The End of Questions

For reasons not to be answered, my dreams (which you may remember from the last post are actually your dreams, or something) have commissioned me to write the best story I can about an ionized orange. Here it is.
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Alone on the vast landscape of a distant planet sat an orange. It didn't know how it got there, nor did it really care. It had other thoughts to think about, those being the thoughts that oranges usually think, no matter what planet they are on.

"Do I have a name?" considered the orange. "And if I were to have a name, might it be Benjamin?"

"Could an apple tree afraid of bees ever convince itself to be pollinated?"

"How many souls would I be able to consume before my own soul was completely marginalized by the others?"

And, "If I were really hot, could I peel myself?"


This is not a selection of the orange's thoughts, but rather the complete collection. Each question would be pondered anywhere from one to three days, at which point the next question would be pondered, and so on, returning to the beginning once all four questions had been exhausted. Now, usually a plucked orange could only make it to question two or three without proper refrigeration, but this planet provided a natural temperature perfect for preservation. The orange felt fairly confident that in this distant reach of space he could finally get to the bottom of some of the mysteries that had perplexed his species for years.

Years went by, and then decades, and then whatever measurement comes after decades. No conclusions had been made, but the orange was still as optimistic as ever. Even when it noticed a purple, all-encompassing atmosphere approaching its position in the distance, the orange remained completely focused on its task. Yes, from time to time the thought of what this violet storm was popped into the orange's mind, but there was always an answer ready for that question: "It's purple."

The purple passed over the orange and everything seemed the same. If there were a human scientist on this planet, he could have told the orange that it had been ionized by the passing phenomenon. Chances are, however, the orange wouldn't have cared. In the exact instant that the scientist would have approached, the orange solved all of the questions. Answers were so simple for an ionized orange! The orange quickly rearranged its seeds so that other oranges would be able to recognize that he was an orange with answers, and he waited.

Nobody ever showed up, but of course the orange knew this. You see, ionized oranges can not only discover the indiscoverable; they can also see the future. The future of this planet was that it would chemically bond with whatever object sat on its surface and eventually become a burning star of that substance.

You see, this planet was, and still is, the sun.

Sadly, the sun is too ionized to ever spread its knowledge to the oranges on our planet, so its mission has transformed into providing the light and heat which give orange trees life. The fact that humanity also thrives off of these resources is no mere coincidence, for the sun knows that one day a human experiment will go horribly wrong and ionize all of the world's oranges, allowing its revelatory mission to succeed.

You see, the purpose of humanity is failure. For the sake of oranges. Because the sun is an orange.

The end.
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Note: This post features user interactive technology, displaying below a picture of you enjoying my story; that is, as long as your screen resolution can capture the width of your smile!