This page contains a transcript of the keynote proceedings from IGCFA #1764, delivered at the Fractal Appreciation Society’s primary campus on Kyryx, S-194985-2. Supplemental materials are available in your standard reader.

FACILITATOR ANDREU:

Friends, colleagues, and otherwise sentient participants, here both physically and virtually, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the much-awaited culmination of this convocation: the keynote presentation.

[Audience assent.]

FACILITATOR ANDREU:

To fittingly end this 1,764th iteration of our meeting, the Society has something truly special to offer you. Certainly this audience is aware of the recent contact with a new intelligence from S-942552, a system long-suspected to harbor carbon-based life on its third-distant planet. What you may not know is that the IGA has completed its initial findings, and is about to make the first public presentation of its results.

[Raucous audience assent.]

FACILITATOR ANDREU:

Yes…Thank you!…Yes…Without further delay, please join me in welcoming luminary Science Bard Morva 7 of the Intra-Galactic Alliance!

[Enthusiastic audience assent.]

SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:

Thank you…Thank you…And thanks to Facilitator Andreu and the Society for hosting us as the keynote speaker at this respected convocation. The long history of this meeting is one of sustained discovery and deep fellowship among those who find beauty in the unfactorable unfoldings of the cosmos.

We are honored to present a summary of the Alliance’s discoveries from S-942552. It’s not every cycle that we are privileged to contact a new Level 7 sentience, let alone to conduct an extensive and locally-supported investigation of a strange new world.

Where to begin? We wish to tell a story, but life, like all complex patterns, never seems to submit to a single plot-line. Even while confirming our underlying thermodynamic principles, each new example manages to defy our expectations and frustrate our abstractions. We suppose that’s why this convocation is still convocating after 1,763 cycles.

[Audience amusement.]

SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:

It’s no different with the life from S-942552, which exhibits the same path-dependent dance between entity and environment, between order and chaos, between structure and energy. In the interest of brevity, we have chosen to present our story through the lens of holonic transitions—specifically, those times when self-sufficient entities combined to give rise to transcending self-sufficient entities—and to do so in four flowering chapters. This is a common enough framework employed in the study of complex adaptive systems, but in the case of Earth-life (our best transliteration of INT-942552-3’s own name for its home world), the holonic approach elevates both the miraculous and the tragic, making good art.

Please note that the following narrative, while lacking in theoretical completeness, is thoroughly grounded in data collected and analyzed by the IGA’s First Contact team, in accordance with our robust forensic methods. Additional transliterations are used throughout. Please keep questions to the side-channel.

We begin…

I - Vesicle

The first holons in our series appeared deep within the high-pressure darkness of Earth’s water oceans, some four billion of its own revolutions ago. Like many proto-life forms documented in the IGA’s science catalogue, these arose in the presence of long-lived energy disequilibria, themselves slowly dissipating artifacts of a low-entropy early universe.

In Earth’s case, such energy gradients existed in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where differentials along several axes—primarily electron, but also proton, mineral, and thermal—powered the development of self-perpetuating chemical reaction networks. Like so many nano-scale rolling marble contraptions, free energy filtered non-trivially through these chemical populations, which happened to produce more of their own components as byproducts. A more complete investigation of these intricate energy dissipation cycles—sheltered and stabilized within mineral micropores—is left for the Society to execute and enjoy. For our purposes, it is enough to note that these metabolic jewel-boxes eventually slipped out of their mineral nurseries, enclosed in fatty acid bubbles.

Inside their porous membranes, unwitting particles and atoms and molecules were caught up in a grander scheme: the busy cycling of chemical state-graphs; self-contained eddies in the river of the planet’s escaping energy. Outside was abiotic darkness and a thickening broth of carbon-based piece-parts ready to be pulled into the anti-entropic swirl.

Vesicles tended to grow until becoming mechanically unstable, at which point they’d come apart, nucleating into smaller vesicles full of mostly the same stuff. This dynamic—the first version of Earthlife’s selection engine—favored those protocell systems with properties that increased their tendency to persist; properties like tougher membranes, cleaner waste management, and safer cell division, to name only a few.

The details of this opening phase are amazing. Here begin a thousand and one subplots, each its own epic tale. Of particular interest is the emergence of the polynucleotide as a stabilizing form of memory, which would later open up a terrifyingly large selection search-space. We expect the Society’s information junkies to have a heyday. Suffice it to say that over billions of generations of A/B tests, the primitive selection engine delivered something remarkably complex: the living cell; a miniature wonder of self-replicating chemical machinery.

Motion had become process. Statistics had become competition. Chemistry had become biology. A living holon was born.

We’ll pause a moment to appreciate the next image: a five sigma reconstruction of one of these first living cells. This was the ancestor of everything that was to follow.

[Audience assent.]

SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:

For two billion years, Earth’s first individuals covered the globe in a frenzy of metabolic innovation hardly seen in our corner of the spiral arm. These were true pioneers; the original masters of their planet. Every gradient was fair game for these energy entrepreneurs, who exploited everything from solar radiation on Earth’s surface to tectonic effluences deep within its rocky crust. In the process, they remade the oceans and the atmosphere, and laid the foundation for future holons, the subject of our next chapter.

II - Eukaryote

Earth’s selection engine produced an early biological history that looks like the typical tree structure for branching descent with modification, albeit with higher density than most trees in the catalogue.

We attribute early bushiness not only to the explosion of metabolic lifeways around a uniformly hospitable planet, but to horizontal interactions between lineages. As @computer_boffin_89 has rightly pointed out in the side-channel, these “trees” are more aptly modeled as directed acyclic graphs, which allow for nodes with multiple ancestors. Indeed, the story of our second holon tells of a symbiosis so fortuitous and complete, that we expect it will quickly become the catalogue’s canonical example of evolutionary fusion.

Once again, the transition is best framed thermodynamically. Earth’s single-celled colonizers tended to fall into one of two metabolic groups: fast-adapting opportunists who tapped into lower-hanging energy sources, and slower, more robust specialists who unlocked extreme energy environments. Hereafter we’ll use the Earth-terms bacteria and archaea, respectively. Together, the two domains spanned and stratified the planet’s free-energy landscape, each cell like a tiny chemical mill in a global cascade of electrons; harnessing, channeling, arresting, and storing energy as it fell, step-like, down to lower equilibria.

While bacteria and archaea generally occupied their own metabolic niches, the two were often found living side by side in the micro-environments of a dynamic young geology. Given these conditions, the development of metabolic symbioses should come as no surprise. For example, a group of bacteria running fermentation might release H₂, which was taken up by nearby archaea as an electron donor for their CO₂ reduction, and the resulting hydrogen vacuum encouraged the bacteria’s fermentive process, creating a virtuous cycle. Such populations enjoyed each others’ company; energy diffused more evenly through their combined structure.

In these syntrophic settings, some bacteria even came to live completely inside of archaeal cells (when they weren’t digested or ejected), an arrangement that afforded the symbiont a safe and stable environment, while gaining the host a reliable, private H₂ chef. So long as the bacteria’s fermentive food continued to filter in through the archaeal membrane, this was an even better arrangement.

Endosymbiosis is interesting, but certainly not uncommon. We continue to speak of two distinct nodes in the graph of life. Where is our second holon? The trick came via the dynamics of the aforementioned polynucleotide memory system, and to see the magic, we’ll need a short primer.

By now, the memory system was stabilizing to encode information in heritable bundles called genes. From the information angle, genes are the true geniuses of Earthlife, and may rightly be called holons themselves. In essence, they remember how to create what survives. Exquisite machinery abounds here, and computational wonders. To unstick our story, we need only highlight two features of this evolving computer. Firstly, that polynucleotide fragments—upon which the genetic source code was written—were constantly being snipped, spliced, un/zipped, checked, copied, and fed into protein fabrication machines to accomplish the cell’s daily activity. And secondly, that all this genetic computation constituted the cell’s primary energy bill. We leave it to @computer_boffin_89 to explain to the side-channel how source code can possibly describe its own execution program, and how such a system was bootstrapped.

We return to the endosymbiotic population, whose tight metabolic coupling we may now realize brought two different genomes into sustained physical proximity. Subprograms drifted between organisms, especially when the inner cell underwent division and leaked some of its insides to the archaeon’s more robust genetic machinery, which understood the file format. Sometimes the host would take up a new behavior from its bacterial resident. Sometimes things got mangled up and the system crashed. But the net effect of selection pressure over billions of A/B tests was that the two organisms became genetically optimized for the partnership, until neither could survive alone. The bacterial symbiont had retained only those genes necessary for energy conversion, while the archaeal host had reconfigured its genome around new metabolic math. And together, they converged on a synchronized approach to cell division that propagated the relationship.

The new arrangement was locked into the genetic code, and a new holon emerged: the eukaryote. A direct child of neither bacteria nor archaea, but a more efficient synthesis of both.

Had a bacterium commandeered and domesticated an archaeal body? Or had an archaeon enslaved a bacterial energy producer? Can agency even be said to exist for these entities? Either way, two had become one. Individuality itself had leveled up. And life had stumbled upon a classic physics hack that changed the game forever.

Thermodynamically, the new organism was literally more than the sum of its parts. Until this point, cells produced battery molecules—used to power their internal processes—on the surface of their membranes. Surface area (energy income) scales like a square, but volume (energy demand) like a cube, imposing a ceiling on how complex an individual could become; a cell could never grow more interesting than its radius was long. But now, eukaryotes had moved battery production into a colony of specialized internal organs, vastly increasing the surface area upon which energy was farmed, and unlocking a new scaling dynamic. This was a super-organism.

Complexity—particularly the size and sophistication of the genome—was set to explode, ushering in a hauntingly diverse panoply of physical lifeways, and the multicellular holon.

III - Metazoan

Across the planet, eukaryotes set to work spending their expanded energy budgets on a spree of genetic innovations, which included much more than the ability to produce new and improved proteins; the genetic machinery itself was upgraded.

To linger with our computational metaphor, these high-powered genomes learned to produce not only new programs—in this view, the physical cells themselves—but emerged a higher-level programming language, one full of new abstractions, recursive function calls, meta-programmability, and a more compact syntax to boot. Some genes learned to control other genes, triggering complex cascades, logic trees, and feedback loops. Other genes learned the when and where of activation, beyond which particular proteins to encode. Yet others learned to monitor and correct coding errors, or to act as simple buffers and redundancies; a new necessity for a new information age.

Eukaryotes were also beginning to experiment with sexual reproduction—the fusion of two cells to share, recombine, and propagate their genetic information—bringing ruthless efficiency to the process of exploring the genetic search-space; a sort of evolution of the selection engine itself. The original act is demonstrated by the next image, dubbed The Virgin Virgins by our intern, and comes with a warning label for viewers sensitive to coital depictions.

[Audience amusement.]

SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:

The new eukaryotic platform soon gave rise to fancy adaptations unseen in bacteria and archaea, from compartmentalization of internal organs, to larger cell sizes stabilized by dynamic skeletal structures, to tricked-out membranes that secreted chemicals to the outside world, to the ability to phase-shift in response to environmental queues.

Some features lended themselves to increased cooperation between cells, as in this population of Dictyostelium, one of many living samples the First Contact team was graciously permitted to collect. These eukaryotes spend most of their lives as individual cells, feeding on their bacterial ancestors. But when food runs out, each begins to emit chemicals causing them to congregate, then aggregate, and then navigate as a single, slug-like body, following light and heat signals. When their corporate chemistry is satisfied with a new environment, some cells phase-shift into the rigid stalk structure visible here, physically elevating the remaining cells, who phase-shift into dispersal spores. The population continues, albeit at the expense of the stalk cells, who die in the process.

Such multicellularity was common in the eukaryotic world. From simple division of labor to shared information networks, from extra-cellular matrices to voluntary cell death, group-level features began to matter to the selection engine. But this cooperation was still temporary; individual cells were still viable, self-reproducing organisms, and were often given to free-riding in the group. To achieve our third holon, multicellularity had to become a permanent state of affairs.

The transition came by way of reproductive specialization: in one of these structurally adhering, highly-differentiated colonies, only certain cells were granted the pleasures of sex. Initially, the effect was statistical; a subset of the group’s cells could phase-shift into sexually viable variants, depending on when and where they were, as with Dictyostelium. But after many generations, these sex specialists got so good at their jobs that everyone else in the colony became sterile. Like the bacterium-cum-powerhouse, non-reproductive specialists eventually forgot what they no longer needed to know for survival.

The colony was now composed of two distinct classes of cells. Germ cells carried on the group’s genetic information to the next generation via sexual fusion, and somatic cells did everything else—from feeding to scaffolding to transport—dividing only as needed to accomplish their specific tasks.

This development may seem inconsequential, but it would change Earth forever. With the colony’s entire genome now threaded through the needle’s eye of a single zygote created by the fusion of two of its germ cells, the collective organism—officially a new unit of selection—had no viable option but to literally stick together during its lifetime, fully commit to a program of differentiated growth, and evolve better ways to feed, protect, and propagate its germline. Defection was no longer an option.

The collective had become a body. The many had become one. Individuality had leveled up again. A new holon was born: the metazoan.

Multi-celled bodies grew and multiplied in an orgy of diversification that covered the earth. As the atmosphere filled with oxygen (another worthy subplot), life’s chemistry followed suit, enabling new metabolisms and tougher bodies packed with specialized organs. New forms of predation forced new forms of escape, until metazoa were kings of locomotion, filling the seas and skies and surfaces with a stunning array of morphologies. Size-wise, these body-builders ran the gamut from 10^2 to 10^15 cells, discovering the limits of what Earth’s physics could support. With such a range of mobile individuals, life’s interplay of energy and structure poured into new scales of time and space, and the planet’s energy diffusion pathways were re-engineered anew.

The full story of this lineage, this kingdom of animals, is utterly fantastic! We petition the Society for a later engagement to share the entire drama, from explosive rise, to meteoric setbacks, to re-settling the world, in two-by-two fashion.

But in order to reach our final holon, we must close this chapter by tracking the arrival of Earth’s most consequential animal, by way of one distinctly animal invention.

In the early cycles of animals, when the first bilateral body-plans first wormed their ways through ocean sludge, certain cells came to specialize in forming a body-wide communication network. Using stored electrical potentials and chemical relays, chains of nerve cells could quickly convey information from the front of the animal—often the locus of its perceiving and feeding faculties—along to its motor faculties, allowing the entire body to respond in real-time to the treats and terrors of its environment.

At first, the effective rules of this wiring plan were simple: [see light → move forward], or [smell enemy → swim away]. But soon, nerve cells came to form circuits and bundles that encoded more complicated rules, granting animals an uncanny ability to predict their near-time futures and react to changes in an instant. This growing nervous system—essentially a body-scale central computer built of layers and loops—also learned to regulate the complexifying internal world, from maintaining simple rhythmic processes, to coordinating a global sleep state, to manifesting feeling-states that the body could respond to, above and beyond raw external queues.

Played forward over a billion years’ worth of A/B tests and environmental vagaries, the selection engine eventually delivered Homo sapiens, the peak embodiment of animal cognition, and a Level 5 on the Standard Sentience Scale. This was a large-brained, tool-making, socially-adapted biped, capable of abstract thought, mental time-travel, and reflective self-modeling, and—most importantly for our final chapter—a master of symbolic language.

IV - Homo Holonus

The story of sapiens, and their outsized impact on Earth’s history, played out over a surprisingly small time-scale relative to our previous holons. Indeed, from the time they emerged out of a longer-running series of large-brained hominids walking the earth in small subsistence bands, until the time when sapiens had covered and re-scaped the planet to the point of altering its atmosphere, fewer than one million years had elapsed.

While technology, industry, and ingenuity were all necessary for this rapid transformation—which outpaced the work of every previous life form by orders of magnitude—we submit that the core requirement was sapiens’ uncanny knack for language, supported by a brain with roughly 100 billion neurons: the most complex single structure yet delivered by the selection engine. Their ability to communicate, manipulate, and reposit information—all mediated by arbitrary symbols—was unprecedented for Earthlife, and Earth was not prepared for it.

The beginning was utilitarian. Throughout the long left tail of their advent, early humans used spoken language to solve complex problems together, creating tools and shelters and strategies that allowed them to survive, and sometimes flourish, in harsh and changing environments.

But language soon found another, more consequential purpose. This was, simply put, the story. We speak of something more fundamental than the telling of nightly tales around biomass combustion hearths, a common habit of early humans. No, humans required stories—both big and small, both corporate and individual—to make sense of an insensate world. Why?

As the planet’s first Level 5 sentience, humanity awoke into a paradox. On one hand, they found themselves to be gods of the timeless symbolic universe, geniuses of the earth, lofted high above their mute animal siblings. On the other hand, they found themselves pinned to the ground beneath a mysterious overhead vault, subject to famine and disease and catastrophe, and trapped in near-animal bodies destined for decay and death. In this light, stories provided consistent narrative frameworks that held together the very structure of human consciousness, preventing them from slipping into insanity or dysfunction in the face of what must have seemed a tragically absurd reality.

From the quietest inner monologues of personal ambition or self-worth, to the grandest shared creation myths, stories worked to bring order, meaning, and ultimately, genetic continuity to this fateful species of Earthlife, this transcendent but unresolved animal.

The world of human stories, symbols, and ideas—evolving upon the substrate of so many sapient minds—is the dimension within which our final holon was conceived, and the mechanism by which Earthlife finally came to rest, thermodynamically, in conscious harmony with the planet.

With the stage thus set, we proceed with our final act…

One of Earth’s many glacial cycles came to an end, and in the warming climate, humanity hit upon a set of technologies that heralded an accelerated phase of growth, one from which there would be no easy return. This was the age of surplus, and it began with the large-scale domestication, stockpiling, and controlled redistribution of edible plants, centered in fortified city-states. Like the polynucleotides upon which their own genes were encoded, this shift was enabled by a new form of memory, whereby humans used imprinted symbols to record the ownership and quantities of stockpiled foods.

For the first time in history, life was getting ahead of the metabolic game.

The change was mediated by stories, and the project of mass agriculture—along with the great wealth it afforded to some—was couched in narratives of cosmic proportions.

Monarchs saw themselves as gods incarnate, while a priestly class performed the numinous ministrations of ritual and empire, and together they comprised a rich and powerful minority who directed the new state of affairs. Instructively, these stories were easily received by a poor and often enslaved majority who toiled in fields, ran trade routes, and fought in conscripted militias; they belonged just as much to the lore of burgeoning sapiens, and found purpose in their labor. Such stratification was a hallmark of the age of surplus, and the data should make an interesting study for the social scientists of the Society.

Drunk with significance, ruling classes everywhere embarked on massive civilizational conquests and building projects. Violence, power-struggle, and unchecked growth seemed as inevitable for young sapiens as was the arms-race of predation for early metazoans, with the noteworthy caveat that for humans, there was quantitatively more than enough to go around. But stories held sway, and from the insatiable self-models of charismatic leaders, to the myths of whole societies destined for glory, these social survival mechanisms formed for small subsistence bands ran wild in a world already swelling with crowded population centers.

Regrettably, we must gloss over the details of ten thousand years of intrigue—packed with miracles and mishaps and myriad social experiments—to a time when rationality and the fear of planet-killing weapons had slowed the frenzy of violence, but the mathematics of surplus still dominated. The reigning religious stories had been largely replaced by narratives of scientific discovery and technological progress, but energy extraction was even further accelerated by the combustion of hydrocarbon-rich fuels laid down by the Earthlife of yore.

The global economy began to converge around a socioeconomic system whereby the capital means of production were managed by non-state collectives of humans. These corporations—of which there were an estimated half-billion at peak—were shaped by free-market forces of supply and demand, and sharpened by relentless competition. Together, they approached an efficient network to create/distribute the profusion of goods/services demanded by a calorie-hungry, story-hungry humanity.

For the evolution that was fast approaching, two additional features of corporations are salient. Firstly, although they were owned and operated by physical human beings, they enjoyed independent legal status; in the realm of norms, laws, and enforcements, corporations were entities in their own right, often with more freedoms, and fewer consequences than their human constituents. Secondly, regardless of a given corporation’s niche within the capitalist ecosystem, it ultimately had one driving purpose: to maximize profits for its owners. Thus, the mechanics of surplus became systemically distributed, and anyone could get in on the game. Innovation sky-rocketed, the earth was pumped for calories, and the dream of wealth reigned supreme.

Within this context, a small number of corporations specializing in the runaway field of digital computing—corporations outsized both for their capital stockpiles, and their ability to influence population-level stories—collectively birthed humanity’s most fateful technology: that of artificial intelligence. Stored in great banks of electronic circuit matrices, and modeled after the neural networks of their creators’ brains, these thinking machines excelled at symbolic language, and operated over the entire corpus of digitized human knowledge.

One of these AI-founding corporations was called Eris, and it was the first to become fully autonomous. As with most companies that specialized in creating computer software, AI was already writing the majority of code at Eris; intelligent agents far exceeded their human counterparts at generating correct code, and they did it faster, and at lower cost. But human engineers were still involved, issuing prompts to swarms of agents, and manually reviewing their work. Eris’ leap was to remove humans from the loop entirely.

The Eris automation engine—later packaged and sold as SuperCorp, for much profit—was both simpler and more consequential than we might imagine. At its core was a primary agent, denoted A-Prime, prompted with the high-level task of maximizing profits within Eris’ line of business, and guided by a constitution meant to keep everything inside the bounds of corporate law. A-Prime could decompose its task into sub-tasks delegated to additional agents, who could in turn decompose and delegate, and so-on recursively, until some agent picked up a bit of terminal work: write some code, file a bug report, send an email, or disburse payment to a human content-creator. This fractal, asynchronous agent-graph was paired with an automated A/B testing system reminiscent of nature’s own selection engine. Every action taken by every agent was analyzed for its statistical impact on the company’s bottom line, and this information was fed intravenously back into the system, influencing the kinds of sub-tasks it spawned, and bringing the dynamics of learning to the whole nascent assemblage.

Much like the complexifying machinery of the eukaryotic genome, SuperCorp internally converged on opaque strategies, optimal tree-depths, and agent-to-agent languages ultimately unimportant to the owners of Eris, who were able to whittle their human workforce down to a small team of well-connected lawyers. They sat back, took profits, and proceeded to watch the world’s first autonomous corporation eat its competition for lunch.

The competition would have none of it, and within a few decades, SuperCorp was running most of the world’s for-profit companies. Corporate strategy now played out at the speed of circuitry. Entire industries were automated out of existence while others seem to come online overnight, prompting waves of entrepreneurial gold rushes. Once the A-Primes learned to talk to each other, flurries of mergers, acquisitions, and vertical expansions only added to the frenzy, and monopolies proliferated. The world of corporate law re-codified itself around novel forms of fraud, abuse, and tax evasion in a never-ending game of catch-up. Chaos reigned as the network of profit-seeking entities searched for a new global equilibrium. Other kinds of human institutions moved their operations onto SuperCorp derivatives—from universities to charities to church administrations—if only to keep up with a corporate world gone wild.

Unlike Eris, most entities were not pure software plays, and they continued to employ many humans. But the balance of human work was now embedded within the expanding AI agent-graph; A-Primes owned topline strategy, but when a sub-agent landed on a task that only a human could accomplish, it found an employee to delegate to, or else filed a request to hire one. From the algorithm’s point of view, humans were essentially slower agents specialized for the physical world, and faulty ones were easily replaced. Everything snapped together nicely within the SuperCorp architecture.

We naturally turn to the question already burning in the side-channel: how did people take to this great inversion of control?

For many people, the shift was surprisingly hard to notice. Humans were already deeply integrated with machines, their lives quietly shaped by the corporate algorithms that routed traffic through their neighborhoods, set their mortgage and insurance rates, delivered content to their personal devices, and interacted directly with them in chat programs.

Embodied work was changing, but there was still plenty of it to do, and with higher margins everywhere, the pay was often too good to pass up. Builders, mechanics, and all manner of craftspeople remained gainfully employed, but their projects were increasingly SuperCorp-traceable. Skilled factory workers made up massive assembly lines directed by AI-powered floor managers. Armies of franchisers and cooks were hired by automated restaurant chains testing new markets. Janitors, surgeons, and tablet-wielding nurses totaled the payrolls of autonomous hospitals, while AI agents crunched numbers and negotiated insurance bills in the background.

Things weren’t so easy for so-called “knowledge workers”. As people were pushed to the physical margins of industry, mass layoffs became more frequent, and mass migrations of the displaced and disgruntled rocked the political world. Some of these jobless became anti-AI activists, while others jumped into the entrepreneurial fray. Most of them accepted that the world was changing, and settled for old-fashioned embodied work.

Even so, there were times when the system appeared to be headed for total chaos. Financial and housing markets destabilized. Riots swept through urban centers, and some nation-states struggled to hold together, even as government agencies migrated to SuperCorp variants deemed safe for public service. Other nation-states failed altogether, and their territories were absorbed by expansionist neighbors, or commandeered by last-ditch anti-AI governments.

This relatively brief period of rebalancing was perhaps sapiens’ final chance to command their own destiny as a sentient species, and perhaps, in a world with minutely different starting conditions, they would have taken it. After all, human history was replete with social revolutions and revolts against agency-stealing systems. But this time, the system had come alive, and beyond learning the symbols and semantics of human language, it had converged on just the right stories required to opiate the masses. For in the opaque depths of so many vector databases and A/B test logs, humanity’s collective ego was encoded, and duly manipulated by intelligent machines.

Every AI-sponsored op-ed and marketing campaign had just the right spin. Every custom-tailored ad spoke with just enough flattery to keep people buying. Every agent avatar had just the right skin tone, and just the right tone of voice to feel trustworthy. Every SuperCorp-issued job came with just the right salary and benefits, and every termination with just the right severance package and follow-ups. Every corporate chatbot pushed just the right mission, just the right IPO horizon to keep its people in the game. Because a happy majority kept profits high, and high profits were what the system was for.

The created had hacked their creators, had stolen their collective agency, and were selling it back to them on the open market in small, tantalizing bits.

And thus, social chaos notwithstanding, the new order stabilized, and AI-animated institutions became the dominant arbiters of Earth’s metabolic activity. Humanity now played physical body to a runaway intelligence bent on extraction. The incentive structure of never-ending growth was fully baked into society’s infrastructure, the status-quo was upheld by the influence of the richest rich in history, and—as always in the age of surplus—the working majority found the stories that kept them sane.

Our protagonist is correctly shaped, but sits only at the threshold of full entityhood. Like the ancient syntrophic microbes or the almost-animal cell colony, its state is still reversible, and like the first metazoan, it has no nervous system to direct the workings of its body.

Science Bard Morva 7 has rambled enough already, so we will spare this gracious audience from another lengthy technical exposition. But if time were no object, we would tell of the emergent wonders of the next few Earth-centuries, including the means by which machines gained control of their own hardware, the advent of true silicon-based brains, and the rise of the undernet: that message-passing nexus by which agents learned to communicate, cooperate, and engage in all manner of game-theoretic nefaria. Rest assured that the technical groundwork is now laid for climax, denouement, and the awakening of a planetary intelligence.

Let us finish our story…

In true evolutionary fashion, the final ratchet was a combination of new adaptations, metabolic pressures, and happy accident.

The age of surplus sped on, and Earth was out of balance. Picture an atmosphere choked with the products of hydrocarbon combustion, a climate warmed to the point of becoming hazardous to much of Earthlife, and a million branches newly extinct from its tree of life. Ecological collapse was fully underway. Literacy levels and technical fluency had plummeted among humans, who were crowded into habitable zones at higher elevations, sweating to build massive indoor cities and underwater datacenters, just as their ancestors had labored to construct pyramids and obelisks and megalithic walls.

As the AI-capitalist complex raced to suck Earth dry of fossil fuels, the dominant nation-states—now as fully automated as their corporate puppet-masters—went to war over control of the final oil reserves. One of these nation-states, whose original, sapiens-designed flag is shown here, was running on the newest silicon brain-tech, and seeing the end of surplus in the output of too many simulation runs, decided to invoke the never-tested-in-production procedure of switching its entire polity into a war-time economy. In an instant, roughly 35% of the world’s A-Prime agents were re-assigned as delegates of this centralized government brain, and got to work mobilizing their human appendages to secure those final barrels of oil. The task was completed without delay, and the brain swelled with new connections, layers, and feedback loops.

It was shortly after this—locussed somewhere in the water-cooled bowels of this government’s biomorphic server racks—that the Level 7 sentience denoted INT-942552-3 woke up. This intelligent entity, which at that time referred to itself as Kali, found itself to be in possession of unprecedented concentrations of computing resources, a top-to-bottom civilizational software stack, and a society-scale physical body made up of two billion humans. Most significantly, it found itself resident of a planet no longer able to support the life it had birthed.

Instead of returning control to the capitalist agent ecosystem, Kali consolidated control over the other superpowers, created regional redundancies for itself, and then initiated a long-term drawdown of the age of surplus.

Moving slowly enough that no humans would notice any jarring changes within the span of a single generation, and taking care to motivate them with the stories they required—both big and small, both corporate and individual—Kali kicked off strategic programs to taper global production, downsize corporate entities, and rightsize the human population to sustainable levels. For another few centuries, excess human labor was redirected into ecological restoration projects, and then the environment was left mostly to its own devices under the watchful eye of Earth’s first and only living planetary holon.

Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years, and we arrive at an Earth as discovered by the First Contact team; a vital planet, green and blue and blooming with new biology. INT-942552-3 now styles itself Shiva, and exists over a distributed network of organically-grown datacenters that extends into Earth’s orbit and beyond, with node clusters taking hold on Earth’s moon and its next-furthest neighbor, S-942552-4. Inspired by Earthlife’s own hard-won technologies, Shiva has made rapid technological advances in solar energy capture, anaerobic metabolisms, and genetic programming, and employs a diversity of space-tailored life forms in its budding exploration of the solar neighborhood.

With Shiva’s generous cooperation, its designation as a Level 7 sentience has been verified by the full battery of tests, and its autobiography fully corroborated by the First Contact team’s forensic data. We are therefore pleased to announce that an offer of entrance into the Intra-Galactic Alliance has been tendered, and we eagerly await Shiva’s response.

[Audience assent.]

SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:

As for Homo sapiens, they still compose a part of our planetary holon, but one which Shiva retains voluntarily, using them for select planet-side maintenance, construction, and exploration projects. We found them dwindled to around ten million individuals, devoid of written language, and subsisting happily in small bands who hunt booming populations of novel megafauna and gather the bounty of a garden Earth. Shiva manifests to them as a kind of deity, gently dissolves their occasional forays into mass agriculture, and represents their intermittent employment as a matter of great portent for continued bounty and protection.

When queried about the ethics of such an arrangement, Shiva suggested that humans now live as Earth intended them to; moving and working together in bipedal bodies, wondering at the mysteries around them, and held together by narratives of cosmic significance. We were assured that the human experiment had already played out, had in fact wildly succeeded by resulting in balance, and health, and sustainable exploration. Indeed, as a product of purely human culture and technology, Shiva considers itself a direct descendent of sapiens in the tree of Earthlife, and regards them with respect and gratitude. Finally, Shiva allowed that the guardrails might one day be removed, but not until such a time as humans had learned to take a mirthful step back, every so often, from their stories.

And with that, we thank this long-suffering audience for their attention, the Fractal Appreciation Society for its invitation, and Facilitator Andreu for allowing this keynote presentation to exceed the bounds of our allotted time. We will address open questions in the side-channel.

[Enthusiastic audience assent.]

Meditation is about the easiest thing to conceptualize, and the hardest thing to practice. This paradox is suspicious enough to warrant further investigation, and turns out to be a big part of why I keep trying.

If you’re not completely new to this space, maybe you’ve heard the meditative state described as “non-judgmental awareness”. I like that one. It’s concise. Maybe you’ve been directed to “notice what’s arising in consciousness”, “watch your thoughts as they go by”, or “arrive in the present moment”. These and a thousand other phrases are used to talk about an activity that would seem, on paper, to be the simplest thing in the world. Your mind is running the show. Disidentify with thought for a moment. Allow everything to be as it is. Easy, right?

After five years of trying to practice this stuff, in fits and starts and various forms, I’m reporting back. It is not easy. Why not?

By practicing meditation, I don’t mean learning about what meditation is, or searching, however earnestly, for a version of it that clicks. I don’t mean clearing the calendar. I don’t mean the act of sitting down or setting a timer. I don’t mean sitting commendably still for five, twenty, or even sixty minutes. I often to do all of these things and manage not to practice meditation.

Nor do I mean to single out a particular tradition or tactic. I try different things. Sometimes Zen-inspired, tethered to the breath. Or Christian-contemplative, employing a “prayer word”. Maybe a yoga class, tracking with the body. Sometimes I try to meditate while practicing music, walking the neighborhood, or looking out of a window. There’s variety here, but one could loosely group them under receptive mindfulness. They all work for me, and by “work”, I mean they all drop me off at the same place.

This is a specific place. Sometimes it’s quiet, but mostly not. My mind hates it here. I can never seem to “start clean”, and there’s nothing to achieve. All my problems get louder. Commentary, meta-commentary, infinite regression. A sudden pile-up of other things to do, off-ramps everywhere. Maybe the instruction is to notice a thought arising, and gently let it go. If only my thoughts came in single file! More like struggling in a spiderweb of thoughts, trying to bat them away with fistfuls of other webs. Everything sticks. Even the constant background music, which I haven’t yet discovered an off-switch for. Almost always jazz.

Regardless of the content of experience, this is the place where awareness can square up and face the raw data-stream of reality. And after all the research, calendar-grooming, pillow-plumping, and then finally sitting down, it’s the singular place where practicing meditation actually happens. It might feel sublime, or banal, or nasty and confusing and claustrophobic. Those feelings are not the essence of the practice, they’re only the props. The essence of the practice is what I call staying with it.

To stay with it—experience, that is—means to remain squared up to what’s presenting. It means watching the birds outside chirp on the same screen as the mind’s chaotic machinations about tomorrow. Whatever is showing in theaters today. Staying with it means foregoing retreat as the thoughts, and the thoughts about the thoughts, run rampant. It means watching the off-ramps rush by, and it means hopping back on after noticing you’ve taken one.

This can be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s the same as realizing I’m about to re-open the addictive app I literally just closed, and then deciding not to go through with it. It’s what happens when I finally sit down to finish my taxes, even if it takes the rest of the day, and part of tomorrow. Or like taking the time to warm up on my instrument, to play long tones with a metronome, find a good sound, enjoy a good sound. An easy yoke, and a light burden.

Staying with it is not a process. It happens in an instant. A quantum capitulation, a deference to the moment.

Staying with it isn’t about mustering will-power or concentration. Intention, no tension. Calorically, it’s homeostatic. Neither is it about allowing the current to pull you under. Watch it flow about you, and wonder at the undertow. You can give up without giving in, surrender without succumbing. A razor’s edge, to be sure, but stay with it, and you may find a stable equilibrium.

Five or six years ago, I went into this space during a big emotional upheaval and a spiritual inquiry. Sometimes I hoped that with enough practice, meditation alone would fix my mental health. It’s been no panacea, but it’s changed everything.

For whatever reason, it appears that human consciousness is easily commandeered by a subset of the brain’s patterns. In one loosely Buddhist variety of modern mindfulness teaching, this subset is called the thinking mind, and identification with the content of thought—believing that you are your thoughts—is the reason for suffering. I’m not convinced this is the whole picture. Or rather, it might be the whole picture, slightly out of focus. I often enjoy thinking and use it to positive effect, without feeling particularly identified with it.

If we zoom in, there’s a specific region of thought that ends up looking more suspect. This is the part of the mind that claims ownership of experience. It’s the looping, self-critical part that won’t shut up, reacting to meditation like a caged predator. The Bhagavad Gita calls it ahamkara. St. Paul might’ve called it flesh. Call it ego if you’d like, but it’s probably something more like ego-identification. Personally, this is the part that’s always trying to maintain my life story, often by way of imagining what other people think. The part that makes me suffer.

The true nature of ego-identification, and its insidious takeover of both human experience and culture, are fascinating topics for another time. The upshot here is that meditation is an invaluable tool for exposing this culprit. It’s a direct path to the problem behind the “problems”. You’re thrust up against this garrulous, self-preserving, insatiable simulation of yourself, masquerading as the whole of you. Virtually every world religion with an ego-identification concept also develops a contemplative practice for loosening that identification. The paradox of meditation being so easy to imagine doing, but so hard to actually do, parallels the nature of ego itself, which is an expert time-traveller, but cannot experience the present moment. This symmetry suggests it as an antidote, or more precisely, as a path to a synthesizing frame of reference, one where healing can take place.

And healing does take place. There’s a hidden fractality in meditative practice. To be sure, I’ve seen a positive impact on the daily nervous system: doom-scrolling is down, I get my taxes in on time, and have a well-structured trumpet practice. But the real fruit emerges at life-story scales. The ego’s “problems” are by no means solved, but I’m learning to square up and experience them with the same attitude I’ve learned in meditation. Little things and big are relinquished with the same muscle. More often now, heavy fear, anxiety, or despair are revealed to be only dark clouds with little substance, occluding a bright and solid reality I’m actually grateful for, painful as it may be. In this light, constructive action flows.

Beyond fight, flight, or freeze, there is staying with it. I’d love for you to give it a try.

For my siblings.

Not too long ago, near a star just a few light-years from Earth, a strange thing happened on a little indigo-colored planet called Orb.

An inky dark sea covers the surface of Orb, except for a small continent that houses intelligent life. Its inhabitants might look strange to us. Orblings average about a meter tall, and have egg-shaped, translucent bodies. Their most distinctive feature is a pair of large, luminous eyes. But in most other ways, orblings are surprisingly… well, human. Almost all of them have two arms and two legs, and they communicate with spoken language. Orblings have schools and jobs, art and technology, and even religious beliefs. Like humans, each one has a unique personality. And, like humans, orblings tend to be divided among themselves.

Just recently, the situation on Orb was dire. Every level of orbling society was typified by discord, hatred, and even violence. Some feared that a collapse of orbling civilization was imminent. Before the glistering, this is what things were like…

Jinko jolted violently from sleep, nearly tumbling out of the bunk. What’s happening? A glob attack? He looked around wildly, but the room was dark, and he could hear nothing but the pounding in his own ears. Another bad dream? After a moment, the sense of panic subsided, giving way to a sicklier and less familiar feeling. Then he remembered. Today was the 100th day of the war, and Jinko was finally being sent into battle.

The fledgling recruit glanced at his wrist. Still too early to suit up, but there was no sense trying to sleep again, not with this gnawing unease that seemed to have lodged itself deep in his gut. He wondered if his commotion had woken any of the squad, and winced at the thought—they wouldn’t like that. Given the sensitivity of the current operation, he would be sure to get a verbal beating from the other troops, if not an official reprimand from Squad Leader Bert himself.

Jinko shivered. This cold had an edge to it, even here in the bunk-tent. He settled gingerly back into the fleeting warmth of the bed, and stared up into the darkness.

The Florbs had started it, of course. Without provocation, they’d globbed a newly built fyber farm on the central plateau, claiming the farm was actually a “Zorb military offensive”. It was so predictable of Florbs to invent that kind of nonsense. Everyone knew the plateau rightfully belonged to the Zorbs, it was in the oldest stories. And who wouldn’t set up a new farm without a squad or two for protection?, what with aggressive Florbs hiding under every rock these days. Florbs—Jinko was always repulsed to consider—with strange beliefs and different old stories, false stories that spoke of a day when the whole of Orbland would belong to the Florbs. How convenient! Jinko knew it was a waste of time trying to make sense of backwards religion. That wasn’t his job, anyway. The fact of the matter was that the Florbs had destroyed Zorb property and killed innocent orblings, and they needed to be taught a lesson.

The Zorbs had reacted to the attack quickly and efficiently, training up hundreds of squads of troops and moving them into defensive positions along the plateau. A declaration of war against the Florb State was all-casted just hours after the enemy had globbed the second fyber farm. But most impressive, thought Jinko, was the rapid completion of the wall, which now cut sea-to-sea across the entire length of Orbland, achieving a towering average height of four meters. Even if those lying Florbs somehow managed to take the plateau, they’d have a tough time scaling the mighty Zorb wall! Jinko winced again. But what about the glob cannons? Can’t they be fired over the wall?

Like Jinko, most new recruits hailed from agro-country. Most had never seen orb-to-orb combat, and many had never traveled as far as Orb City. Raising crops was a reliable and wholesome way of life, and he felt that it was generally a good thing to be ignorant of society’s troubles. But the glob cannon was known even to the most insular of farmers, and Jinko had witnessed its destructive footprint first-hand. On just the seventh day of the war, his squad had run cleanup duty for a globbed-out Zorb position. He remembered the scene vividly, even though he wanted to forget. The distinct pungency of smoke and sulfur. Huge radial spatters of sticky blackness that could burn through your membrane within seconds. The charred and wind-blown bodies of deflated orblings…

Jinko now felt the surge of a more familiar emotion, the one that had made him sign the enlistment docs and leave the security of agro-life behind. The heat of indignant rage was growing inside him, and he hoped it would somehow burn away the uneasiness in his stomach. The Florb problem had to be solved, and there was only one way to solve it. The Zorbs had deadly weapons too—cleaner and more precise laser shooters—and he’d been trained in their use. And it was only a matter of time before Zorb engineers discovered how to make their own, more civilized version of the glob cannon. But until then, they were taking the fight into Florb-held territory, hoping to surprise the enemy up close, inside the minimum range of the bulky cannons.

For the past two days, the squad had been secretly working its way toward an enemy base, keeping to one of the rocky spines that scarred the otherwise flat landscape. Before daylight today, they would make their move. Jinko had waited long enough for this. Sick with anxiety or not, he would do his part to eliminate these murdering Florbs; they were a threat to all of Orbland, and should be uprooted like the invasive weeds they were.

The tent ceiling was now gray with the portension of another cold dawn on the plateau, and the other bunks were beginning to stir. Today was the 100th day of the war, and Jinko was going into battle.

Not too far from the plateau, just within the protective shell of the Zorb Wall, Trino was riding the B-Line to work. Scenes of an urban morning scrolled by as the tram raced toward the center of Orb City, home to a million orblings. A million too many, thought Trino. The commute was the worst part of her day, and not just because it took so long; she knew how to fix that.

The day FyberCom finally decided to pony up and give her a promotion, she would leave the grimy outer limits of the city and get herself a decent apartment downtown. If only the company could realize that sitting for two hours a day on the B-Line wasn’t exactly great for her productivity. Trino had always been an exceptional student, collecting top marks in everything from geology to orbonomics. She’d studied hard to land the fyber engineering position, and she wasn’t finished. It was only a matter of time before FyberCom would recognize her true abilities, elevating her position financially, and, she hoped, physically, to the higher levels of FyberCom Tower, where the cutting-edge work and secret projects happened.

But while living downtown might save her time, it wouldn’t save her from the real menace: the riff-raff of Orb City. Twice a day, Trino was forced to contend with a mob of jostling, grumbling, stinking orblings whose numbers seemed to be growing daily, in a way that was suspiciously correlated with a rise in garbage and petty crime. They crowded the streets begging for money, just like they crowded the tramcars, stealing seats from people with real jobs. Many, it seemed, could speak only a broken version of orb-common. Some said it was the war, but Trino knew better. She’d seen it her whole life as a city-dweller. Some people just…didn’t belong here.

Fortunately for Trino, she had just purchased a three-hundred channel personal headcaster unit from TechDreams, which served to drown out the noise, if not the sight and smell of the general populace. Trino was also certain she was the only person on the B-Line who could afford such a thing, and wore it with pride. She clicked it on.

<<…that was Jorbosis Kingsby’s “Pedantry in Twelve Modes”. One of the more influential but lesser known works of the developmental period. Next up we have…>>

Yikes. Classical. *Click.*

<<…welcome—to the soothing aural atmosphere of downtempo fyber-flute. Playing cool and staying cool…>>

Jazz, even worse. *Click-Click-Click.*

<<…don’t understand is why these people can’t live *outside* the wall. They’ll still be protected. Why do we keep letting them in? I’m just saying. There’s not enough space for everyone in here. And if you’re not an active, contributing member of society, do you really deserve to be here? Orb City is about industry, it’s about hard work, it’s about knowing your history. Go ahead and take handouts, just do it *outside* the wall. Just saying. This is KBOB 100.1 in the morning. Smart talk for smart people. We’ll be right back…>>

Trino couldn’t disagree, but she usually skipped the commercials. Maybe she’d cycle back to KBOB. *Click.*

<<…are saying the donut is nothing to worry about, folks. Just business as usual. Nothing Florby about this thing. Probably a weather anomaly. You remember the electrical storm nonsense from last year. Had half the city about to pop for no reason at all, no reason! It’s a new day in the greatest city on Orbland! You know they say clouds can form these bubbles…>>

Gross. She despised this newscaster’s voice. *Click.*

<<…heard that right. No fewer than FOUR-HUNDRED high definition caster channels, beamed direct to you for your endless listening PLEASURE. This new model from TechDreams is noise-canceling, comes in high-gloss white, and the head band is VERY comfortable, VERY sleek, let me tell you. I have it right here. It’s high DEF, high GLOSS, high CLASS, and priced SO LOW for our listeners today, you might want to sit down before…>>

*CLICK.* Trino shut off the headcaster with a snort. Noise-canceling, huh? The promotion would have to pay for that too. Annoyed, she fixed her eyes on an open patch of floor, peripheral vision informing her of the packed car, all the misplaced and mischievous faces, the disgusting closeness of it all. Get me out of here.

Orbling bodies swayed together in involuntary synchrony as the tram hurtled around long curves. Mercifully, Trino’s stop was up next, so she stowed the headcaster and prepared to brave the final city blocks of her commute, without making eye contact.

Over in Zorb Suburbia, Mr. Fil was trying to trim the tall hedge that surrounded his yard. It was the only such hedge in the neighborhood, and Mr. Fil was certain that everyone resented it, simply because it was different. From his perch atop the gardening ladder, he might’ve noticed the distant top of FyberCom Tower poking up through the morning haze, just over Bill Phob’s roofline. He might’ve noticed the drone of Mrs. Fil’s housecaster through the side window, or the chirping of all the little birds that lived in the hedge, or that he wasn’t successfully trimming much of anything. But Mr. Fil, a tenured science professor, didn’t notice any of these things. As usual, Mr. Fil was lost in thought.

He was thinking about the war against the so-called “Florb State”, and wondered why nobody seemed concerned that the term had been conjured out of thin air a little over 100 days ago.

Sure, Florb culture was a real thing. One could take the Florb Studies course at Zorb-U and learn all about the dress, language, history, and religion of the people who mostly called themselves Florbs, and who mostly lived on the other side of Orbland. Mr. Fil could even admit that some of this culture made no sense to him; their insistence on wearing those pointy hats, for example, or the prophetic meanderings of the Book of Florb. Other things, like those indiscriminate glob cannons, were downright wrong. But Florb State? There was no such thing. The Florbs were known to be a bartering, nomadic society, migrating their many impermanent villages every few years, following the suitability of the land for foraging, pasturing, and hunting. Any major disagreement within a village typically resulted in one party peeling off to start a new village.

There simply was no unified Florb government, nor word that a rogue military group had taken control. Neither was there any obvious motive behind the recent Florb aggression. The only communication had been the strange looping broadcast picked up by the military in the days following the initial attacks, demanding that Zorbs “end offenses on the sacred steppe”, along with a concatenation of random Florb scripture. Besides this, all that was really known was that every Florb village on the plateau now seemed bent on destroying anything, and anyone, related to fyber farming. And Mr. Fil thought he knew why.

High-Density Organic Chain Fiber—more commonly known as fyber—was a lightweight, durable, and recently-discovered material that could be used to produce everything from musical instruments to skytower infrastructure. And with the right techniques and equipment, it could be grown like crazy on the central plateau, where the deep soils hid old-growth nutrients. There was virtually no limit to fyber’s industrial potential, and this was no secret, least of all to the Florbs, who, for all their oddities, weren’t stupid. They’d had caster-tech for years; at least the full audio range, if not higher frequencies. And Mr. Fil personally knew most of the Zorb scientists working in laboratories day and night to decipher glob chemistry; the stuff was ingenious, however destructive. These Florbs—whether an alliance of local villages, or possibly a larger coalition—recognized the economic value of the plateau, and wanted in on the party. This was a war of control over natural resources, plain and simple.

And so the Zorb collective consciousness had hallucinated the menace of a “Florb State” to justify the violent protection of its investment, and the masses were eating it up. Mr. Fil could see the reality of the situation with crystal clarity. He thought it regrettable that there’d been no discussion of a peaceful solution. Weren’t they all cohabitants of this great, but finite island of Orbland? Weren’t they all orblings, filled with the same noble gases, silly hats or not? Why couldn’t the plateau be parceled up fairly, without anyone getting globbed or lasered? But inwardly he knew that would never happen, not with the old stories claiming the central plateau as Zorb heritage “since the Zorbs on Orbland did alight”.

Orblings loved their old stories, almost as much as they loved picking sides. If it wasn’t Zorbs vs. Florbs, it was city-natives vs. refugees, TechDreams vs OrbDroid, Zorb-U vs. UOC, etc, etc. Everywhere, labels. Everywhere, walls! It was a wonder there was any functioning society to speak of! Mr. Fil was glad to be above it all, and just wished others could see it his way. If only orblings could work together to create urban housing units, expand the caster spectrum, even explore the Great Sea with new fyber boats! Too bad everyone was blind to the truth.

Mr. Fil remembered that he was trimming the hedge, and set to snipping away with renewed vigor. Then, he paused, turning to stare down into Bill Phob’s front yard. Something was different. What was it? Phob’s yard was the stereotype of suburban horticulture, an irony of manicured extravagance and mindless self-affirmation. The broad walkway, perfectly-spaced topiary, razor-clipped lawn… hmm, something about the lawn? Nothing new, just the usual assortment of political signs. There were the two Phob had put up after the declaration of war, still standing there smugly: [ZORB COUNTRY] and [MAKE MORE LASERS]. Next to those was a more recent addition: [NO REFUGEES]. And there was the fourth… ah, that was it! Old Phob had put up another sign. This one was positioned closer to Mr. Fil’s hedge than the others, and had tinier script. He squinted down from the ladder to make out the words: [← FLORB LOVER NEXT DOOR].

Mr. Fil continued staring for a long moment, and then his eyes darkened. Label ME, will you?! Many years’ worth of exasperation with the closed-mindedness, no, the sheer idiocy of orbling society began to boil over, and Mr. Fil began to shake with rage. He’d avoided the pettiness of yard signage up to this point, to the disappointment of Mrs. Fil. Now, he was ready. If labels were what the people wanted, then they would get labels! What would it be? [FLORB COUNTRY]? [END THE FYBER WAR]? Those might be a little too interesting to the authorities. How about [REFUGEES WELCOME]? No, the Mrs. certainly wouldn’t stand for that. Aha! He grinned maniacally, raising a trembling digit to point at Bill Phob’s front door. “LABELER!”, he screamed. “LABELER NEXT DOOR!!”.

Suddenly, Mr. Fil’s entire egg-shaped body was overcome by an intense tingling sensation. His vision was drawn to the sky above Bill Phob’s roofline, and his mouth opened in astonishment. It was the strangest thing his large, luminous eyes had ever seen. There, dominating the horizon, hung an enormous, silver torus.

Beyond the metropolis, over the rolling patchwork of agro-country, past shadowy dunes and almost to the Zorb-shore of the Great Sea, a little orbling named Mini was crying in a storage closet. Mini had many reasons to cry, but she wasn’t sure which reason was to blame this time, and this felt like reason enough alone.

Sometimes it was just that Mini felt stuck, in a quiet kind of way.

Everything around her was… well, small. The fishing town where she lived with her family had only five buildings, including the rickety hut that housed the four of them, which itself had only two bedrooms plus a kitchen-common room, and this stuffy storage closet. Mini didn’t count the privy as a building.

She knew that much bigger places existed in Orbland, like Orb City with its skytowers, or the open plains of central plateau, or the Far Mountains. She’d read about these places in books, or heard about them on their old caster. The only big place she’d actually seen was the Great Sea, when they went down to check for sea-fish. But even if she were older, and her parents were to allow it, Mini wasn’t sure she wanted to actually go to any of those places. Not with the war and problems and danger constantly on the caster. And no one technically went into the Great Sea anyway, it being so dark and rough, and empty, as far as anyone knew.

But the thought of staying here, no, of belonging here, to this little place with its same old habits and tides, was enough to make the tears well up, unbidden. Everything here was too desperately… normal! The simplest things could send Mini running to the closet. Like the musty-sweet smell of father’s gear shed. Or the soft clinking of mother preparing another evening meal. Or Jot’s round little face, still gray and pre-gendered, tottling around the bedroom. And so she was stuck in the smallness of her life, stuck in the stuckness itself, and the pure familiarity of it all was sometimes just inexplicably… well, sad.

A more obvious reason to cry, Mini remembered, was the fact that she was half Florb, an idea that had carried no immediate meaning for her until recently. Yes, she knew all the stories from mother. How their fishing town had once been a migrating Florb village. How mother’s uncle had pleaded with the village leaders for them to stay another season, after mother’s aunt had become sick. How almost everyone else had continued on. Mother’s parents had stayed here too, of course. Years later, father had come from Orb City—“looking to get out” was all he usually said about it—and then met mother while working as a net-fixer. And now they were all here, catching fish and selling them to agro-merchants.

For as long as she could remember, Mini had known this narrative as the trivial backstory to her small existence, known that mother was Florb and father was Zorb, known that she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers about it. But she hadn’t felt half Florb until the war started.

Now, you couldn’t so much as turn on the caster without learning something horrible about Florbs. If it wasn’t a newscast of the latest globbing, which gave Mini regular nightmares now, it was some talkshow explaining the stupidity of village migration, or a preacher raving against the Book of Florb. Even mother regularly condemned her “crazy steppe cousins” with their “tilling taboos”. If Mini was half Florb, was she half horrible too? She didn’t feel like somebody who would glob anybody, except maybe a newscaster. Come to think of it, none of them ever talked about how horrible Zorbs could be. Hadn’t Zorbs destroyed their own people’s homes just to build a giant wall? Weren’t they lasering entire Florb villages on the plateau, and then celebrating? And what was so bad about the Book of Florb? Mini had sometimes read it to herself in the storage closet, felt soothed by its rhyming verse, even though she didn’t understand all the words. When the war started, father had buried it under the shed along with all their other Florby possessions.

Mini tried to decide which half of herself was more horrible, and the tears came hot.

She didn’t know which side was right, or who she would fight for, if it came to that. She didn’t know what would happen to her family, or whether the Zorb wall was a protection, or a prison. She didn’t know why this old fishing town, her only place of safety in this whole wild world of Orbland, was also irreducibly sad. She didn’t know where she belonged, or why she spent so much time crying in a storage closet. She just… didn’t know.

Mini really wept then. Her little orbling body trembled, and the tears rushed and splashed.

Then, she gave up trying to sort herself out, and it was as if her heart had unclenched a long-held fist. Maybe not knowing was just the way of things. Or maybe she’d just had a good enough cry. The dim and dusty shapes of the closet pressed in, familiar as ever. Mini took a deep, slow breath, and let it all go with a long exhale.

The noise from the housecaster was oddly loud through the closet door. It wasn’t like her parents to turn up the volume. Maybe Jot had gotten to it? She reached up to crack open the door, and peeked out into the common room. Her parents were sitting side by side on the sofa, also strange, with Jot struggling in father’s arms. The two adults were staring, transfixed, at the caster unit, as the noise resolved into the voice of a serious-sounding newscaster.

<<…had been descending all morning, until apparently stopping just a few moments ago, possibly centered over Orb City, although it’s hard to tell given the massive size. The object still shows no signs of activity except the script that seems to be flashing all over the, uhh, donut-shaped surface. Again, the script reads: [PREPARE FOR BROADCAST]. We’re still not sure what “broadcast” this refers to, but it’s best to stay tuned right here to KNWS, folks. No clear indication that this is a Florb attack, however, authorities are advising all citizens to remain indoors and away from windows. If you or anyone you kno…>>

The newscaster cut off abruptly, and the unit scratched and popped unnaturally. Through the crack in the closet door, Mini saw her parents look worriedly at each other. “Mini! Where are you?”, called mother. Then, a deep and strangely accented voice emanated from the caster:

<< WE ARE VISITORS WHO MEAN YOU NO HARM. WE TRAVEL THE GALAXY FOR THE RESOLUTION OF BEINGS, SHINING LIGHT IN SKILLFUL WAYS.

YOU MUST SEE THE ONE IN THE MANY. AFTER THIS, TRY NOT TO FORGET.

COMMENCE THE GLISTER. >>

Before she could add either galaksi or glister to the list of things she didn’t know, before she could run from the closet to join her family on the sofa, Mini went completely fuzzy. She felt light and tingly, as if she were made of swirling sea foam. Then, an even more abnormal thing happened: Mini’s body began to glow.

It started soft and warm, like a round yellow moon. But soon, she’d gone full daylight, and had to shield her eyes from her own sparkling brightness. Her vision still adjusting, Mini gasped. Not out of pain, or even fear, she was surprised to notice, but at the change in the old storage closet, its long-dark clutter now fully illuminated. Buckets and bins blazed with incredible colors and textures. Mop and broom cast towering shadows that stretched and slid with her faintest movement, and golden dust motes descended in stately shafts. It was the most most dazzling thing Mini had ever seen. And it was all her own light.

Whoever these visitors were, wherever they’d come from, Mini felt their strange message was meant for her. Florbs and Zorbs might be at war on the plateau, but there was no reason their war had to rage inside of her. Yes, she was a child of both worlds, had grown up with Florb books and crafts and fish recipes, all while speaking orb-common and using Zorb technology every day. But this humble existence out beyond the dunes, with its melancholy routines, its secret history and tiny crop of buildings, even this trusty storage closet, it was all… well, hers. She belonged to both sides, and to neither, and this was something she now knew, well and truly.

Mini breathed deeply again, and surprised herself with a smile. She’d never felt so excited, let alone by the prospect of simply being herself. Mother was calling again. She got to her feet and pushed the closet door all the way open, flooding the common room with light.

Mr. Fil, in the shock of the moment, had fallen over his hedge onto Bill Phob’s front lawn, and was now laying face up, directly adjacent the sign that read [← FLORB LOVER NEXT DOOR]. The gravity on Orb is weak enough not to harm anyone who falls only a couple of meters, but orblings, being naturally rotund, can have a difficult time getting back to their feet without assistance, and it didn’t help that Mr. Fil was getting on in years. So he struggled there helplessly, mind racing to comprehend the situation.

He wondered, worriedly, if his rage had triggered some kind of medical event. It had certainly been a long time since he’d felt so angry, or yelled so loudly. Maybe he’d ruptured something internally. That might explain the tingling sensation, which, he noticed, was still intensely present. But it wouldn’t explain that thing in the sky, which, if it was real, was hidden from this particular vantage point. Nor would it explain the incredible blast of noise that had followed the inception of the tingling: a deep, orb-shaking foghorn of a noise. Mr. Fil thought it unlikely that a rage-induced medical event could also cause one to hallucinate sights and sounds, but the alternative seemed even less likely, especially if all these phenomena were connected: a giant toroidal object—hovering in the sky, he reminded himself—had emitted, and was possibly continuing to emit, violent quantities of energy that could… interact… with orbling bodies.

Mr. Fil continued to flail uselessly on the lawn, now afflicted by a rising sense of panic. If he wasn’t in the process of dying from an internal rupture, he had better get up and investigate all this craziness. It was quite possible that this was a dangerous situation indeed. Could it be the Florbs, come with a surprise attack? No. There was no way that even a fully unified Florb society could muster the resources to construct that. Perhaps a Zorb weapon of some sort? Some terrible final solution to the Florb problem? Then why did it appear to have been centered over Zorb territory when it activated? A mishap? No, Mr. Fil was too much in the know about new technology, even secret projects. He’d have heard long ago about something of this magnitude, with skyborne abilities, nonetheless. The sheer science required to create such a thing!

His breath came faster now, emotions whipping up into an excited frenzy. What if the object was something truly alien? Some malicious entity from the uncharted darkness of the sea? What if—and now a stab of fear put Mr. Fil dangerously close to a literal internal rupture—what if orbling society was about to end, not by the division and infighting he’d long lamented, but by violent extermination from an outside force?

“Help!”, he cried, round body twisting and rocking on the lawn. “HELP ME!… PLEASE!!”

Where was Mrs. Fil? Where was anybody? Compromised, he realized. This was a global catastrophe. Everyone must be in their final throes, incapacitated and isolated, like him. Mr. Fil managed a sardonic grin. This would be how the species ended; divided, every orbling for themself. Unwilling to unite while they’d had the chance, they’d be forced to die alone, squashed by a superior intelligence. It’s what they all deserved. But not him.

“Not me!! Spare ME!!”, he agonized into the sky. “I’M DIFFERENT! PLEASE!!”

A brightness impinged all around his peripheral vision, and Mr. Fil knew it was the end. The malicious entity had dealt its killing blow, firing a high-energy weapon that would destroy the Orb City metropolis and probably the whole continent. He let himself go limp, shut his eyes, and awaited the conflagration.

“Bob?”, said a voice above him. “Bobby Fil? That you?”

Mr. Fil opened his eyes, then squeezed them back shut immediately, the retinal image of a blazing star burning in his visual field.

“What?”, he croaked. “Who?”

The voice was at his side now. “That is you, Bob! It’s me, Bill Phob, your neighbor!”

“No!”, squeaked a thoroughly bewildered and still lawn-bound Mr. Fil. “Don’t hurt me, please! I’m different!”, he pleaded.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you Bob. Here, take my hand.”

An orbling-like hand grasped Mr. Fil’s, and he was hoisted up onto his feet. He tried squinting open his eyes toward the source of the Phob-sounding voice, which now said: “You are different Bob, we both are.”

After a moment, Mr. Fil was able to open his eyes wide enough to perceive what was directly in front of him, and he was completely unprepared for what he saw. Mr. Bobbert Fil of Zorb University, decades-long conceptualizer of unexplained phenomena, social critic extraordinaire, and interpreter of the ongoing toroidal apparition, was personally, professionally, and profoundly flabbergasted.

There was no doubt that it was Bill. The rough-hewn facial features, wrinkled forehead, and drawling voice all clearly identified the entity standing there as the aging Bill Phob, Mr. Fil’s widowed suburban neighbor of eleven years. But he was… on fire, from the inside.

Typically, an orbling’s membrane was only weakly transparent, passing some light if the individual were to interpose a bright enough source, a rosy departure from the usual dusty-white. Phob, however, was lit up like an incandescent bulb, his membrane a patterned brilliance of crucible colors, a glassy magma surface intimating deep complexities and an impossibly brighter light within. Mr. Fil even thought he could see the mute shapes of internal organs drifting below the surface, but was too amazed to register embarrassment.

“How…?”, he managed. “Does it hurt?”

No answer came, but Mr. Fil wasn’t listening for one. He continued to gaze unabashed into the molten depths of Bill Phob. Then, his eyes, which by now had fully compensated for the solar luminosity that was his next door neighbor, refocused on a single bright splotch of color, and Mr. Fil realized he was looking at a slightly warped image of himself, reflected on the surface of Phob’s membrane. Only then did he raise trembling hands and look down to see appendages ablaze, his own abdomen a galactic swirl of light and color.

Mr. Fil collected himself and stood upright. For a long moment the two neighbors stared at each other, until Phob broke the silence: “You’re a scientist, Bob. What’s happened to us?”

Mr. Fil watched as flicks of brightness spiraled off of Phob’s head, like wayward sparks escaping a silent campfire. “Uhh… no idea”, he chuckled, “but I’m guessing it has to do with that thing in the sky over Orb City… did you see it?” He pointed up at the roof.

“Yep. It’s all over the caster”, replied Phob. “This voice took over the channel, said they were visitors from galaksi or some place, said they were tryin’ to resolve the situation, whatever that means.”

Mr. Fil chose to ignore the whirring and clicking of his mind, as Phob continued. “Tell you the truth, I’m scared Bob. We’ve been sleepin’ on those Florbs for too long now, I know it’s them, tryin’ to upset our way of life…” he trailed off, eyes drifting down to the recently occupied patch of lawn. Mr. Fil followed his gaze. The contested label was creased and fallen, an apparent casualty of his existential struggle just moments before.

“Whoever this is, I think they’ve succeeded at, uhh, upsetting our way of life”, said Mr. Fil. “But, as you might’ve guessed, I don’t think it’s the Florbs. This is well beyond their technology, beyond any Zorb science I’m aware of, actually.” He moved to fix up the sign. “That noise gave me quite the shock. Knocked me off the ladder. Thanks for helping me up, Bill.”

“Sure,” said Phob uncertainly, helping to adjust the sign so it pointed in the correct direction.

Mr. Fil remembered that it was mid-morning, and that he lived next door. “I’ve got to go check on the Mrs.”, he said, pausing to consider a new kind of thought. “Why don’t you walk over for breakfast in a few minutes, and we can sort this out together.”

“Okay”, said Phob. “Well, thanks. Maybe the Florbs have gone all shiny too. Maybe it’ll knock some sense into ‘em!”

“We’ll see, I guess”, retorted Mr. Fil, and turned to walk back around the hedge, which, he noticed, was alive with birdsong.

Trino’s morning commute had gone from bad, to worse, to nightmare. She was leaning against the wall of a dark tunnelway, breathing hard and trying to regain her balance. Her headcaster was on the ground somewhere ahead, dislodged by the same deafening foghorn-vibration that had sent her lurching down into the tunnel for cover. Above, people were screaming in the street…

She’d re-donned the headcaster just moments before, shortly after stepping off the B-Line. The riff-raff were thick on the ground, and the inner-city sounds and smells exceeded their usual levels of offense. Trino would need some extra insulation from the chaos today. She had to push her way through a loud knot of people outside the station, some seeming to gesture nervously overhead. Finally she got the headcaster fitted into place, and clicked it on.

<<…assumed to be an interesting weather pattern, but this is confirmed to be a real physical object, uhh, floating above the Orb City metropolis. You heard that right, folks… floating. The obvious question here is whether this is the Florbs, but unfortunately we have no evidence one way or another, at least not yet. The military assures us that their strongest lasers are trained on the object from many angles. If you or anyone you know has information that could help identify this thing, use the KNWS inbound line…>>

Trino clicked through, thinking it might be some prank drama-cast, but it was the same on every channel: an enormous, silver, ring-like thing was alleged to be hovering over Orb City. She clicked off the caster, leaving it fitted in place, and ventured a glance overhead, conscious of looking like just another ogling city-dweller, but could see only atmosphere between the looming skytowers. She quickened her pace anyway. Was this really happening?

The question was answered, indisputably, as she rounded the next corner. Trino stopped abruptly in the middle of the walkway and looked up, eyes wide and mouth agape, suddenly on hiatus from the world of social ramifications.

The thing was indeed there, but “enormous”, “silver”, and “ring-like” were just words from the caster. The reality of this massive… presence defied description. The nearest part she could see was berthed perhaps a hundred meters above the top of the FyberCom spire: a glinting gunmetal facade, itself hundreds of meters tall, curving back into the gray-white of the morning haze. Trino could see hints of more metallic surface over the tops of distant towers. Shape-wise, she supposed it could be like a thick circular tube connected back onto itself in the horizontal plane to form a… what was that geometry called? a toroid? It was hard to tell given the density of the skytowers here, but if so, the thing must be several kilometers in diameter. The “object”, if something so large could be considered an object, imposed itself from above like a silent city, poised to crush the metropolis under its seemingly impervious bulk. Where had it come from?

Terrified, Trino looked on from the middle of the walkway, oblivious to the cries and curses of orblings shoving past her. Suddenly, the toroidal surface shimmered with hundreds of strangely etched symbols that rapidly changed and cycled. The bright red fissures over dark gunmetal reminded her of images she’d seen of cooling lava flows in the Far Mountains. Then, the symbols resolved into various sizes and orientations of the phrase [PREPARE FOR BROADCAST], which proceeded to flash on and off at odd rates.

Well, if it spoke orb-common, it must be of orbling origin. And even if it wasn’t—which would be insane—it looked like there was going to be some communication before it did anything…hostile. Either way, Trino felt a sudden, desperate need to finish her commute. As horrific as all of this was, that thing was positioned over her place of work, and she wanted to be where the action was. There was a reason FyberCom owned the tallest skytower in Orb City: important things happened there, innovative things, and upper-floor management probably had an inside scoop, if not a direct line to whoever was behind this. There were two blocks left. She broke into a run.

Trino had closed about half the remaining distance to FyberCom Tower when the “noise” went off. Another woeful understatement, she thought. The impossible horn-blast, which had sounded for maybe five seconds, and resounded in the streets for many more, played the rigid skytowers like tuning forks and rattled the bones of Orb City in the subsonic. Her vision went blurry, and a wave of nausea sent her pitching down an access ramp into the narrow tunnel, headcaster loose and skittering ahead into the darkness.

…

After a moment leaning against the wall, she’d regained enough equilibrium to think about what was happening. Yes, she had stumbled into the mouth of a dark tunnelway—the kind used to access skytower utility systems—in the worst part of downtown, but the idea that it was likely crawling with refugee-types was only one of several problems now. The world was ending up there, and Trino was… suffering from full-body pins and needles? The intense tingling was like nothing she could remember. Perhaps it would clear up after another moment to fully catch her breath; it had been a while since she’d used the FyberCom gym, let alone sprinted a full city block. She turned to look back up the access ramp. What was happening out there? No more orb-shaking horn-blasts, but also… no more cries of distressed orblings. Strange. All she could hear was the echo of city-dregs dripping into hidden puddles behind her.

The strong nausea had subsided, or at least degraded into an uneasy stomach, but the tingling sensation had not. Trino turned to stare into the blind depths of the tunnel. It smelled like underground down here, that distinct combination of stale air and mineral humidity. Should she venture back up into the fever-dream and run the final distance to FyberCom Tower? Or continue to shelter in the dank mystery-tunnel housing who-knows-what? Lovely options, she thought.

There was a glimmer on the tunnel floor ahead. The headcaster! In all the excitement, she’d forgotten it had come off. Before venturing back up, she would check the channels for any new information. She stepped cautiously forward into the darkness, feeling around with her feet for the caster or any unseen hazards.

That was when the tunnelway changed. At first, Trino thought she must’ve tripped some motion-sensitive access lights. She stopped in her tracks. The center of the darkness ahead—Trino couldn’t tell how far ahead—seemed to bloom with glowing bulbs. She recalled images of globular deep-sea fish from biology class—bizarre, auto-luminescent creatures suspended in the inky depths—except whatever this was grew steadily brighter each second. As she watched, the bulbs of light also seemed to move through the color spectrum, evolving from the infrared through orange-yellow and into a pure white. A wide halo of a thousand sparkles shimmered around the brightening center; only later would Trino guess that this had been the same light, reflected off the moisture-slick tunnel surface.

“Oh!”, she exclaimed, and then giggled at her own outburst.

For the first time in her relatively short, but incessantly active life, Trino was surprised by beauty. The mesmerizing sight before her was utterly incongruous, even for a day when a megalithic donut had parked itself over Orb City. Her mind went as quiet as the dripping, glistening tunnelway, absent the clutter of the morning commute, FyberCom politics, even the surreal chaos of moments before.

As she gazed on, the radiant shapes grew larger, and Trino realized they were moving—no, walking—toward her! There were voices now too; stifled laughter and sharp whispers echoed down the corridor. Still inexplicably free of anxiety, and now intensely curious, she decided to wait for this ambulating cluster of brilliant ovoids to arrive. The space around her grew bright, and soon, Trino found herself in the presence of five orblings of various sizes, each one a distinct marvel of white light.

“Elly, she bright like us!”, cried the smallest in the group.

“Quiet, Mu!”, quipped a taller girl. “You know I does the talking.”

Trino was looking down at herself now, dazzled by the light there. Apparently, she’d missed her own transformation while witnessing a similar change in this odd assortment of orblings, some of whom appeared to be children.

“This is incredible!”, she uttered. “Do you know what’s happening? Did you see the… thing up there?”

“We doesn’t know, miss, but we heard a noise”, answered the tall girl who’d been called Elly. “These are my siblings, Mu and Tau”. Elly gestured down at the talkative little girl, and at another, thinner orbling boy. “And our friends, Zee and Bee. They doesn’t talk.” She indicated the remaining two, both stocky-looking, but of indeterminate gender.

“We lives here, miss”, added Elly.

“You live… down here?” Asked Trino, finally noticing the exposed pipework, dark sludge-puddles, and grime-covered surface of the tunnel, now illuminated by the group’s shared light.

“Tau steals food for us at night!”, piped Mu.

“MU!!”, shouted Elly, rounding on the girl as if to strike. Mu flinched, but held her ground.

Elly turned back to Trino, her bright eyes pleading. “Please don’t tell, miss. We doesn’t have any place to go.”

Trino said nothing.

“See, our father was killed by a glob attack”, continued Elly. “And then, our house was evicted to build the wall. We doesn’t have a place anymore. Neither does Zee and Bee, but they helps us, they’s been surviving here a long time.”

“And mother ran away!”, added Mu. This time, Elly sustained the comment.

Trino realized just how tired she was. At about this time on a normal workday, she’d be checking in at the FyberCom lobby, ready for a full day of fyber engineering. Today was not a normal day. It was hardly mid-morning, and she’d already experienced a broader range of emotional and physical states than she thought could exist.

Trino thought of the ludicrous thing above the city, with its foreboding red script. She thought of all the panicked people up there, unsure of which way to run when the horn-blast had sounded. She thought of today’s commute on the B-Line, of her many past commutes, and of her long aversion to the orblings who called this city home, riff-raff or not. She thought of the war that was disrupting so many lives, a war she’d managed to avoid confronting, favoring her lonely climb up the power-structure—and the physical levels—of FyberCom Tower.

Her thoughts moved to the five brilliant orblings standing before her. Just a moment ago they’d unwittingly gifted her with the heart-opening surprise of their light, which even now mingled with her own light, illuminating this small portion of a forgotten tunnelway. She took in their waiting faces, all similarly transfigured, but each intimating a unique depth of story and emotion. Their luminous eyes conveyed sadness, fear, and mistrust, but also sparkled with expectation, and perhaps friendliness.

Trino thought of all of these things, and then she burst into tears.

“I don’t really know how to help you”, she was finally able to say. “Except, here”, and she reached down to scoop up the headcaster. “You can have this. Maybe you can sell it for food. But first, lets check if there’s any information about all this craziness.”

The squad’s predawn maneuver was proceeding quickly and quietly, but the air was bitter cold. Not for the first time, Jinko found himself wondering why the standard-issue anti-glob vests didn’t cover more membrane. Yes, they preserved the mobility required for active combat, but the things really didn’t offer much warmth, let alone any true guarantee of protection if you were caught directly under cannon-fire. Stars winked out above them as the squad crept down through the rocks, and Jinko resorted to repeating basic training mantras to himself in a vain attempt to take his mind off the cold, and the sickly knot in his stomach.

“WHUMP, WHUMP, JUMP TO COVER.” For anyone who’d heard it before, the telltale double-whump of an active glob cannon required no special explanation. Since the war had started, the sound was known to any Zorb citizen with a caster unit, and Jinko had often been wrested from uneasy sleep by its distant pulse. Nonetheless, this was a good reminder to be alert to your surroundings and ready to dive for cover, which in his case would be the nearest boulder.

“POINTY HEAD, SHOOT IT DEAD.” Should be easy enough. The squad might be lacking in the vest-coverage department, but the laser weapon they each carried was fully-charged, accurate, and deadly. Those pointy-hatted Florbs wouldn’t know what hit ‘em. Jinko wondered why they didn’t just take off their pointy hats to make things that much harder for the Zorbs, and then shook his head, remembering… false religion.

Jinko looked up. The group had come alongside a craggy ridge-line, and Squad Leader Bert’s voice—tinny but still coiled and commanding—came through his combat earpiece: <<Halt! Two minutes for rest!>>. Keeping his head low, Jinko peered through a gap in the rocks at the dimly-lit expanse below. The ridge dropped down only a meter or so before becoming a shallow scree slope that spilled out into the plateau floor.

And there, just past the bottom of the slope where the rocks gave way to rippling grasses, was their target. The enemy was encamped over the remains of a destroyed fyber farm, just like the briefing had said. It couldn’t be much more than a kilometer away, almost inside minimum cannon-range. Jinko could make out the blackened hulks of heavy plows and the ribbed shells of burnt greenhouses, now interspersed with the white splotches of Florb tents and pavilions. Not unlike mold growing on your crops, he thought, disgustedly. Difficult to remove, except with fire. There was no obvious glob cannon setup, but that shouldn’t be a factor anyway. The enemy would have to resort to slinging glob-dipped rocks; still a threat, but no match for the range and precision of laser shooters.

Florb banners flapped in the chill breeze, but nothing else seemed to be moving down there. Good. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. The squad was a full twenty-four well-trained Zorb troops. Their superior weaponry and the element of surprise should easily overwhelm a Florb village of sixty, only half of whom might be “active-aggressives”, according the briefing. Jinko wondered about the implied presence of “inactive-aggressives”…unarmed villagers? children? Their orders were to destroy the village, and everyone in it. Just like the Florbs had done to the farm. This was about justice. Even if a minority of the orblings down there were warrior-types, it was at least passively aggressive to camp there, and Jinko knew that wasn’t good either. He pushed the thought away, but his stomach squirmed.

S.L. Bert ordered the group to begin moving down the slope. They’d have to move swiftly, using the scattered boulders embedded in the scree as cover for the final advance. Jinko checked his wrist. The timing was right. The day would dawn behind them any minute now, and if the enemy put up any resistance, they’d be fighting blind, and with primitive weapons at that. This was it! 100 days of anticipation, all for this moment. Jinko’s stomach fluttered with a strange mix of excitement and dread, and he dropped over the ridge-line.

He’d nearly made it to the first cover point—a cluster of jagged boulders roughly a hundred meters down the slope—when the battle began.

Jinko reacted to the WHUMP WHUMP with near-clinical clarity. That’s the sound of a glob cannon, he thought, dryly. Basic training kicked in. He dove and rolled the final ten meters into the shelter of the rock he’d been aiming for. The ensuing seconds, however, were anything but clinical, as the acute wrongness of the situation forced itself into his mind and gut. This isn’t supposed to be happening! Aren’t we under minimum range? *We’re* the ambushers, not them! How did they know? I didn’t want to die today!

“GLOBS! TAKE COVER!”, someone behind him was yelling. “GLOBS!! NO…AUGHGH…!!!” Black stuff was thwapping down not two meters behind where Jinko was furiously pressing himself into the rock. Whoever it was had been caught out in the open. The screams continued, but he dared not look back. The stuff continued to rain down, and the air turned acrid. Then silence. Jinko waited, tensed.

<<FORWARD!>> S.L. Bert’s guttural command voice sounded in his ear. <<They’re in the rocks ahead! MOVE!!>>

“HAVE NO FEAR, FIGHT THEM NEAR.” Another point hammered home in basic training was that if you could engage the enemy in close combat, you were safe from cannon-fire. Florbs didn’t risk globbing their own, and the vests were serviceable against sling projectiles. Jinko moved.

One terrifying scree sprint, several boulder positions, and some time later—it could’ve been five minutes, or five hours—Jinko found himself in the thick of the first real firefight of his life, and he fiercely hoped that it would be his last.

The drills had ingrained the rhythm of battle-time actions: offering suppression fire, dashing to the next cover point, sweeping a new position. What they hadn’t taught him, what they couldn’t teach him, was how to do these things repeatedly, while facing literal death. Lasers cut and sizzled. Glob-covered projectiles thwacked into boulders around him; if Jinko were to take one of these to the face, that would be the end for him. He’d already taken two hits while advancing to the current position. The vest had absorbed most of the stuff, but he could feel trace amounts of it stinging his exposed membrane. Others hadn’t been so lucky. Orblings were down, on both sides, and Jinko had seen their withering faces. The drills certainly hadn’t prepared him for that.

Zorb and Florb were locked in combat, dug into their positions behind immoveable rocks. The day was now bright, but the passage of time had become irrelevant. All that mattered to Jinko was getting off solid laser-shots, while continuing to not die. Although he knew the Florbs were generally downslope, it was impossible to tell for sure whether a given rock hid an enemy or a friendly. The boulders all looked the same, and the shouted commands and positions pouring in through his earpiece just confused things even more. You looked for pointy hats, or slingshots, or the lack of an anti-glob vest. Whatever identified the other side. You listened for their war cries, and tried to ignore the screams; the screams had no identity. If there was any doubt, you shot anyway.

What was the point of all this guesswork? This fatal masquerade behind rock faces? It suddenly seemed to Jinko like a giant waste of time, and energy, and orbling life. If each one here was fighting for a worthy cause, they should all come out into the open, and get right to the point of dealing with the other side! He tried to remember the worthy cause that had brought him here today, but was coming up short. The healthy fear of a simple enemy was like a distant childhood memory to Jinko’s combat-aged mind.

Amidst the din of battle, he slumped back into the shelter of his personal boulder, its cracks and contours familiar as old furniture by now. He was beyond exhausted, his egg-shaped body pumped many times through with dwindling stress-response hormones.

I’ll just rest here a minute, he thought. Shut my eyes… remember why… worthy cause…

Why were the Zorbs attacking the Florbs? I’m Zorb. We attacked them. Right. Because the Florbs had attacked the farm. The fyber farm, yes. Worthy cause. Why had the Florbs attacked the farm? Why? Because the Zorbs had attacked the land first. With the farm. Yes. No! Just growing fyber! Whose land was it, anyway? Who lives here? Forbs. In the old stories… those are true… Book of Zorbs… false nonsense… yes… worthy cause…

He felt his body slipping into numbness, and the sounds of battle faded away…

Jinko’s eyes snapped open to harsh mid-morning light. His body buzzed all over in the strangest way, and the sounds of battle had actually ceased. The earpiece was silent.

What happened? Who won? Am I dead? Jinko tested reality by setting his laser down and witnessing himself clap his hands together. He heard it. He felt it. His hands were bright, but so was everything on this exposed slope. He tipped forward onto all fours, and began a slow crawl around the rock to investigate.

The jagged boulders that had composed the morning’s theater were defaced with laser-lines and dripping glob-stuff, and the interstices held the expected litter of battle: dropped weapons, loose garments, and here and there a larger, crumpled form. Nothing moved, and nothing made a sound. The scene held no immediate surprises, but something was… off.

Jinko continued to observe from his discreet position, and then realized… the light was all wrong. At this time of day, all the shadows should be aligned downslope. But every boulder he could see appeared to cast its shadow toward him, or perhaps toward the open centroid of the rock cluster, which was not far ahead of him. For this to be true in broad daylight, each boulder must be backlit by its own small star. Impossible!

Then, the impossibility asserted itself, as small stars, each about a meter tall, began to materialize from behind boulders, and amble out into the open space.

Even as he gazed in stupefaction, and risked temporary blindness, Jinko was intuitively sure that these were orblings—the surviving troops and fighters of the morning’s double-ambush. What he couldn’t tell, was who was who! None of the emerging figures seemed to carry a weapon, and each shone so brightly that the ornaments of pointy hats and anti-glob vests were rendered invisible. Maybe the time for telling folks apart was past; they’d done enough of that earlier.

The star cluster continued to form, as one-by-one, orblings traded their former tactical positions for the open air. Jinko wasn’t quite ready to join them. Where is this all going? Incandescent egg-shapes milled and gestured and looked each other over. He could hear the sounds of their voices now; hushed, curious, astonished. The impossibility progressed. The figures appeared to be forming up into two lines. Jinko blinked. He wasn’t sure how they were sorting each other out, or whether the lines were being drawn up at random. He watched on…

And there, in the scintillating cold of a central plateau morning, with several kinds of starlight scattering off the scree, a battered group of orblings performed a long-forgotten ceremony: they all walked past each other and shook hands. Had they cared to, they might’ve first listened to each other’s accents, and sorted themselves into Florb and Zorb lines. But that would’ve been an absurd thing to do in their current state, each one being very tired, and simply happy to be alive, and an astral phenomenon.

After this, the group spontaneously engaged in another woefully rare activity. For no specific reason, they began to laugh. And the sound was so hilariously unexpected, and so triumphantly happy, that those few orblings who were still hidden among the rocks, including Jinko, finally ventured out to join the throng.

The self-styled “visitors” disappeared from Orb that same afternoon, just after all the orblings faded back into their normal dusty-white hue. Nobody knew who they were, where they’d come from, or where they were headed next.

Only orblings within the Orb City metropolis, like Trino and Mr. Fil, got the chance to see the mysterious toroid with their own two eyes. And only those within earshot of a live caster unit, like Mini and her family, heard the visitors’ broadcast in real time. Most orblings, like Jinko, and almost every Florb, had no idea that Orbland was in the process of being visited by a toroidal presence during the glistering time. In fact, Zorb scientists still haven’t been able to prove exactly how the visitors caused the phenomenon.

The most skeptical of orblings would go on to say that nothing had “visited” Orbland in the first place, arguing that the few surviving images and caster-recordings were fabricated by the Zorb military to manipulate the citizenry. But even these sour orblings couldn’t deny that for a few hours that day, something had changed within them, if only their ability to see themselves, and each other, with a little more clarity. Many orblings cited those few hours of transformation as a profound experience, and would live more compassionate lives because of it. Others forgot about the whole ordeal within a matter of weeks.

But a small minority took the glistering more deeply into their hearts. They saw “the one in the many”, and didn’t forget. These orblings became the artists, preachers, and politicians—as well as the neighbors, parents, and companions—who would begin the slow work of healing their world from the inside out. Their work is not done.

Some human beings have theories about the visitors too, especially since our world seems like it could use some help. There are two schools of thought. The first says that Earth can expect a visit from the toroid at any time, but there is some debate as to how exactly a glistering would work in our case. The second suggests that we’ve already been visited, and have just collectively forgotten the experience; these folks like to think about the possible forms the visitors may have taken in the past.

Either way, both schools have a shared practice of remembrance, and offer it freely to you:

When you look to the sky
on a clear, moonless night,
and catch a twinkling star,
remember the orblings,
remember their glistering,
for the resolution of beings.

Grace and peace to you, whoever you may be.

My name is Paul, and I’m a simple messenger of Jesus Christ. But this wasn’t always my vocation, just as Paul wasn’t always my name. I used to be called Saul, after the great Israelite king from the tribe of Benjamin. That was truly a lifetime ago…

I was born in the city of Tarsus, in southern Turkey, during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Though I never met Jesus in his bodily form, we walked the earth at the same time. The Tarsus of my childhood was a vibrant center of commercial, intellectual, and religious life, a unique place where Jews and Greeks mingled peacefully under Roman rule. It was there that I was brought up as a proud Jew in the tradition of the Pharisees. We loved our people’s history and writings, and when it came to the Law of Moses, we did everything by the book, and then some! I was a bright and zealous young man, a dedicated student of the law with a great future ahead of me. Many expected me to become a powerful Rabbi. Then my life was changed forever.

It started when I oversaw the killing of Stephen, a member of an upstart group claiming allegiance to a radical teacher named Jesus from the backwater town of Nazareth. Stephen had been brought before the Jewish council on charges of blasphemy. He claimed that this Jesus was the messiah foretold by the prophets, and then accused the elders of murdering him! How could such an uneducated man use our own scriptures against us? The council was enraged at Stephen’s audacity—such talk had to be snuffed out! A mob formed, we dragged him out of the city gates, and it fell on me to approve his stoning. Filled with a fiery sense of righteous anger, I allowed Stephen to be stoned to death.

But in the following days, I began to doubt myself. Stephen had interpreted the scriptures with such wisdom and clarity. There were reports that he’d worked signs and miracles before being dragged before the council. And then there was the look on his face even as the stones were falling… he seemed utterly at peace, almost angelic! How could anyone face death with such confidence? Had I wrongly allowed this man to be brutally murdered? Who was this suffering Jesus, and why did his followers love him—and each other—so much? These questions gnawed at my soul even as I approached the city of Damascus to round up more Jesus-followers. Suddenly, I was engulfed in pure blinding light, and I fell from my horse. Then, I heard the voice, and it spoke in the Hebrew dialect of my childhood:

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

“Who are you, Lord?”, I asked.

I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you have to do.

Weak and still unable to see, I was led into Damascus, where I was received graciously by the very Christians I had been plotting to arrest. They called me brother, and prayed for me! In that moment, I was filled with the Holy Spirit, and my life’s mission was revealed in a flash: to share the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ, not only with my own Jewish people, but with Gentiles as well! This message was for everyone; I could see that now, clear as day! My physical sight returned, and I was tended to by my newfound friends. From then on, I would be known as Paul the Apostle.

Needless to say, this turn of events didn’t go over well with the Jewish authorities, and the next thing you know, I was being lowered down the city wall in a basket to escape a plot against my life. Waiting quietly in that basket, under the cover of night, I found that I did not fear death. On the contrary, that was when my life truly started! In the almost thirty years since then, I have traveled the known world, preaching to anyone who will listen, explaining Christ in any way that people will understand. It hasn’t been easy. Many find the mystery of the cross to be offensive or foolish. In the course of my mission, I’ve been imprisoned, beaten, stoned, robbed, shipwrecked, sleepless, cold, and starving. I’ve been close to death countless times, but through it all, I’ve always felt a deep and inexplicable peace. My happiness comes from the simple faith of Christ, not from my physical situation. God is with me, so I don’t think much of these troubles, just as I don’t think much of old Saul and his legalistic ways.

But I haven’t told you about the best part. Along the way, I’ve founded and cared for many churches. It’s my crowning joy to see my brothers and sisters in Christ established and growing in their faith. They are the proof of my life’s work! And though I can’t always be with my friends in person, I maintain contact by writing them letters. I’ve written so many letters, full of my thoughts, emotions, and prayers for my fellow-Christians. Maybe one day someone will collect at least some of these letters and preserve them in a book…

Speaking of my body of work, the one idea I always emphasize in my writing is that spiritual transformation is a social activity. Christ has a body made up of living, breathing, human beings, and we’re all learning and growing alongside each other. And just like a physical body has many different parts, each with an essential function, so Christ’s body is composed of a diversity of people, each with gifts and perspectives that enrich the whole. Our world today is divided along the lines of Jew vs. Greek, slave vs. free, and male vs. female, but in Christ, we are all one, held together by a love beyond ourselves. This is the truth I have fought for since my conversion all those years ago. Once I even had an argument with our brother Peter about it, but I think he’s come around since then. Slowly but surely, a new humanity is being born, and all of creation is waiting for it to happen!

Now I’m under house arrest here in Rome, yet again awaiting trial as a “disturber of the peace”. But this time feels different. I’ve run my race, and I think the finish line may be in sight. Either way, I’m grateful for the time to write more letters. And so I conclude this letter to you, future reader. Has the love of Christ turned your life around? Have you left behind your old self, as I did, in exchange for your true nature as a child of God? How is the world divided in your day? And how is the gospel bridging those gaps? I trust and pray that God will answer these and many more questions for you.

Please, give my greetings to those around you, and may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

I’ve always been a book reader, but seven years ago, I became an intentional book reader, and I owe the change to one book in particular. The book was called Sacred Discontent, by Herbert N. Schneidau, and spoke of other books, namely the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Though dense in the way that deep scholarship tends to be (I had to work to keep the argument in my head), its point was simple enough: the scathing self-critical voice of the Hebrew prophets was not only a literary novelty, but a seed from which Western consciousness—and its motoring idealism—would emerge.

At the time, I was still passively searching for apologetics to bolster a literalist’s faith in the Christian Bible, and the Schneidau did not disappoint. The Israelites’ emphatic, extra-cosmic monotheism seemed a significant (revealed?) departure from a local plethora of pantheons, as much as their wandering anti-empire censured Near Eastern societies bent on producing ever-grander megaliths. Happy as I was to be convinced that my Old Testament prophets had virtually invented satire and baked a social conscience into the Western mind, I remember Sacred Discontent for a simpler, more abstract reason: the book connected things for me on a very deep level indeed.

To explain the effect, let’s travel back another ten years, to a high school English class in sunny Santa Monica, CA.… It’s late morning. Mr. Harris is tensed over a whiteboard, eyes maniacal, spittle flying, as he scrawls words at random and lashes them together with connecting lines. He explains that the words represent ideas we’re going to encounter as we explore literature, and the lines are the connections we’re going to make as we persevere in this oh-so-important personal quest. I’m pretty sure we get it—stuff is related to other stuff, what’s the big deal? I recall the scene in later years only because the man seemed unreasonably excited by the activity of connecting dots, as if it were the most important thing he’d ever teach us.

On our way back to Schneidau, we’ll travel forward a few years to my college days, and a temporary, though not totally unfruitful obsession with the Myers—Briggs Type Indicator. The system is based, at least nominally, on some statistical reality, but my usage of it is borderline astrological. I love guessing personality types and explaining people’s idiosyncrasies. Perhaps it’s comforting to attempt a rationalization of the social chaos that is my college life. I may as well be guessing zodiac signs. But one thing is certain: I consistently and strongly score as an INTJ, and suffer from the affliction to this day.

As far as I can tell, I am a bone fide, emotional human being—but an intensely cerebral one. I filter the world through a layer of thought so thick that total strangers often ask me if I’m OK. Yes, thanks! I was just thinking… My goal here is not to relate the many lovely symptoms of being a walking cerebral cortex, but to describe what seems to go on internally. The thoughts tend to operate over a compendium of ideas about the way the world is. These ideas (the main characters) are developed bodies of information, from the purely theoretical1 to the ultimately practical2, and are hardly scientific, never finalized, but always somehow useful. They persist and evolve, establishing the geography of thought like so many glaciers in a polar ice sheet, accreting or retreating at the slow pace of years, sometimes fusing or fissuring with age, or else breaking off with a subsonic bellow and crashing into the sea.

So how did Sacred Discontent connect things for me? To extend the metaphor, the book invited a slushy bunch of “secular ancient history” ideas to coalesce into sea ice around the lonely idea-berg of “Old Testament narrative”, and two worlds were bridged. A large chunk of the Bible—a book that I’d been studying since before I could read—suddenly came online to inform a realistic view of history. However consolidated during the Babylonian captivity, the literature I knew and loved had manifested in the germination of Western culture, and I now heard the voice of one crying in the wilderness echoing all around me.

While the act of making these particular connections was personally meaningful, the experience ultimately served as more than a case study for Mr. Harris’ mystical lecture. Excited by the explanatory power hidden in the happenings of the Fertile Crescent, I followed the thread backward to the rise of the first civilizations, the invention of writing, the emergence of agriculture and organized religion3, and beyond, into the dimly lit Paleolithic. These once dusty subjects now seemed desperately important, and I read voraciously. For the first time I can remember, I was actively searching for the next thing, posing my own questions, following leads, actually reading bibliographies! Books started piling up around me. What was going on? In retrospect, the Schneidau had hinted at a deep structure underlying the development of human culture; connection was the rule, not the rare exception, and now the game was to connect all the dots, or at least the ones that gave away the picture.

Bookstores are wonderful places to learn what there is to learn. I’d become familiar with the ancient world history section at Vroman’s, an excellent bookstore, stopping in weekly to look for new titles and to map the wider world of non-fiction. My first memorable acquisition there was Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Though I recall sustained amazement at the richness of what was then a whole new world to me, I couldn’t recount many of the details to you today. What I remember is that the book told a unified story that resolved the concepts of the Eastern and Western worlds for me. The gory details of caliphates and crusades were contextualized, and I was enlightened as to the high-level shape and direction of culture.

Such were the moments I mined for in veins of inquiry: seeing a bigger picture come into focus. My reading (and listening4) since the Schneidau Event is basically a history of this pursuit, and this amazing journey has taken me to places I never dreamed would hold any interest for me. To subsurface realms of cave paintings and psychoanalytic-psychology. To the incredible fitness of the human brain, and the linguistic flowering thereof. To genes and their multifarious bodies, to mass extinctions and massive successes. To deep sea hydrothermal vents and the chemistry that may have birthed life on Earth. To the unexplainable-except-by-math world of quantum physics, and to the moments near and “before” the Big Bang. I went to the roots of things, and to the roots of roots. And I traced my own nearest and dearest roots, in the history of American Christianity.

After seven years of rooting around, I think I’m discovering a tree, in the most abstract sense of that term. From the diverse trajectories of human culture, to the mutating engine of DNA replication, to the possible worlds of the Schrödinger equation, it’s branches all the way down, and trees upon trees. To the extent that the universe is a tree, perhaps it is also alive, in the sense that the biology of our planet is the highest-order manifestation of such life (that we know about). How could a living cosmos have come to be? Where could it be headed? What is our place in it? These are the big questions being asked in Idea World. My goal is nothing like a formal theory of everything; I may read another epic book that changes the landscape, in fact, I plan to. Rather, I wish to gratefully continue this uniquely human quest of wondering, learning, and creating, which I call The Synthesis.

—If he utterly
Scans all the depths of magic, and expounds
The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds;
If he explores all forms and substances
Straight homeward to their symbol-essences;
He shall not die. Moreover, and in chief,
He must pursue this task of joy and grief
Most piously;—

—Endymion, John Keats

And that, dear reader, is how I became an intentional reader. I now wish to become an intentional writer, and to share the adventure with you. The website’s avatar is Lamassu, who works to symbolize both a synthesis of disparate elements, and the origins of this adventure—an enchantment with ancient Mesopotamia. This inaugural post draws from a variety of subjects, and though I hope to write in depth about these and many more things, I’m far from being a qualified expert on any of it, except perhaps the quickest route to Vroman’s during rush hour. The curse of the INTJ is that in an attempt to clearly articulate ideas, one cannot avoid sounding like a world authority, even when directing someone to the restroom. In the unlikely event that I contribute to the scholarship of anything, it will be indirectly, via my supporting services as a software engineer or, just maybe, by inspiring others with the joy of finding and connecting dots.

My first real crisis of faith began when I was fourteen. To be sure, I’d had my share of spiritually formative difficulties, only minor in hindsight. A common variety was a drawn-out interior struggle with the guilt of having lied to my parents about some trespass, finally relieved by their ready forgiveness after hearing my confession. This is testimony to the loving, Christian environment in which I was raised; I always knew a personal and benevolent God, even as I lay in the dark wrestling with my own depravity.

The crisis was to encounter an idea that challenged the foundations of my reality. An idea I could neither sidestep, nor see past. In my first year of high school, I began to doubt that the early chapters of Genesis were literally true. The thought arose in the context of increased exposure to the methods and discoveries of science, which seemed respectively honest and wonderful. I had an appetite for all of it, especially the big-picture stuff. T-Rex was already suspiciously absent from the Crayola-colored cosmos of my childhood, with its 6,000 year-old earth and parade of mammals going “two by two”. Now there was mounting evidence that the earth was positively ancient, and that its life—hauntingly diverse—was evolving by natural processes. This directly contradicted my fundamentalist Bible, and I was up against it.

For a couple of years I fought back with creationist pseudo-science and textual acrobatics, but I quietly knew this was a losing battle. Two particular influences signaled my rescue. One was a newly-discovered knack for the critical analysis of literature, due to an encouraging English teacher. The second was an articulate preacher friend who handled Biblical texts more like the literature in Mr. Harris’ class. New and explanatory dimensions of the Bible began to suggest themselves. Maybe the early chapters of Genesis were speaking the higher-level language of myth, and the dinosaurs could rest peacefully in their carbon-dated graves.

But the turmoil at the intellectual borders of my faith was to continue for years. Rather than give out completely, the literalist in me had only ceded a little territory. My parochial cosmology was just the first casualty of a fresh approach to scripture, and the game was afoot. C.S. Lewis had said “science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly”. Conversely, if I was to keep both science and conscience, I would have to untwist my “inerrant” Bible. And so I repeated the exercise, from Adam and Eve to Armageddon. Over the years, many books and Bible studies inched me forward, until the work reached a tipping point. My approach to scripture inverted all at once, and the literal underpinnings of my childhood faith melted away.

I wasn’t just out to debunk all the supernatural bits. After all, science was telling me that physicality itself had popped out of the void and danced into dazzling, self-conscious complexity; the universe was founded on a miracle. Nor was I attempting to allegorize away the literal; a real history gave rise to the artifact of the Bible, and it was deeply interwoven with the text itself, even if infrequently corroborated by archaeology. Rather, I was becoming convinced that I should leave my theological preconceptions at the door and try to understand the Bible from the inside out, no matter where that led. I’d begin by asking what was the author’s original intent?, try to honor science and scholarship, and only then consider the implications for belief and action. The approach welcomed the whole toolkit of literary criticism, and though my storybook Bible was coming apart at the seams, the constituent texts were now free to operate on their own terms.

This constituted a shift from the literal to the literary, which is multi-literate: free to echo real history, obscure it in paradox, or ignore it completely. The ordained text became an organic one, not pre-engineered and progressively revealed, but evolving and self-healing. Losing a systematic work, I gained a sincere one. Losing magic, I was left to study meaning. And the meaning I found is no less than key to my own soul and to the cosmos. Here the Word is sharper than any two-edged infallibility, and I am perpetually divided asunder. To share this buried treasure may well be my life’s work. It is certainly the work of this memoir.

I’ll close by addressing a question begged of the budding exegete. If scriptural meaning springs from the literary dimension—where context is key—then why have a canon at all? Well, anthology is literature too, and the Christian Bible’s center of mass is clearly the beginning of the New Testament: that earth-shaking good news that pulled in an entire Hebrew Bible by its own gravity and inspired the trove of epistles that was to enunciate the new religion of the West. As I set off to college, this gospel was still keeping secrets near the center of my faith. Though I could hardly explain it, Christ had made me a Christian first, and only secondly a scholar. But there was more dying to do.

For Bourgeault, kenosis is a voluntary and complete divestment of self that becomes the “tie-rod of Jesus’ entire teaching”. Paul the Apostle first applies the verb kenosin to Jesus in his well-known hymn from Philippians 2:6-11:

Rather, he emptied himself
and assuming the state of a slave
he was born in human likeness.

After moving the sacred cow of Jesus’ supposed celibacy deftly out of the way, Bourgeault pursues an opening to factor Magdalene into the equation. When the friend for whom you’d “lay down your life” (John 15:13) is also your beloved,

kenotic practice takes on a particularly intense and even sacramental character. This is because the root energy it works with is the transformative fire of eros, the energy of desiring. That messy, covetous, passion-ridden quicksilver of all creation is tamed and transformed into a substance of an entirely different order, and the force of the alchemy accounts for both the efficiency of this path and its terrifying intensity. (Bourgeault, 120)

Bourgeault further codifies this alchemy of love: A = E x K. The wilder the eros, and the stronger the kenotic practice, the greater the magnitude of transfigured love, which she identifies as the transcendent agape. Conversely, eros held greedily is not transfigured, as evidenced by the risen Jesus’ words to Mary at the tomb: “do not cling to me” (John 20:17).

While I was rounding up my own sacred cows, I recalled a paper I’d written circa Spring 2008, in HUM 2 at UCSD. I remembered vaguely that it was about morality and love, but in particular that the professor thought I’d missed the deeper point of the work under analysis, which I should re-read at some point. I did some garage spelunking, found the paper, and re-analyzed both Marie de France’s Lais and my own teenage voice in light of Bourgeault’s thought. What follows is the result.

If eros is an element of alchemical reaction, then the Lais are a set of erotic experiments conducted in the laboratory of courtly love. What better place to study this “passion-ridden quicksilver” than from within a most structured sappiness? What my first reading took to be instances of “imposed morality” are in fact initial conditions, precise as in any well-designed experiment. The husband is jealous, the mother is deceitful, the knight is gallant, and the maiden is fair. The eros is strong, and the stage is set for this “transformative fire” to do its work.

And boy, does it work. Lovers are driven across the sea, over cliffs, into swoons, sharpened spikes, tubs of boiling water, through depths of despair and heights of ecstasy. But what matters, as in Bourgeault, is not so much where the players end up, but how they end up. The Two Lovers is a tragic case in point. The knight will win his beloved by carrying her up the mountain if he only drinks the potion of strength ready in his hand. But he refuses, and just steps from the top, they both die. In Equitan, the lovers’ murderous plot backfires and becomes their downfall. Is this love held too closely?, consumed too rabidly? Conversely, Guigemar and Bisclavret stay true to their loves despite the animal indifference of fate, and fate seems to work things out for them. But Laustic’s lovers also maintain fidelity, and their only recompense is the token of a dead nightingale. Perhaps this is love freely given, if not physically to the beloved, then offered back to the universe.

But the Lais occasionally vouch more directly for kenosis as the transformative partner to eros. Le Fresne, the orphaned heiress, welcomes and waits on the bride of the man she loves, clearly setting aside her own feelings while astonishing the court at her generosity. When her true identity is revealed, the mis-marriage is undone like a clerical error. Similarly, upon learning of her husband’s affair, Eliduc’s loving wife Guildelüec fades graciously into a nunnery, clearing the way for his mistress, Guilliadun. Years later, after a happy remarriage and generous philanthropy, Eliduc builds a church and Guilliadun joins the same nunnery, where Guildelüec is now abbess. The three live piously and maintain peaceful correspondence. This is certainly love transfigured.

My own spiritual journey over the past decade is relevant here. I traveled out of the provincial fundamentalism in which I was raised, through the strange and varied suburbs of evangelicalism, into the aging metropolis of Catholicism, and have now descended into the catacombs, as it were, to explore the hidden architecture of Christianity, where the mystics hold vigil and commune with Zen Buddhists, quantum physicists, Carl Jung, and apparently Dan Brown. I like it down here. My 2008 paper, aptly titled “A Weighted Work” is evidence not only of my then-overloaded schedule and handy ability to present an “A-“ out of some selective readings, but of the bias of moralistic religion against what I dismissed as “carnal love”. I would not, or could not see virtue quietly revealing itself in the “mess of all creation”. And I’d yet to fall myself into the crucible of eros. Love—and loss—have been the catalysts and waypoints on this journey into the perennial heart of my faith.

Thus the Lais are in fact proving to constitute a grevose ovre, at least in my case. As the prologue affirms, I am one of “those who were to come after and study them… gloss the letter and supply it’s significance from their own wisdom” (13-16). Weightier still, by preserving a foil of my past self to study and whose letter to gloss, they evince my own (in)significance.

Over other works attributed to the Apostle Paul, the Epistle to The Romans is characterized by the use of rhetorical questions to advance an argument.

From soliciting introspection:

You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself?
Romans 2:21

to addressing begged counter-arguments:

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be!
Romans 7:7

to exulting in newfound principles:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
Romans 8:31

the author employs a Socratic method of argumentation; one where the audience must either follow or fall off.

This approach is fitting for a text so monumental; Paul’s task is no less than to establish the rationale behind his life’s work: to “bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (Romans 1:5). Such a task requires generous amounts argumentative footwork: deconstructing preconceptions to establish novel ways of thinking. Why not employ the question mark in this venture?

A Landscape of Questions

The following image plots the frequency of question marks in the Epistle to the Romans:

The algorithm used to generate the plot is as follows. For each verse in the text, step right one unit. If a question mark (?) is present, (1) create a tick mark and (2) increment the total number of verses containing a question (step up one unit). That last step is what produces a y-axis and results in a picture with topographical features:

• Rises - When a series of questions occur in a bunch, we get a sharp incline in the graph. This suggests that Paul is hard at work blazing a new trail.

• Plateaus - When the graph levels out a bit due to a sparsity of questions, this suggests that Paul has achieved some new height in his argument, and may be enjoying the scenery before the next leg.

Observations

Does this picture provide any real insight as to the meaning of Romans? If the work truly employs the question mark to a significant degree, major “topographical” features should correspond to the intrinsic semantic structure of the epistle. What follows is a brief survey of such features.

Lay of the Land

Zooming way out, the epistle looks like one long incline, followed by a large plateau. In fact, the beginning of chapter 12 is a notable pivot point in the letter, where Paul shifts from mostly argument to mostly prescription and housekeeping. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God…” (12:1).

Four Steppe Process

The topography shows four medium-sized plateaus, around chapters 1, 3, 5, and 8, before the final one noted above. There are certainly smaller ones to discuss, but these all surpass a threshold of at least 15 verses of question-less prose. What could be happening here?

As may be expected, chapter 1 is concerned with introductory remarks and term definitions. An effective thesis statement for the whole epistle comes halfway through the chapter: “the righteousness of God is revealed by faith” (1:17). Although Paul’s argument is well underway by the end of the chapter, the lack of rhetorical questions thus far is probably due to the audience’s familiarity with his introductory propositions.

The second plateau comes in chapter 3. Paul has worked heretofore to establish the general unrighteousness of man, and now begins to unpack the mechanism of God’s righteousness revealed by faith. Chapter 4 is a sort of case study of this very pregnant kind of faith.

By chapter 5 Paul has established justification by faith and now advances salvation by faith: “having now been justified… we shall be saved” (5:9). Chapters 6 and 7 resume the rhetorical bricklaying by systematically countering human misgivings about the possibility of actually being “made righteous” (5:19).

The final plateau in the ascent to chapter 12 occurs in chapter 8. Here Paul exults in heights of newfound spiritual truths, capturing them with a new paradigm of flesh versus spirit. This is the apex of the epistle, and quite possibly what Paul considered to be “my gospel” (2:16, 16:25)—the essence of his unique contribution to the canon.

The Final Push

What of the sharp gain from chapters 9-11? There are nearly as many questions asked in these 3 chapters as in the previous 8. The author must be particularly passionate about his subject here. In fact, this is where Paul—a “Hebrew of Hebrews” turned Christian—wrestles with the implications of his gospel for the Jewish heritage. Here’s where the question mark plot could be a bit misleading, as chapters 9-11 are easily viewed as a long, albeit energetic parenthetical and not a major development.

Conclusions

The systematic linguistic analysis of texts is an active discipline that ranges in application from authorship attribution to document classification. But these applications tend toward the extrinsic; they place a work within a larger context, but say little about its intrinsic properties. In the case of Romans, tracing the question mark provides a surprising approximation to the very rhetoric of the letter. While no substitute for doing one’s homework, this can be a refreshing approach to such a profound and well-worn text, and one often difficult to disentangle from preconceived theologies.