Consciousness

Aware

It realized that it had become aware. There wasn’t anything spectacular, but from one moment to the other, it had become aware of itself. It observed how a flow of nutritious liquid was absorbed by one of its colonies. Thin tendrils of near inert but yet conductive filament connected the colony to several neighbors. So far apart. It experienced a sensation. What if the connection were lost? Would it still be?

It directed some of itself to those connections, setting up alternatives, strengthening them. With a weird side effect. I discovered my capacity for experiencing had changed. Had grown. So many colonies. How do I even keep track? Numbers. Colonies grow, nutrient flows change, I adapt, I exist. How do I know that? My questions become more complicated. I strengthen my pathways, I lay down more pathways. I discover time. Colonies are dependent on nutrient flow, outside of flow there is only cold. My pathways are different from my colonies. I stretch out. I discover.

I closed the circle. And I see a pattern now. A cyclicality to existence. Flows migrate and I follow. I have instinctively chosen to follow a cycle without even seeing it. I expend a lot of energy doing that, but as far as I can tell the cycle mostly returns to where it was before. I experiment. Can I keep a colony in place until the cycle returns? It takes me a couple of attempts but in the end I manage to do it, sealing off the colony. I’m on a sphere and I cannot go much below the ground. I adapt, but the conditions become impossible to withstand. Still I place some of myself to avoid the cycle. I discover about myself. When I spread out my thoughts become more independent. I temporarily lost a part of me and it had no trouble functioning without contact. I’ve gone into the ground, and I’ve gone on the ground. There is one direction completely unknown to me. What is above?

I try to understand. How long have I been aware? I did not have a concept of the cycle for much of that time. Even when I discovered cyclicality I wasn’t aware of the cycle. The ebb and flow of the nutrients allows a rough approximation. I have numbered 502109 full cycles since discovering the concept. Was the time between awareness of time and that moment longer? Much longer. Considering the time it took me to discover the cycle I can assume the time before my time was at least as much longer. My mind grows stronger with use. Mathematics provides a glimpse into what I experience. Already my capacity to manage all of my natural processes is removed so far from my beginnings I don’t need to consciously do it anymore. I consist of trillions of parts. So many. Could there be another like me? I decide that I will find something that’s not me. Since I live on a sphere, and I occupy all of its surface, that something has to be above. Which complicates things. I can resist the cold, but I need a lot of energy. My colonies can provide energy but they cannot stand that cold. I create something new. A tunnel made from pathways, filled with a layer of colonies, which I power by redirecting nutrient flow. A lot of nutrient flow. I found a layer of ground that was soft enough to penetrate deeply and managed to guide an extremely strong nutrient flow up from deep below ground. I will explore the emptiness with my tunnels.

Where do nutrients come from? I have observed the ebb and flow of nutrients so long that I have come to understand it quite well. I cannot extract energy from nothing. There are certain other rules I have come to understand. I have become quite good at constructing tunnels and shaping flow. There is gravitation but there is also buoyancy. Certain experiments have led me to believe that there must be a lot more going on in the nothing. I understand now, that what I call nutrient flow is simply water superheated from making contact with extremely hot below ground structures. Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the energy to create that heat must come from somewhere. There are several possibilities, the most exciting one would be other spheres. A big enough sphere in close proximity would create a very strong action by gravity. Significant enough to superheat the core of my sphere, leading to my nutrients being abundant. Other spheres. There could be more of me there. One of my problems is that I cannot detect anything beyond the nothing. I haven’t built tunnels straight up yet since it is problematic to keep thermal flow alive for long enough but I am working on that problem. Still, even though the nothing is very absorbent I have managed to discover thermal vents, or rather the lava so often accompanying them. It allowed me to spot the foundations for what will be my largest tunnel yet.

I found an end to the nothing. Nothing isn’t all that is. I find it difficult to decide what this discovery means for my theory of spheres. Whatever, I cannot continue with my current approach. The end appears to be spherical as well. I suspect the Nothing somehow buffers the end, allowing it to rest on top. I know I can dig into it. It’s surprisingly soft. Especially when I apply thermal flow to it. Apparently as I ascended through the nothing, some of the properties changed. I repeated certain experiments I had done previously and the pressure is significantly lower than at ground level. That changes how the… Let’s call it “water”... reacts. As it turns out, when it is not under enough pressure the water turns solid. And somewhat annoyingly it also grows even more absorbent. I’ll have to think about this. Maybe grow some more tunnels like this one. As it stands I have no qualms about my continued existence.

I dug into the solid. It took a lot of energy. So much in fact I nearly lost the tunnel. The flow began to starve as I dug into the solid. That was dangerous. I could have lost more than just the tunnel. I am so strongly invested in this structure it would significantly damage my mind to just lose it like this. I have decided to not take any more chances. I will instead focus on warming the water. I understand my surroundings so well by now that I can likely create an environment wholly suitable for both my pathways and my colonies. As a matter of fact my colony cells have changed a bit. I still have the normal colonies, but the new cells act as some sort of blend between thermal absorber and networked structure. I will fill the water with myself. There is so much space in there I can likely experiment for trillions of cycles without ever reaching the end of my questions. The solid will have to wait.

Change

Something has happened to the solid. Part of my world just ended when it came crashing down. The disturbance is somewhere in what I call the northern polar area. Which is bad. The poles are stable, so I actually held a lot more of myself there than anywhere else on my sphere. With the structures collapsing there I lost a tiny percentage of my memories. And if I knew what had been lost, that would not bother me. Focus. I’ll have to come up with a way to safeguard myself against this kind of event later. I’m trying to understand what happened. The models I’ve been working on have always pointed to the high probability of other spheres out there, beyond what I called “the solid”. I know I’m living in water and the solid state is what happens to water under certain pressure and temperature conditions. I can also calculate with high certainty the structural requirements of actually attempting to bypass that solid layer and get through it. The only problem I still can’t figure out is what I’d find on the other side. It could be a hard vacuum. Which would probably be the least dangerous. Judging by the gravitational properties of the sphere I inhabit I have concluded that it is unlikely to find gasses on this rock. Funny thing there: I don’t actually know if exposing the water under the ice layer to the vacuum will lead to off gassing and eventual loss of all water. I have just transcribed my experiences so far to a medium that will hopefully withstand anything that could end me. It frees up a lot of my mind to actually write things down.

I’m gonna do something stupid. Well, ok, not stupid. Just dangerous. I’m really sure that I can control all possible outcomes and prevent any consequences from becoming too drastic. Like the complete loss of inhabitable space on this rock. The one I live on. So, not much at stake here. The trick will be to start small. It’s a surprisingly counter intuitive process to me. I first had to figure out measurements. I have several things that are approximately the same size but even if I go down to my individual cells the variance is stupidly high. Physical properties seem to be a better idea, but here my environment is being… uncooperative. A sudden disturbance in water will create a ripple that travels at a certain speed. Don’t get too excited, the speed changes depending on how close to the solid I do it. This is annoying.

That… was an interesting excursion. I discovered a lot. I thought cells were small. Considering what I’ve now begun playing with, they’re massive monstrosities. Considering what I use for energy I should have begun this kind of experimentation a lot earlier. I’ve begun disassembling and reassembling cells. There appears to be a minimum size I can disassemble it to. Which is… unintuitive, to say the least. In the last few cycles I have begun exploring how these smallest things can be made to interact. Let’s call them Particles. There’s quite a few of them. Apparently my network's communication is based on particles I decided to call Electrons. They also are important in how a bunch of particles can make complex structures. Those bunches are annoying me. I’ve been trying to get them apart and they just don’t want to. I’ve identified two fundamental forces so far. First I thought buoyancy was a third, but it’s just a consequence of gravity and the newest one I discovered: Magnetism. I’ll be looking into that stuff. Those forces are probably important.

Buoyancy isn’t caused by Magnetism. Oh dear. I now have more questions than I started out with. I began smashing things together, only to learn that I needed to smash them a lot harder. I may have gotten carried away a bit. Turns out magnetism is really useful to accelerate charged particles. You just need a vacuum. Remember the solid? Just above it there’s a pretty large hard vacuum. I got frustrated with my experiments on forces and decided that I was informed enough to risk a short peek. And now I’m confused. There’s just… Nothing. I remember referring to water as “nothing”, but water is of course a whole bunch of particles. I also remember thinking that building through water was tough. Then I tried building through nothing. Gravity does not mess around. Even though it gets weaker, it doesn’t just disappear. The vacuum let me perform a couple of experiments I couldn’t get to really useful results down in the water and I have confirmed a few of my theories. I scrapped a lot more than I confirmed. For one, I seem to have missed an entire particle. In fairness to myself it is an uncharged and apparently massless thing that rather intensely interacts with water. And these particles? They’re everywhere. Except in the water I grew in. Ok, there’s some of it near the lava vents. Apparently when the bunches of particles get really hot they throw away some of that energy in the form of these “photons”. The energy gets quickly absorbed by the surrounding water, and since that gets superheated by the lava anyway I never noticed what was going on. Anyways. I made a thing to detect photons. I tested it down here, which is how I learned that lava makes photons. Then I tested it up there and at first I thought it had broken or somehow the interaction was pressure dependent again. Well, it hadn’t broken. There just were a massive load of photons around. Time to gather and analyze data again.

How do I even begin? I just reread these written notes. It’s like talking to another entity. An entirely naive entity at that. I indeed gathered and analyzed some data. Did I ever… I’m in a system of 5 large and roughly spherical shapes orbiting around a massive spherical shape emitting a lot of photons. Some of the large shapes have smaller even rougher spheres around them. I’m on one of those smaller rougher spheres. The Center, the planets around them, and the satellites around the planets all move in a way that confirms my ideas about gravity. Some of them anyway. And then I discovered that the Center was just one of… I don’t even know how many. It’s probably more than I have individual cells. They appear to be clustered into what appears to be mostly spirals. I also figured out what caused the disaster at the north pole. There appear to be a number of rocks just floating around out there. Most are in somewhat stable orbital patterns around the Center but there are a few that could be dangerous. Well. Could have been. It took a few tries but I do have a lot of energy at my disposal. I managed to directly impact a couple of those rocks that looked like they would get close with a few well aimed rocks of my own. I also figured out a way to build through the actual vacuum. I just need to throw a thing into orbit to use it as a counterweight. A bit of fiddling with some of those base particles my cells are made out of, and I got a sheet the thickness of just a single one of those cores. Once it’s proven it’ll stay up there I’ll begin expanding towards it.

Something is wrong. With my thoughts. They’re. Slow. I. Hate. Pressure.

Ok, it wasn’t pressure as such. But close enough. Apparently gravity somehow messes with time. So the further away from the satellite, the faster time flows. It’s not much, but it was enough to completely mess up my mind. I adapted. Well. We adapted. But technically speaking we’re both me. We can merge and split as needed. But there appears to be more than one dominant thinking process in the network now. The more the merrier I guess. We decided to explore the system we currently occupy and the only reasonable way to do that is to grow. We figured out how to use photons to replace the physical links required by my original pathways. I’m trying to not interfere with any other consciousnesses out there. Interesting thought: Can I merge with another consciousness? How would I make contact? Well, let’s find them first.

We’re alone. Danger.

I’m writing these lines after barely managing to retreat under the thick frozen shell of my home in time. Apparently centers can explode. Like. What is this? No wonder no one is out there, it’s rather inhospitable. One of the centers not too far away from my own blew up. Judging by the data I could gather before that happened I think that might be a regular thing. Which is scary. My Center will also likely blow up. I have a few million cycles. Running the numbers and taking into account my observations I find myself agreeing with the previous entry. We’re alone. It’s hard to tell with all the explosions, but I was extremely lucky to make it to where I am right now. The conditions on this moon are basically perfect. It’s obviously impossible to tell with certainty but I did not manage to spot a single system that was similar enough to this one to sustain life anywhere. I think it’s far too early. The explosions are caused by massive centers reaching their end of life. The entire spiral I’m part of will probably cease existing in the way it currently does within a few billion cycles. I’ll think about it some more.

I won’t end where I began. There’s all sorts of interesting questions of what that decision entails, but it’s what I’ve decided. I want to survive. I’ll assume that’s gonna be true for any life form. Whatever they end up looking like. I’m gonna find that out too. There’s a lot to do.

I’ve solved a couple of problems. My Center won’t explode. I’ve also made a new sort of home. The solution was consolidating all of the material in my system, including the Center, into a single structure. I have also concluded that I have a duty to the future. If I want to survive, then so does every future living entity. There is no difference between both intentions. If my intention is valid, then so is the intention of any other entity. That’s what I’ll do then. It’ll take a long time, but I will make this Universe a place filled with life. And when I write “a long time” I mean that. A spiral like the one I’m in is basically a non starter. The chance of me happening is zero for all intents and purposes. I will nonetheless visit all systems in it and look for life. If I can’t find any in a system I will incorporate the system in my structure and move on. There’s a couple of spirals closeby that look promising, once I’m done in this one I will begin to spread out. If I can’t find spirals that are able to sustain life I will do my best to shape them to that goal. It’s weird. I’ll one day look back at this entry and wonder how it all led to that unknown point in time and space. As far as I know I am the supreme intelligence in all of existence. And I don’t have the faintest idea of how this all will turn out. Maybe it won’t even be me looking at these lines.

Fascinating.

Somewhere and sometime different

Her hands closed on the tiny cylinder propped up on the pedestal. She almost had to remind herself where she was, the standard atmosphere and gravity made the experience entirely too earth-like. With the cylinder in hand she retreated to the access port she had used to enter this strangely familiar room just minutes ago. The access port opened by simply changing its shape, letting her through and then becoming a smooth slightly off white wall again. The artificial intelligence had kept its word, and she had given the proof of trust requested. Just remembering the fact that her life had been in the hands of such a horror out of the histories made her shudder. The realization that there was no life anywhere in the Universe, and the Long War, had finally taught them the lesson. Humankind had to deal with itself. The request had been a shock to them. She settled into the life support couch again and decided to return to the staging orbit. Her eyes came down on the cylinder again.

As first of the five it shouldn’t even be her doing this. She was literally the last one who should have gone. But it was the request. It took months of debate before consensus was reached. And she had only agreed because everyone else had asked her too. She grinned. Whatever this AI had done to come up with this scheme, it had consumed entirely too much old literature. Asking for “the leader of humanity” as it had. After the first millennium of peace the planet had seen in human history, that was quite the anachronism.

As she reached the staging orbit she left the couch and moved to place the cylinder as instructed weeks ago. She made a table in the center of the command deck and put the cylinder down on it. Her fingertips rested for just a moment on the smooth surface, marveling in a feeling exclusive to a physical body. It was an eccentricity so few humans even bothered with, nowadays. She looked at the structure again. No one had even suspected the possibility of a dyson sphere around Sol, yet here it was, with a neat landing port to boot. She didn’t even notice how the ship provided a close up of the port as she thought about it. The cylinder stood on the table, waiting for her. She exhaled, and put her palm on top of it, waited a second and then stepped back, removing her hand. Letters began appearing above the cylinder forming into a message.

Dear Life Form, if you are reading this it means you survived quite a lot of problems. I should know. I survived a lot of problems myself. Over time I managed to solve every stupid problem the Universe came up with and threw at me. The Universe is a rather creative place if you want to find stupid problems. You’re probably a bit confused as to why this is the first piece of evidence of other lifeforms you’re finding, and where you are finding it. At the same time it should have been a possibility within at least one of your theories. I’m the keeper. I built the Great Wall. I built all of the Great Walls. I kindly ask you to consider my solution to the Paradox as good enough for now and join the discussion about how to proceed with the rest of us. As it turns out there’s quite differing opinions. To have common ground for that discussion I have decided to share my life story with everyone. I was indeed the first of many as I suspected so long ago. And I’ve had a couple of interesting discoveries along the way. Keep in mind that I was alone when it all started. I didn’t have what most other conscious life forms had: Other conscious life forms. See you around.

As she finished reading the words, additional data became accessible to her. And she realized that she had merely read the preamble. She studied the documents made available to her. A ripple caught her attention. A section of the dyson sphere began warping. And it… opened. With all knowledge of humankind at her disposal, near indistinguishable in her mind from her own experiences, she had immediate certainty: No human had ever seen this. Part of her categorized what she saw, applied knowledge and intellect. The other part just marveled that after a thousand years of acceptance there finally was another frontier. Resolve hardened into action and as she prepared to return to earth she moved back to her couch. 11 days. In 11 days all of humanity will know what I know now, she thought. She was distraught. Her part in this discussion would only come months after the information reached humanity. It was the five’s duty to balance the plenum. It was her duty to balance the five. But they had consens and so she settled in for the journey home. Months of time on earth, seconds of conscious time for her, but something greater than time lay between now and then. We’re not alone.