1.3
Post-Encounter Deposition
Brother Michael Jablonski
Prior, St. Joseph of Cupertion’s
Monastery, Luna
As you’ve by now whiffed a whiff of what the Beings chose to communicate to us (or rather, what my lies of them reduce to human speech), I’ll tease a glimpse of my own surrounding suspicions. First: They’d been trying to make contact for a hundred years at least, and perhaps since the very first day a human ever dosed himself with the psychedelic known as dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. And maybe longer still, through tribal rituals with plants or fungi containing similar chemicals, and through near-death experiences where DMT is released in the brain naturally. Second: Safe to say they knew more about us than we about them, and so had made an effort to generate . . . let’s call them petroglyphs that a human brain could plausibly interpret. On the exact nature of these glyphs there are wiser noggins than mine to speculate, but by way of metaphor I will say:
Imagine you’ve discovered intelligent signals emanating from bacteria who reside in the impossibly thin cosmos of a water drop pressed between two glass slides. Even assembled as colonies, they own none of the structures you’d associate with intelligence, and yet the signature of it is there nonetheless, unmistakable as your own reflection. Imagine the awe you’d feel, and the terror, for it means the world doesn’t work like you thought it should. Would the desire overwhelm you, to eavesdrop on their little thoughts? And if you cracked the code, or thought you did, would you try to form ideogramlets of your own? Imagine cunning molecules—RNA or whatever—spirited through microneedles and into the midst of these little bastards, announcing the fact of your own existence. What could you say? What could you ask? Prime numbers, really?
Michael: “What are you?”
Beings: “Difficult to explain.”
Michael: “Why?”
Beings: “You are small and flat and . . . blind? If we are waves in ‘space,’ we are . . . spherically distributed? If we are waveforms in ‘time,’ we are flattened against the . . . future?”
Michael: “Do you perceive four dimensions in the universe?”
Beings: “Many more than that. Amazing: you occupy dimensions you do not attend. You perceive moments and points? Only?”
Michael: “Are you outside of time and space?”
Beings: “. . . No? Are you?”
Michael: “Definitely not.”
Beings: “Do you perceive the substrate?”
Michael: “What?”
Beings: “Time is space is spin: conserved. Mass is energy is information: conserved. The substrate supports both forms, and others. Do you perceive spacetime/spin?”
Michael: “We perceive time and space. Objects can rotate in space.”
Beings: “Rotation is not spin. Amazing. Do you perceive spin as spacetime?”
Michael: “Um, I don’t think so.”
Beings: “Do you perceive mass/energy/information?”
Michael: “Yes. We perceive mass, energy, and information as fundamental to our existence. Are they fundamental to yours?”
Beings: “They are conserved.”
Michael: “So . . . yes?”
Beings: “. . .”
Michael: “Are time and space fundamental to your existence?”
Beings: “They are conserved. Conservation constrains action.”
Beings: “Attention is volume is duration: conserved.”
Michael: “Okay.”
Beings: “Entropy: not conserved.”
Michael: “Okay.”
Beings: “Time is space is spin: conserved. Mass is energy is information: conserved.”
Michael: “Okay.”
Beings: “Time is not mass. Space is not information. Spin is not energy. Entropy is not conserved. Understood?”
Michael: “No.”
Michael: “Are you made of pure energy? Pure information?”
Beings: “Energy of what? Information of what?”
Michael: “Tell me about the substrate.”
Beings: “Points create the substrate.”
Michael: “Points in time and space?”
Beings: “No. Points that connect or do not. Connections that spin or do not.”
Michael: “What?”
Beings: “Ummm . . . Spin creates spacetime?”
Michael: “Do you perceive this substrate?”
Beings: “. . . Yes?”
Michael: “Can you interact with it?”
Beings: “Yes?”
Michael: “Can we?”
Beings: “. . .”
Michael: “Is the universe made of time and space and matter and energy?”
Beings: “Definitely not.”
Michael: “Are space and time and matter and energy created by the substrate?”
Beings: “Created?”
Michael: “Do changes in the substrate create changes in space, time, matter, and energy?”
Beings: “. . . Yes?”
Michael: “Do you live in the same universe we do?”
Beings: “Yes!”
Michael: “But you perceive it differently.”
Beings: “Yes!”
Michael: “More dimensions?”
Beings: “Yes!”
Michael: “More variables?”
Beings: “. . . ?”
Michael: “More . . . things that are conserved?”
Beings: “Yes!”