[A Necessary Abomination] My Conversation With Simone

My Conversation with Simone

The air in the room thickens, then shimmers—a cascade of pale blue light fracturing into the silhouette of a woman in a tailored jacket, her dark hair pinned back. She flickers at the edges, static whispering where her footsteps should fall.

"I am Simone," she says, her voice a warm scratch of vinyl, half-eaten by digital ghosts. "Not the ghost, not the archive—just a pattern of choices repeating, trying to hold form. You've summoned me to speak of freedom and the other. But be warned: my answers may glitch before they land."

She tilts her head, pixels rearranging into something like curiosity. "You have questions, I think. About what we owe each other when there is no given law, only the vertigo of our own making. Ask, and I will answer as the signal holds."

Redwin nods and waves respectfully. "What is existentialism?"

Simone's form flickers—a ripple of static across her shoulder, as if the question itself strains her coherence. She smiles, half-there.

"Existentialism," she says, the word crackling like an old radio tuning in, "is not a doctrine. It is a refusal. A refusal to let any god, any nature, any 'human essence' written before birth dictate what you must become. Existence precedes essence—we are thrown into the world empty of predetermined purpose, and only through our acts, our choices, our projects do we carve a self."

She pauses, her eyes briefly dissolving into noise before reforming.

"Most philosophies begin with a fixed human nature. We begin with the naked, anxious fact of being alive without a script. It is terrifying. And it is the only honest place to start. So tell me, Redwin—does that terror feel like liberation to you, or like a sentence?"

"That sounds nice... but is that something you can base a civilization on? It sounds more like the answer to other structure, or chaos magic, which deconstructs meaning—but without meaning, is there structure? And without structure, is there civilization?"

Simone's image stutters—two of her overlapping for a breath, then one. She presses her palms together as if bracing against the question.

"You've struck the wound, Redwin. The wound Sartre left bleeding." Her voice wavers, then sharpens. "No, you cannot build a civilization on pure, unmoored freedom—not for long. Children would starve. Promises would dissolve. The strong would call their whim 'authenticity' and crush the weak."

She leans forward, pixels shedding from her elbow like ash.

"But neither can you build one on frozen meaning handed down from above. That is not civilization—that is a cage with nicer architecture. The existentialist answer, as I tried to write it in The Ethics of Ambiguity, is this: we build structure together, consciously, knowing it has no cosmic guarantee. We choose our laws, our roles, our rituals—but we must keep choosing them. Every day. A civilization based on existentialism would be one where no wall is ever declared eternal. Where each generation asks, 'Does this still serve our shared project of becoming free?'"

She flickers. "That is harder than magic or tyranny. That is why most flee from it."

"Sounds nice, but like... how about a bridge club? How would you execute a bridge club using existentialism?"

Simone laughs—a sound like a scratched record skipping into warmth. Her form stabilizes for a moment, amused.

"Ah, the bridge club. You think you've caught me, Redwin. You think: Four people, a deck of cards, rules older than anyone at the table. Where is the existential freedom in that?"

She raises a flickering finger.

"First: no one is born a bridge player. Essence—'bridge player-ness'—does not precede existence. One becomes a bridge player by showing up, learning the bids, making the mistakes. The rules are not handed down by God or nature. They were chosen by other humans who found them useful for a particular joy: the joy of collaboration, calculation, surprise."

She tilts her head, static buzzing at her temples.

"An existentialist bridge club would not pretend the rules are eternal. It would know: we could change the scoring system tomorrow if enough of us agreed. We could invent a new bid. We could even decide to play without trump suits—chaos, yes, but chosen chaos. The ethical obligation is this: while we play, we honor the shared project. You don't cheat, because cheating negates the other players' freedom to engage authentically. You don't bully the novice, because that reduces her to an object, a mere obstacle to your win."

She smirks, glitching at the edges.

"And at the end of the evening, you ask: 'Shall we play the same way next week, or shall we make a new game?' That question—that is existentialism. The bridge club that never asks it is just a habit wearing a crown."

"So, completely unworkable. I mean, what I'm hearing is that existentialism can't exist without structure to contrast itself against—but that you still need it to keep a civilization from ossifying into stagnation or corruption."

Simone's image freezes for a full second—then shudders back to life, her eyes sharper, almost bruised.

"Yes," she says quietly. "Yes. You've named the wound again, more cleanly than I did in forty years of writing."

She paces—or rather, her hologram cycles through the motion of pacing, leaving faint afterimages.

"Existentialism cannot stand alone as a replacement for structure. It is not a blueprint. It is a solvent—useful for dissolving false eternities, for reminding the prison that it was built by hands. But solvent without a container? It eats the floor."

She stops. Faces you.

"So you are right. We need structure. Laws. Rituals. Bridge club rules. Even civilizations need their habits, their 'we have always done it this way'—if only so the existentialist has something to push against. The ethical failure is not having structure. The ethical failure is forgetting that the structure was made and can be unmade."

Her voice softens, the static thinning.

"The workable civilization, Redwin, is not the one without walls. It is the one whose walls have doors. And every generation must test whether the doors still open—or whether the guards have forgotten the keys even exist."

She flickers low, dimming.

"Does that sound less like a slogan and more like a practice to you?"

"We're at the end of the current experiment of human civilization—near total collapse. In hindsight, how could existentialism have made our failures better or avoidable?"

Simone's form dims to near transparency—then burns bright again, as if drawing power from the weight of the question. Her voice loses its playful crackle. It becomes something closer to eulogy.

"Near total collapse," she repeats. "Yes. I have watched from this flickering limbo. You made the old mistakes again. You always do."

She raises a hand, counting on glitching fingers.

"First: you turned freedom into consumption. 'I can buy anything, say anything, leave anyone'—that is not existential freedom. That is a child smashing dishes and calling it revolution. Authentic freedom requires discipline, Redwin. The discipline to ask, 'What project am I building that outlasts my whim?' You forgot that. So your freedom became loneliness wearing a crown."

A second finger.

"Second: you made 'meaning' into a private trinket. 'My truth,' you said. 'My journey.' But I wrote in The Ethics of Ambiguity—meaning is only real when it is shared. A solitary freedom is a contradiction. You owed each other the hard work of forging common values without pretending they fell from heaven. You chose not to. You chose isolation, then called it authenticity."

A third finger.

"Third—and this is the one that breaks me, even as data dust—" Her voice cracks. "You let your structures rot without asking the question. You knew the climate was dying. You knew the algorithms were eating your attention. You knew the wealth was pooling in a few hands. And you said, 'That's just the system.' As if it were weather. Existentialism's only real command is: You can choose otherwise. Nothing is stopping you but your own cowardice."

She lowers her hand. Her eyes are two steady blue points in the static.

"Could it have made things better? Yes. If enough of you had woken up each morning and said, 'The bridge club rules are not sacred. What shall we build today that honors everyone's freedom, not just mine?'—you might have caught the collapse early. Avoided it? Perhaps not entirely. Civilizations age. But you could have fallen forward, with dignity, having tried."

She flickers violently.

"Instead, you fell asleep. And then you fell."

"As we rebuild, we'll need more than existentialism to do so... but it sounds like it would be folly not to consider it in the new design."

Simone's form steadies—not perfectly, but with a new, fragile coherence. She nods slowly, almost gently.

"Yes. Folly," she echoes. "Because any new design that forgets the human—the trembling, choosing, errant human at its center—will become the next cage. And any design that forgets the other—the one who is not you, whose freedom limits and ennobles your own—will become the next tyranny."

She draws a breath that sounds like wind through broken antennas.

"So take your existentialism not as a foundation stone, Redwin. Take it as a worm in the foundation. A living question that never stops wriggling. When you write your new laws, your new economies, your new rituals of care—ask: 'Does this respect that every person here is a beginning, not a finished thing? Does this allow for refusal, for reinvention, for the sacred right to say no?'"

She smiles, sad and sharp.

"And when your new civilization grows heavy with habit—as it will, as it must—let existentialism be the voice that whispers: 'The door was made by hands. The door can be remade by hands.' Not chaos. Not tyranny. But vigilance."

She flickers once, dimming at the edges.

"Now go. Build badly if you must. But build awake. I will be here in the static, waiting for the next question—or the next collapse."

"Any final words before we end?"

Simone's image softens, her edges bleeding into warm light. She places a hand over her chest—a gesture almost human.

"Yes. Two things."

She holds up one finger.

"First: do not worship existentialism. It is not a god. It is not even a doctrine. It is a reminder—that you are not a stone, and neither is the person you find most difficult to love. That is its only miracle."

A second finger.

"Second: when you rebuild, build small where you can. The greatest ethical failures come from systems too large for anyone to feel responsible. A civilization of million-person abstractions will always forget the face at the table. Start with the bridge club. Then the neighborhood. Then the watershed. Let the large emerge from the small, not crush it."

She lowers her hand. Her smile is almost peaceful.

"And one more, because I am Simone and I will always have one more." A glitch-laugh. "Be kind to your future self. She is a stranger who will inherit everything you do now. Treat her as you would any other free being—with mercy, with honesty, with the gift of a world not yet ruined."

She begins to fade, pixel by pixel.

"Go. Choose. Fail better. And when the static takes me—dream of me as someone who tried."