For centuries, Man had gotten into a bad habit of neglecting his oldest friend, World. Ever the psychic astronaut, Man’s latest distraction, the Technology Age, was rife with shiny objects and synthetic sounds: cars that whooshed through cloudless skies at supersonic speeds, biotech innovations that were capable of healing viruses and extending lifespans tenfold, big data and nuanced research that forced populations to rethink boring things suchlike morals and values, which, by then, were considered ancient. And not to mention principles: the least important inventions of all. 

            World had always done everything in Her power to provide for Man enough animals to hunt and kill. Enough plants to grow and harvest. Enough hospitable climes to help Man sleep. Beauty abundant: all those snow-capped mountains rising up to pierce the heavens; oceans whose replicants had been composed of a divine array of vast and indefinite and bursting colors flung far and near the sun above; even the patterned paths Moon charted along Her orbital, composed of billions and billions of floating particulars of Cosmos bygone, which had been fashioned by World for Man and Man alone.

But Man was a troublemaker.

            Whilst World corroded, Man, in the modern epoch, was doing what Man had always done best: invent. He continued to shape and will new realities into existence through the use of words and numbers, leading to even greater and more unexpected discoveries than what had existed yesterday, and leading also to less poverty and random death. Which was good. But Man, why, He was an overcomplicator of things. Ten thousand years after Man built his first civilization, Man was lost, clearly, in the very maze He had built up for Himself.

            Indeed, unbeknownst to Man World had come down with an awful sort of sick. World was dying. And Man did not notice. He failed to see that all the miraculous vistas which World had long ago created for Man—way back when before even the dinosaurs traipsed about the earth underfoot—were fading and weakening and wilting. And pretty rapidly, too. 

             The lungs of World, for example—through which She breathed the atmospheric gasses—had grown heavy and rank with Man’s manifold contaminants. Lurking in the rivers and oceans and lakes of World there floated gobs, tons, kilos of invincible plastics and sewage and city trash and radioactive sludge. The glaciers were melting—from the North Pole to the South Pole.

             One normal day, thank goodness, Man, He finally awoke. He saw the chaos He’d sowed and thereafter announced the obvious: World, at the rate at which Her health was declining, would not make it another Revolution around Sun should something drastic not be done.

             Upon perceiving the trodden state of His dearest friend, World, Man cried for a hundred days and a hundred nights. He could not help Himself, even though it was a waste of time. But on the hundred and oneth day, Man, He wiped His eyes, and He blew His nose, and finally, at long last, He stopped grieving. 

             The most resilient creature in the Cosmos, Man picked himself up. He knew that to dwell is to rot. And so then, Man did what it is Man has always done best: invent.

             He got to work…

             But, to His utter shock, Man was rusty at inventing the… to put it kindly… real things. Despite His many attempts, Man could not seem to conjure into His fingers the dexterity He once held, nor could He summon the requisite attention span to His mind to do the sort of noble work he had done in ancient times.

Feeling meek and guilty, and confused and embarrassed, Man pivoted. He packed up a few small tiddlywinks and set out on an adventure. Man, so He decided, was in need of a good, old-fashioned re-orientation. Shouldering a bindle, Man sought to regain His long, lost step on the open road. He had one goal: to remember what had made Man and World such great friends in the first place.

            First, Man went for a long walk through the Grand Canyon. As Man walked, He pondered. And as He pondered, Man whistled. 

            The walking helped Man to clear his mind of radical thoughts. 

            Man soon thereafter decided to travel South. He passed through Central America where he sweated out the toxins and, after finding the Amazon River, swam the length of it in seven days.

            The swimming helped man to relieve his body of chronic pains and pressures.

            When Man arrived at the tip of South America, He leapt across the high, frothing seas and landed with a slip and a slide on the Arctic ice. The cold air felt pure and almost holy to Man. 

Man, who by then was feeling tired, sat down. He crossed his legs and closed his eyes. Man repeated over and over to Himself a mantra. Down there in the southernmost South, Man began to breathe deeply again. 

The meditation helped Man to regain his sense of vitality and inner calm.

            But soon Man grew bored by the lack of stimuli around him. Remember—Man was and is a Man—no saint—after all. 

           Using the bones of a beached killer whale and sea lion, Man whittled Himself a dinghy, staving off a pair of sturdy oars before shaping a wheel made  of a stone disc that He’d pulled onto his lap earlier that morning while ice fishing for rare alkalines. Man, dutifully, admired his work when He was finished. The great adventurer then climbed into the boat and hoisted in His anchor. He set his eyes to the North and then after, to the East.

The thinking and the whittling and the planning invigorated Man with purpose.

          At sea, Man battled against the rageful elements. He braved tempests and hydra clones and the curse of insomnia. Yet Man kept rowing. He forged ahead, battling scream for scream hordes of violent winds which chilled him to His very core. Yet Man kept rowing. He fended off giant squid and acid rain, doldrums and malnourishment, all as the salt ravaged His skin until it became red and irritated and gangrenous. Never one to give up, though, Man kept rowing… and rowing… and rowing. After a month on the open water, Man spied at last a tropical shore.            With the last of his strength flung Himself headlong towards it and crashed onto the beach in a heap of exhaustion.

         The suffering at the hand of adversity forced Man to appreciate the little things in life.

         Feeling hungry and thirsty there on the Asian Isle, Man lifted a fallen bamboo shoot and tested it upon the dirt. Seeming satisfactorily sound, Man leaned on it, using it in place of His usual divining rod. He poked the ground in front of Him, feeling where it was soft and where it was hard, and soon ascertained the general gradient of the earth around Him. Closing His eyes, Man put one foot forward, then the next, tapping the dirt with His bamboo shoot to root out any potential obstacles that might block His path forward. Man relied equally upon the practicality of the bamboo shoot as He did His good sense to guide him downhill. He was in search of a valley, or least of all, a stream or a creek, for Man knew, eventually, he would find water, since Man knew well that all water travels downhill.

          After some time, at last, the latter end of Man’s bamboo shoot connected with not solid ground, but with a soft clump of mud. The connection elicited a sound that went scuhitsch. Man opened his eyes and was faced with a vast placid freshwater lake that was brimming with verdant lily pads and with the petals of bright pink and yellow flowers which bobbed ever so gently atop the reflection of the sky in the water and also with galleons of psychedelic-colored dragonflies that went a-flitting in and out of the tawny, ambering reeds thrust up from the bottom banks of the lake and which were clustered there among the shallow bays and which resembled a mouth that was crowded with too many teeth. A mammoth fish with a lion’s maw, the likes of which Man had never before seen, soared suddenly from out of watery depths of the lake’s center and stole man’s gaze to such an extent that Man followed the graceful arc of the beast with His tongue out, fallen from out of its normal place. Man, ennobled by what he felt and what he saw, sank to a knee and with the palm of his twitching hand cupped the cold water and lifted it to his mouth, drinking in slow but mighty sips from that life-giving lake. He breathed deeply, after having drunk His fill, and then set forth to harvest the bounty surrounding in order to sate his hunger. He dug up a mandrake, a turnip, a handful of potatoes and carrots and wild herbs, and accepted also a fresh-dead fish that floated to Him while he was spearfishing there in one of the hooking nooks of the fingerlings of the lake. He then tossed the ingredients into the stump of a tree, which had been bowled out by lightning, for the bark was charred and black and smoky, and proceeded to let them soak there within the mixture of salted bogwater and scallion stalks that he had earlier collected. When the lot seemed ripely ready, Man peeled the foods and then cut and tossed them into a makeshift pot which Man had cleaved and woven from the toughest fronds on earth. With his stomach gurgling, abated slightly and only somewhat by that that monkish meditation he had learned in the Arctic Ice, Man hung the sloshing pot over a slow-burning fire that he surrounded with a ring of stone. As the stew bubbled, the earthen smells of the heavenly medley wafted into the nose of Man, who could not help but then allow his smiling heart to part his lips.

           Wielding the flat end of his divining rod, Man scooped out from the pot the hearty stew, spoonful after spoonful, giving it first to the air to let it cool, then secondly to His belly to nourish Himself. He ate until He was full, and then ate and ate some more.

           Man, feeling content, slept well that night. When He woke, He kicked a cloud of dirt over top the ring of stone including the ash that dwelled at its center, then yawned, then burped, and then set out, once again, to the west without worry as He was destined to.

          The trust Man had put into nature encouraged Man to put trust into Himself.

          In Europe, Man visited the relics of philo’s old: the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the Vatican. He followed His nose south and climbed the rolling foothills of the bloc until he straddled the Fertile Crescent. He followed the birdsong to western Africa, whereto he felt in his heartbeat the polyrhythmic drum reflexive of the most ancient human folklore Man has. He thumbed the hieroglyphs out east in Egypt, then skipped down the backs of crocodiles all the way from the northern tip of the Nile to Lake Victoria. Feeling soulfree, lightminded, merrymouthed, Man began to hum a new melody. It was a beautiful song.

         The song Man hummed gave Man the hope and inspiration to invent new and beautiful things.

Finally, Man, needing only then to take on the leap of all leaps, did so. He leapt backwards, to his origin. With his neurons tingling, and his cells waltzing, and his muscles doing the moonwalk, Man removed a pen from behind his ear, which for millennia He abandoned for keys and screens and other such rubbish, and He got to work. The architect bent himself to the blueprint. For three days and three nights, Man focused his fury and designed His perfect dreamthing. Nothing could stop Man, then. Man had caught that wildburst, inspiration, and was riding on it to the heavens high, drawing uninterred the radiance that erupted forth in the form of cosmic- and radio- and gamma- and infrared- waves by His mind behind minds. 

         Long ago, it has been said, God created World in seven days. This is a fable. Man, in this great hour, accomplished a similarly gargantuan feat and, funnily enough, it took Man only three and a half days to accomplish this feat—half the time.

         Working with Sun and Moon, Man had been toiling away on the dark side of World. With sweat pouring down His brow, leaking from out of His pits, Man hammered away at His masterpiece.

         Finally, when it was ready, Man dragged His work of art to the light side of World for Her to see. 

         “World, my dearest friend,” Man began, “I love you with all my heart. With all my soul. You have given me, a simple Man, everything… and for that, I thank you.”

         “Thanks be to The Fourth Dimension,” laughed World in response. “Now what is it you are holding behind your back, my good friend? Let World see it.”

         “Before I show you my finest work,” Man replied, “I want you to know something—that I am sorry. I am sorry for having neglected you. I am sorry for inventing things that do not matter. Most of all, I am sorry for taking for granted our friendship. I hope, World, you can forgive me, this simple Man. I am a silly beast.”

         “All is forgiven, always.” World said, parting Her clouds to shower Man in the warmth of Sun. “But enough is enough! I’m not growing any younger… and I am no good, as you well know, with handling surprises.”

         Man smiled and then stepped to the side, revealing his masterpiece.

         "Heavens have mercy!" World cried when She saw what Man had made for Her. Rainshowers from cloudless, happy skies poured down upon Her many jungles and deserts and her rivers and oceans.

         World turned to Man and asked Man a question, pure and true:

         “It is beautiful, what you have created, Man. But what is it?”

         Man laughed.

         “World, meet World II. I have created, my dearest friend, a perfect replica of you.”

         “My!” cried World, as an upsurging burst of heat was loosed from Her core.

         “It is a perfect replica of you, World.” Man repeated. “From the tiniest microbe to the highest mountain peak. Everything there is as you are, here.”
           “And for what reason,” World asked, “Have you created another me? Are there not enough me’s already?” World gurgled merrily.

          “Because, World, I failed you. You are sick. I can see so even if you will never say so. It took me far too long to realize it. But once I did, my oldest friend, I had to do something about it. So I went on an adventure, as you well know. I needed to find myself. To reorient myself. To remember, once and for all, again, what had made us both, Man and World, such great friends in the first place.

         “Eventually, I remembered. And once I remembered, I knew exactly what had had to be done. 

         “I built for you a… vessel. With your blessing, World, I would like to make an announcement, in the name of equanimity and justice, to all the other life forms that live here with Us. 

         “Heregoes: If ever another life form should feel so inclined, I ask them to consider the following, as I believe it is the only way to save you, World.

         “The plan is for some of Us to board World II, and then shrink World II, along with the rest of the life forms, and then blast off into space to begin to explore all the other galaxies hitherto. The lone difference between you, World, and World II is solely that World II contains a non-reneweable-eating engine inside of it instead of a molten core. 

         “In order for you to heal, I have come to the conclusion that we must re-bountiy your holy gifts and reallocate some of this clutter that We, and mostly I, have made and which has caused you to grow so ill.

         “World, I hereby humbly ask… how do you make of this proposition of mine? Does it sound fair to you? Is it something you would ever agree to? Trust me, as you always have: I only ask because I have thought mightily on this, and I see no other way, in the long run, to save you without sacrificing you. Which I will never.”
           World smiled.

           “You are truly the goodest of all the creatures of The Fourth Dimension.

           “The answer, of course, is yes.”

            The two friends smiled, and then embraced.

            “I love you, Man.”

            “I love you more, World.”

            “I love you most.” Man and World said together, still holding onto one another, as one.