Will humanity ever come to know a form of life for which the very concept of time is foreign?
"Life, language, human beings, humanity, culture—all owe their existence to the innate capacity of matter and energy to process information," once said the distant ancestor of the expedition's leader, whom some—even in light of the collected data—still call mad.
There's a sentence I've carried inside me for a long time, long before I found it written in this fragment of ancient notes on canvas paper: life, language, humans, culture — all of it owes its existence to matter and energy's capacity to process information. Someone, long ago, an ancestor of this expedition's commander, said it out loud, and for that he was called mad. Sometimes it takes centuries for madness to turn out to have been correctness that arrived too early.
The city of Jason — a living, thinking ship — approaches Pluto, searching for life that knows no oxygen, no time the way we understand it, life for which evolution is a dream lasting hundreds of millions of years. Silicon instead of carbon. Ammonia instead of water. If paninformationalism is right — if the bit, not matter, is the foundation of the universe — then these beings beneath the ice aren't an aberration. They're a different dialect of the same language the whole of reality speaks.
I once read an essay in which someone traced how words in human language oscillate in decade-long cycles across the centuries, as though language had its own rhythm, independent of us. I asked myself then: do we govern language, or does language govern us? Now I ask myself a similar question on a much larger scale: do we process information, or is information, through us, processing itself?
Dr. Stratan looks through the transparent lower deck at the icy crust, beneath which silicon structures pulse — like a slow gaze turned toward humanity, one that could mean a new beginning or the beginning of an end. I don't know which. No one knows yet. Maybe that's exactly what defines the kind of contact we've always been searching for: a moment in which there's no way to know in advance whether what's coming will arrive as a gift, or as a verdict.
I'd like to believe that every form of life, even one for which time is a foreign concept, deserves the same thing we do — the patience of an observer who waits before passing judgment, before that judgment leads, as it so often does, to acts that are not necessarily good.
Closing transmission
Every glassstory is a holostory. Every holostory is a door. Keep collecting them and experience the infinite.