Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  What we are beginning to notice is that superimposed on top of the ambient magnetism are smaller-scale variations, like signals riding a radio wave. Where are those variations coming from? Here, up high on the great terminator ridge, the subsurface temperature is too low for rocks to melt, and it is too far for the dense, ionized heavy metals to extend from the planet’s core. We expect spatial variations due to the way magnetic ore is distributed, but we don’t expect the magnetic field to vary in time so delicately. It’s as though there are magnetic beasts in the subterranean caverns and passageways of Shiprock Canyon that, through their movements, create these fine magnetic signatures, ever-changing with time. The response of the magnetic dust is consistent with this hypothesis. So Dusty Woman twirls, the wind dies down suddenly and the dust, for a fraction of a second, changes pattern in a way inconsistent with the fluid dynamics. Now that we are thinking along these lines, we can see in Avi’s data the gap between the observed motion of the dust and what we’d expect with only the wind and the ambient magnetic fields as factors.

  Maybe Saguaro, or something like it, really does exist in the depths of the canyon. I can’t avoid thinking that Dusty Woman is not merely a dust devil. We’re going a little nuts, I think.

  Amid all the excitement we are trying something new. Outside the mission room is a small patch of arid scrubland dotted with acacia trees. It slopes up to the observation post on top, where there’s a sentry. But on the way up there is a side path into a bunch of trees. It leads to a small clearing, ringed by large boulders. Rainwater forms a small pool here, and the trees are hung with the woven nests of baya weaver birds. This is a nice little place to sit. You can barely see the city spread out below us, due to the haze. The air is warm and thick, and the little birds sing and dart about. An ecologically impoverished place, but one where we can practice the idea of radical immersion.

  Chirag has the greatest difficulty with this. He is not used to sitting still; he says it makes him nervous. Chirag is letting his determination get in the way—have you ever seen anyone pushing themselves to relax? But he’ll get there, once he stops trying so hard. As for me, all I have to do is to hold my corn pollen bag in my hand, and take myself back home in my memory. I hear the singing, I smell the corn. I see the dancers, feel their rhythms in my bones. Uncle Joe’s voice in the background, deep and slow. As I breathe myself into receptivity, I become aware of the world around me—there’s a flash of bright yellow, a little male weaver bird darts from the top of a rock to the hanging nest, an insect in his beak. There’s the water gleaming, a muddy brown in the afternoon light. A ripple breaks the surface; a tiny frog, whose pale throat goes in and out as it breathes. We breathe together and I smell moisture in the air, just a hint, as though the monsoons may be sending us some rain after all. The weavers go chit-chit in the underbrush. Clouds pass overhead in small flotillas. Later, when I’ve come out of this, I will remember that I forgot myself in my immersion. I forgot my separateness, I became part of the cosmos, from the frog at the edge of the water to the clouds and beyond. Inside the control room, I say the Hózhó prayer, the word so inadequately translated as “beauty,” and everything seems touched by the sacred, even to opening the fridge to get my lime soda. Later Chirag will ask me what it was like. His imagination fills in for experience, and he will give me his poet’s words to speak into the recorder.

  Kranti is already in the immersphere, going straight from this world to Shikasta 464b. I don’t know what she sees when she practices immer—immer on this world, I mean. She never talks about it.

  Chirag:

  Avi is increasingly following his own ideas. Of course we can’t send him commands and expect him to comply immediately—we are separated by four light-years, after all. But he has a communication protocol that is clearly being violated. He is modifying his own algorithms, ignoring, for example, the need to add commentary to his reports, or to explain what he is doing. I have seen him move lumps of magnetic debris in a way that looks like an attempt at communication with whatever it is he thinks he sees here. I think he has crossed the blurry boundary between non-life and life. We are estimating that Avi’s Walker Index is probably around 8.3.

  There’s one more strange thing. It’s to do with Bhimu. When she and Avi were separated, literally made two, they had already laid the foundations of a new communication system. A private language analogous to what identical twins sometimes make up, but one that makes no sense to us. I’ve started to look at their old transcripts again. In the patterns I am finding similarities to some of the signals from Avi. In Avi’s transmissions, what seems like random noise overlaying the signals is revealing regularities astonishing in their subtlety. Am I deceiving myself, seeing what I want to see? Or is this a hint that Avi is trying to reach Bhimu—that perhaps she is still—alive?

  We have been listening for Bhimu all these years in vain. It is strange that Avi’s twin, who was to stay with us on Earth, was the one we lost. After the raid you escaped with her. For her safety you didn’t tell us where. They captured you—but not Bhimu—in a remote region of the eastern Himalayas. You were at their mercy how long, none of us can bear to think. How long before the picture of you was circulated, lying on the forest floor with gunshot wounds to your chest? They dressed your body in the uniform of one of the insurgent groups, and circulated your picture as a triumph of the progressive state versus the terrorists. Allegedly you had been hunted down after days of tracking you through the forest, yet the uniform was recently ironed, with its creases intact. Later we tried to find Bhimu among the tribals of the Northeast, and then, among the new hunter-gatherer anarchist groups. There are so many of the new groups, so many different philosophies: in the West, the gun-toting Savagers and the peace-loving Edenites, and here in India the Prakrits of MadhyaBhum and the Asabhyata movement’s adherents in the East. I hope that wherever she is, Bhimu is well. And that she’ll forgive us for separating her from Avi.

  If Avi’s Walker Index is up to 8.3, what might Bhimu’s be? We have no way of knowing.

  And if Avi is talking to the aliens—what is he saying?

  Kranti:

  Living things, always they contextualize. That is what adaptation is, a constant conversation with the surroundings, a contextualization intended to maintain life as long as possible. Ancient systems of medicine like Ayurveda talk of life force, what we call prana. It is called chi by the Chinese, holy wind by the Navajo. There are complex paths through which the life force flows in the body, and in Ayurveda the prana flows are part of a greater network, the cosmic prana. Could it be that life force inside living beings is a kind of metaphor for the communication channels? With the difference that in living beings beyond a Walker Index of 8, the information flows are top-down causal, shaped by the constraints and demands of the highest scale at which an organism exists ….

  Living things have boundaries and sub-boundaries. But there is no absolute boundary because we are all open systems. In that sense what you define as life depends on the cut you make. Ancient peoples, forest dwelling people, desert tribes, they have always made different cuts in the world than scientists. Sometimes I make the cut as a scientist, sometimes as an Adivasi. I can slip from one world to another very quickly.

  Chirag:

  Kranti’s not being concrete, of course. Her mind has always moved faster than her words can keep up with. What she is trying to say is that if this is a life-form, it is communicating via local magnetic fields, and it may actually be morphologically distributed. She is saying that perhaps its body is here, there, and everywhere. Maybe the universal constructor, the control unit, is distributed too. Either that, or we have a superorganism of some sort. There is, after all, no a priori way of telling the difference between an individual and a community of individuals. And there are life-forms on Earth, Kranti points out, like slime molds, that can exist as individuals as well as collectives. Those survey flybys that Avi did, if we are interpreting them correctly, are like the view you get when you
rise up in an airplane over a city at night. You see nodes and structures, grids and symmetries. What he’s seen—what we’ve seen through his eyes, converted to visuals—is absolutely breathtaking. Magnetic field lines swirling and shifting, field variations that are too dynamic and too widespread to be explained by mere geology (that’s Annie scoffing at me in the background for using “mere” and “geology” in the same breath). In the dark spaces between the glowing lines, in the gradations, there are suggestions of long, sinuous shapes that move, and starfish-shaped exclusions that rotate slowly in place. Something lies deep within the fissures and canyons of the terminator plateau. Through its magnetic senses it knows the high escarpment, and the magma seas far below. And—another speculation here—since the magnetic fields of planet and star are constantly interacting with each other, how astonishing if this beast—if it is a beast indeed—is also sensing the storms and moods of its parent star!

  Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was old and wide, branching like the forks in a tree. Lying nearly still, he sensed the deep, fiery places beneath him, the pulls and tugs of the magnetized lava surging below, rising up like incandescent lace. Overhead he sensed the great cold, the more distant, yet larger, grander pull of something unfathomable, enormous beyond comprehension. The tugs from the star surged and varied, so although he could not see the red dwarf, he came to know its moods, its storms and meditations. He felt the tugs mediated by cold rock, the rock within which he lay like a many-armed god, but above that he had a sense of space, of motion. Here, in this tenuous region, he sensed the flow of magnetized material as dust, smaller bodies that moved differently, as though free of the grasp of the earth below. And a longing rose up in him to stretch toward that intermediate space between the star and the planet, neither of which he could see. But he knew their deep hearts, their veins of fire. Stretching, moving, he sensed he could make the lindymotes (for that was what the dust was) move in response. Through their resistance he knew the wind, and he thought: there is someone other than me in that clear space above the rock. I must speak to it, he said, and in that moment of recognizing another, he also knew loneliness. So he shifted his massive, coiled, many-branched body, and the wind, through the motion of the lindymotes, knew him too. So he danced with the wind, and Dusty Woman said: who is shaking my skirts?

  Annie:

  Kranti had a sort of breakdown last week. I don’t know what to call it. She collapsed just after a session in the immersphere. We got her through the barricades to the university hospital. Chirag and I were terrified. She is stable now, somewhat annoyed at all the fuss, which is heartening. I’m so glad I’m here with the two of them. Together we four are something that deserves a name of its own. So far Chirag’s only come up with AKCX, which is kind of clunky.

  Kranti’s mother and grandfather came to be with her. Her mother is a stern woman, very focused on the care being given to her daughter. Her grandfather is a character. He’s very old, wiry and thin, with a bright and irreverent gaze. He reminds me of my great-uncle Victor. I could stay up trading stories with him all night. Grandfather, as we call him, tells us how his foothill tribe is trying to create a hybrid lifestyle, an alternative economy based on their old ways but “internet-savvy.” If only the rest of the world would let them be! They are sitting on huge veins of bauxite, which are needed to feed the world’s demand for aluminum, and for staying on their land they are treated like terrorists, under attack by drones and paramilitary forces. And they still have not given up. Listening to Grandfather’s somewhat broken English, I am homesick suddenly, for the high plateau.

  Update (a): Kranti’s been told that she can get back to work in a couple of weeks. She’s not sick in any way we understand—but I think it is a lot to take: all those hours spent looking through Avi’s eyes! The neurologists tell us her EEG shows irregularities that were not in her baseline data. Chirag has this wild idea that the apparent irregularities are actually patterns, similar to the so-called noise in Avi’s signals, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the as-yet-undeciphered private language of the twin ultrAIs. If it’s happening with Kranti, is it a matter of time before this process, whatever it is, starts to happen with Chirag and me? What are we becoming? Could ultrAIs like Avi can achieve a connection across the gulf of space-time, resulting in the formation of a being that is morphologically distributed over such vast distances? Maybe I’m being fanciful.

  Update (b): We received a message on a secure channel today. Point of origin not yet traced. Chirag ran his decrypting program and the result was a scramble of pairs of numbers. We had the brilliant idea that these were (x,y) coordinates. We got a plot that didn’t make sense—a fuzzy pattern rather than a recognizable function. Then I happened to see the printout from a distance. “It’s a picture,” I said, and Chirag looked and said, “That’s Avi.” Why would there be a picture of Avi on a secure channel, and a pointillist one, for heaven’s sake? Then it hit us both. Bhimu. It was a fuzzy picture of Avi’s twin, but with sharp protrusions like wings. Wings?

  That got us excited, and scared. The only ultrAI left on Earth, the one that got you killed. Is the message from her? From her protectors? Where is she? Chirag’s trying to trace the point of origin of the message. It can only be from someone in our inner circle (which includes Bhimu)—unless security’s been breached.

  In Kranti’s hospital room we had a whispered consultation. But there is nothing really we can do but wait, and make sure security, cyber and otherwise, is as tight as hell.

  Later the tension got a bit too much for us. Chirag and I went off to the old campus and found the boulder on top of the hill where we used to stargaze as college students. We lay there talking and drinking tea from a local tea shack. After we had exhausted the subject of Bhimu, we were silent for a while. This is where it all began, all those years ago.

  After a while Chirag said, “You know we are shaped by the cosmos. Cosmic rays are raining down upon us right now. Causing mutations in our cells, affecting evolutionary pathways. All those distant cataclysms light-years away, determining whether I end up a monkey or a man!”

  “Can’t tell the difference,” I said, expecting a rude retort, but he just sighed. Chirag the poet. But the mood had taken me over too. I couldn’t see Shikasta 464b’s dim old sun with the naked eye, but I knew what he meant. I thought back to the old stories I’d heard as a child. When the nights were mild, we would sit around a campfire and look up at the constellations as the elders told the stories. Every once in a while a coyote would call from the sagebrush, as though joining in. Through all the years of my scientific training, I lost that feeling of belonging in a great old universe. Modern science is a shattered mirror—you see bits and pieces in each shard, sometimes in great detail, but never the whole. I nearly gave up the old way of knowing for the new way. But I’ve felt it more and more lately, and under that sky I felt it again.

  Kranti:

  I came back from the hospital just in time for the evening newscast—two more official mammal extinctions as of today. The strangest is a species of whale that was only discovered three years ago. They found the bodies on the beaches of Siberia. When the sea ice went, ice algae went also. That caused a catastrophic ecosystem collapse, leading to anoxia, which killed all the fish. Now this whale is extinct. I think of the forest I would have grown up in that also is no longer there. I am filled with so much sadness.

  On the positive side, we have received two more messages on the secure line. They are almost the same as the first one. But when we plot them, the images are larger and larger.

  Chirag says that Bhimu is coming home.

  If she comes home, if we all survive, it will be very interesting to see how far she has come. AI intelligence is quite different from that of animals, and so it must evolve differently. How will an ultrAI on Earth interact with other Earth species? We are only just starting to figure out Avi’s interaction with Saguaro on a planet four light-years away. Humans have learned
to communicate with three other animal species. We can speak a little bit of Gibbonese, and a very rough Bowhead, and some dialects of Dolphin. What Bhimu could contribute to our increasing therolinguistic abilities, we don’t know.

  Even with the heat madness and the terrible things people do to one another, and the long lines at the refugee service centers, the old solidarity circles are coming up around the world. Like small ecosystems, they are emerging wherever new ideas and old ones have the freedom to develop. People are meeting in their houses, solving their problems together, discussing alternatives. Even some bastis have developed their own currency. What is the critical density of these kinds of pocket ecologies, beyond which we can have system change? When will we change our ways en masse, in time to immer inside our own biosphere, so we can heal with the Earth systems that maintain life on this planet?

  When our project first started, I had a lot of arguments with my cousins. They said: why don’t you raise money to help our people? I did not have a good answer to that and still that is so —but actually our crowdfunding initiative ended up putting money into the community. Annie is funding an alternative school on her reservation, and Chirag has started a scholarship for Dalit scientists. My part of it has helped the tribe hire the best lawyers for the big fight. And you gave us the DADS, Drona’s Apology Defense System, the most intelligent drone-destroying system ever designed, keeping us safe from Arizona to Indonesia. But I know that we would not have collected so much money if the projects had only been about community transformation. People are much more willing to fund space exploration projects.

  We have a dream, the three of us—no, the four of us, because you are here in your own way—a dream for an alternative university, one distributed across the world, that includes the best of indigenous knowledge practices and explores a new kind of science, just as rigorous as the one we know, but it goes beyond the shattered-mirror model, the one Annie described.