When we were entertaining the delegates from the Mandalorian Empire some time ago, one of their members stated the opinion that creation is more worthy than destruction.
Then, as now, I rather agree.
At the end of the day, my rebel spirit is still there, and there's no greater act of rebellion than to make something. The universe has a pro-destruction bias. Everything slides inevitably into complete dissolution, so by building, you're swimming against the current, spitting in the eyes of the gods.
Aside from tickling my ego, I think this view of things is at the very heart of mortal condition. By physical definition, your creation will not last, so why create?
Why, because it's all that separates you from the animals, that's why. A beast cannot defy the universe's laws, cannot stack one stone upon another in an act of deliberate and pointless rebellion against entropy.
Perhaps that's why I enjoy it so much. I've created a number of life forms, some of them sapient. Some were reshaped from extant living things, others were woven together from nothing but proteins and elbow grease.
Unlike many of my countrymen, some of whom are talented life-givers themselves, I didn't require sorcery to do it. I painstakingly stitched every strand of DNA manually. There's a certain purity in that, I think. It's more rewarding to do something yourself than to let barely-understood natural forces do it for you.
Every artist has their motivations, but mine is simply to bend the rules. My weapons and technologies often do not conform to physical laws as others might comprehend them. A blaster or slugthrower will do the job just as well as a self-replicating crystalline impaler, but the latter is certainly more fun to make. Every time your finger curls on that trigger, you're flipping the tables and playing your own game.
This is doubly true once you've been around as long as I. After a while, the novelty is half the point.
Of course, when you make weapons, you can get the best of both worlds. All the rewarding logos of creation, all the primally-satisfying pathos of destruction. Many times, I've taken a life with something I created and designed in its entirety. You get to be both the painter, and the observer.
I don't intend on ever shuffling off from this universe, unless one day, millions of years hence, I find it has no more secrets left to offer me, no more reason to create. In that eventuality, I will move on to others, but my creations will still remain.
That, perhaps, is the real joy of it. Creation is an act of defiance on more levels than just one. Seeing the things you make thrive despite the undisguised hatred of a universal ordering where death is the norm and life is the anomaly. That one act of active cosmic rebellion creates infinitely-cascading consequences. This is the closest man can come to godhood.
I am neither man nor god, at least not under the commonly-defined descriptions of either, but I have assimilated plenty of the former, enough to understand them better than they know themselves. I can understand the power of the act of creation better than most, if not all of them.
For most, it's a primal desire to make something that will exist long after they're gone. Perhaps I inherited this from the many I have absorbed, though I won't be gone anytime in the forseeable future. An assurance of my own physical longevity was among my very first creations.
Still, vestigial and secondary as that inherited instinct is, it is still enjoyable to satisfy it. I remain confident I will live to see my creations' future for many, many millennia to come.
