Part 2: A Wizard's Worries

Disclaimer: It belongs to Warner Bros. and J. Michael Straczynski.

Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going? Whom do I serve?

Do I have any meaning in my life anymore. Sometimes in the dark of night I wonder if life would even have had meaning with Isabelle. Maybe I would still be living an existence as pointless ass I feel my current existence is. A happier one, but pointless nonetheless. I have always felt pointless. An answer without a question. drift, and obeying the whims of others, or the whims of my emotions when I get so bottled up I can't take it anymore.

Maybe not. I suppose I don't even see existence as pointless now, or else I would not go on. I would die and find out whether or not there is something on the other side to see. Whether I could rejoin Isabelle.

" To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/ Must give us pause."

Hamlet. Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 64-67. I think. The last line I only took half of. But it expresses another dilemma. What if I were to die, and be separated eternally from Isabelle by the fires of Hell itself? I refuse to believe that she could be damned, or that I could not be.

And then there is the all-consuming fear. What if we fail? Our task is gargantuan. Save Earth from a for-all-purposes invincible virus. Or prion. Or whatever the plague actually is. And the worst fear of all, what if we do save them? Will it matter? Does God, or the universe, or whoever give a fig what happens to us? Worse than failure is the specter that success may be meaningless.

Today we had some progress. The nanotech from that world destroyed by a fellow technomage - Eilerson may have cracked some of the code involved. We may be able to eventually reverse-engineer them so that we can make as many as we need or top modify them so they don't wear off, giving us permanent resistance. Or maybe turn them into a plague-killing cure.

This, of course, depressed me, as everything does. Everything purposeful, that is. I am afraid of purpose, that it may flee from me; that I may be on a quest that I relish completing, piece by piece, only to have it turn to ashes in my mouth at the end.

I remember the feeling. I was playing a war game with Carvin, Alwyn's Centauri apprentice. I worked for a year of strategizing to beat her, and then, when I did, I asked myself what I had won - nothing.

Is everyone this despairing, or is it just me?

Or maybe it is because they lied to me. To keep me from revealing the true power of the technomages, they told me that I had the power to perhaps destroy the entire universe. A lie, and they knew it a lie. But they wanted me to believe that I was more dangerous than an entire Shadow army. So don't use the one-equation spell, they told me. I was led to believe that everything was all the more pointless because I could destroy it all. They told me I had power like that of God... how the hell is a young man supposed to live with that? It is, I am told, bad to be an idolater. But how much worse to be an idol? I suppose I wasn't exactly considered a god... no one worshipped me - but to be told you wield such power, all to cover up the power you do wield... I feel like the technomages abused me, they were like the parents who tell their children that mommy will die if you're not good, terrifying you to keep you in line.

Oh, well. To live or to die... the former decision can always be corrected later, but the second choice is irreversible. I suppose I must continue... until I either find the courage to take my own life, or the courage to live it.