounded and infinite, yielding unlimited amounts of energy which when properly harnessed ultimately defuses the entropy otherwise inevitable. As the amount of information increases in a system -- resulting from communication taking place at a rate of exchange proportional to the amount of available energy input at any given time, coupled with the ever-increasing amount of information which is the natural tendency towards Progress, so increases the system's complexity. As the system's complexity increases in the form of information, so moves the system through Tempus through to aevum , then on to aeternitas, or that of becoming God. It's just that easy. I realized this when I was 9.86 years old, in the summer of 1869. This was the thought that caused me to leave the White Lotus monastery, so that I might get on with my work, the path of which I'd already covered every meter. That path that lay before me, every event, every success and failure neatly lain along the wayside, waiting for me to pass. It's one thing to not know what you want to do with your life; and it's entirely another when your life stands booked, basically, for the next two centuries. I guess you could say I had my work cut out for me. _ _ _
In the shadowed corridors of creativity, where the hum of technology intertwines with the whisper of forgotten melodies, Kevin M. Cowan crafts his enigmatic tapestry. His words, like echoes from a distant jazz club, dance between the lines of reality and reverie, painting noir landscapes with the ink of introspection. As a musician, his notes linger like ghosts in the alleyways of the mind, haunting yet familiar, each chord a step deeper into the labyrinth of human experience. As a technologist, he navigates the digital cosmos, weaving circuits of possibility that shimmer with the promise of the unknown. In this twilight realm, where art and innovation converge, Cowan's work stands as a beacon, illuminating the path for those who dare to dream
Kevin M. Cowan is a writer, technologist, and artist whose work spans novels, AI development, drumming, and filmmaking. From his fiction roots in Nebraska to experimental media projects and cutting-edge AI, Kevin blends storytelling, sound, and code into one creative continuum. Explore his world — one story, rhythm, and idea at a time.
Music. Video. Visuals arts. All composed or curated by Kevin.
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