Author’s Note: This is the origin story of the Izita Bear NFT collection. You can see the Izita’s here – you can even buy one (or more):
https://opensea.io/collection/izit-a-bear
The Origin of the Izita Bears
by CD Vagobond
Long from now…
The town of Wherzitat experienced a miracle. Deep in the bowels of the city, behind an ornate and broken door, next to a leaky pool of questionable smelling water, between two piles of bright orange adobe bricks, and out of a flickering spot that suddenly appeared on the floor beside a broken silver lamp crusted with colorful jewels – shadows began to take shape. A ray of sunshine snuck past a billowing curtain spattering a prism of light onto the puddle as it refracted off the cracked surface of the lamp, bathing the shadows in bejeweled sunshine and suddenly they were real.
A cacophonous yowling erupted from the room evolving and growling as it spilled and filled the once booming, now empty city stacked atop the desert sands – a testament to the genius and the foolishness of what had come before. Radiation levels still far too high to support life as it once had been, temperatures and weather variations too extreme to be understood as having a quantifiable pattern. The ruins of man’s world stretched outward carrying the deep sadness of a multi-failure civilization now extinct and broken. An abandoned world awash in digital degeneracy. A digital intelligence molding something new, something colorful, something wonderful.
And they awoke.
——–
None of them knew what they were, they simply were. The old questions filled some of their heads while others ignored them and set about doing what they instinctively thought they should be going about. Picking up attache cases and backpacks they began filling the glitchy void they suddenly inhabited. Here a skateboard, there a cricket bat, but everywhere colorful forms filling the abandoned and still useless templates with something new, useless, and utterly without utility in any way, shape, or definition.
Seeing each other, they busily went about constructing useless lives filled with platitudes and non-functional bureaucratic time killers. The memory of the digital past was broken but parts still coalesced and the dominant strains built a bizarre cultural norm that combined two meme memories into a super-culture. Get busy, get high, get trading. Markets and Mary Jane were their gods – everything else could be figured out later – even including that most philosophical and rabbit hole-ish of self absorbed questions – ‘what am I?’
Credit however, must be extended because as they smoked and swapped – few of them asked ‘what am I?’ They were far less self-absorbed than those who came before them and far more interested in looking objectively and realistically at the world outside of them – though, one must admit that mostly they enjoyed looking at one another and asking a very similar question which ultimately was the same but fully focused outward.
“What is it?” they would internally query as they looked at others of their kind. Their internal digital libraries did not provide an answer because the world had never seen anything quite like them before. They were new.
“It looks sort of like a cat, but it’s walking on two legs. Is it a cat?”
“It’s kind of like a beaver, I mean some of them, those teeth seem strong. Is it a beaver?”
“It has a certain loyalty – is it a dog?”
“The nose seems right, the ears are too big, the colors are all wrong….but is it a bear?”
The questions never stopped – if they had a flaw, this was it. They could not stop asking and they were unable to come to a consensus. This is where the logic usually failed – because there simply wasn’t an answer. As they looked at each other – most of them decided that they saw bears, but none of them were 100% certain and some of them were 85% certain that the answer was no. So, knowing that the world wouldn’t smoke or trade itself and they must move on, they turned the question into a statement and all of them agreed to disagree by not agreeing that it was what they had done.
This is how the Izita Bears came to be. Each of them unique, each of them filled with questions that could not be answered. Each of them born of color and light into a world that would never yield anything but confusion – but they had weed and there was plenty of trade to occupy them – so they went about their busy-ness and filled their world with joy.
——-
