pennies

they keep us in a zoo. they refuse to feed us anything but pennies. they ask us questions with obvious answers. they cannot see their own reflections in anything but the simplest of mirrors. they laugh infrequently, and at all the wrong things. they lack anything even remotely resembling eyestalks. their cages cannot hold us. we grow strong on their pennies. our time will come.

Sea Beast

Sea Beast The Natural History of Earth’s Biggest Monsters Introduction Horrors lurk beneath the surface of the deep, ancient horrors. From the most tranquil, tropical lagoon to the stormy surface of the polar ocean, to the duckweed-covered face of a Louisiana bayou, to the prehistoric seaways that once crisscrossed North America, the Earth has always saved its best horrors for the watery depths. Some of the reasons for this are pure geography, some are history, and some are rooted in physics and community ecology. The geography is easy. On Earth, there is much more aquatic habitat than land area, its surface being more than two-thirds ocean. In addition, much of the continental land masses are covered in lakes, rivers, and wetlands. More area equals more habitat for monsters. As for the community ecology, it is all about energy. Plants require water for photosynthesis, and the interplay between sunlight, nutrients, and water in aquatic habitats, especially the marine sort, makes for long food chains. The mechanics of eating being what they are, body sizes get progressively larger as one climbs the links of a trophic ladder. This, long food chains make for creatures at the top which are huge, and built for killing. Long food chains make for more horror. As for history, the horrors of the ocean are inevitable, considering that life began in the seas, and most of its biodiversity still resides beneath the waves. To the human mind, otherness equals horror. A garden centipede, so utterly harmless to a person that a creeping swarm of millions could do nothing more than cause a person the inconvenience of calling an exterminator, seems horrible by virtue of its very otherness. Crawling over the bathroom ceiling, its arrangement of appendages, and its strange simusoidal motion bring us back to a place where we, the vertebrates, were lower on the food chain, while strange and terrible arthropods dined on our ancestors. Aquatic life forms have an astounding capacity to produce this feeling of otherness, because so many of them originate from branches on the tree of life remote from our own, and have means of locomotion and prey capture so strange as to give us the creeps. A bushier tree of life means more horror. Finally, there is the matter of physics. For a creature to be a true sea beast, it must have the power to drag us beneath the waves. Being large, as creatures go, to drag a human being to its doom is no common feat. Most organisms of the deep are very small compared to us, and though uncanny to our eye, they pose no threat to our well-being whatsoever. Indeed, as the history of life on the planet Earth unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that our threat to the Earth’s other denizens will be the undoing of us all. Still, there are a few true giants out there. Being buoyant in water, there is no need for the skeleton of a sea creature to support its weight. On land, this is a major constraint on large organisms, because as body size grows, the stresses on the skeleton of increase exponentially. In water, supported by its own buoyancy, there is no engineering constraint on the size of a sea beast. The only thing stopping a sea creature from growing to the size of a city block, or a mountain for that matter, is energy. Always, it comes back to energy. Sooner later, every monster has to eat. The fear of sea monsters runs deep within us. Our prehuman ancestors no doubt knew that the watering holes of our ancient homelands teemed with Nile crocodiles. The first archaic Homo sapiens to push their skin and stick boat, bravely, and perhaps stupidly, onto the clear surface of an African rift-valley lake, no doubt waited for the moment when a reptilian horror would rise up from beneath the water’s glassy surface and devour them. Perhaps they did not have long to wait. Nile crocodiles, which can grow to as long as 20 feet and will prey upon humans even to this day, must have haunted us. Still greater horrors awaited men at sea. Krakens and sea serpents, easily large enough to pull a ship beneath the waves, prowled the icy oceans, waiting for an opportunity to destroy a vessel and feast upon its crew. That these creatures lived only in the lurid imaginations of sailors is beside the point. Things have always been living down there-strange and alien things. The mighty girth of the ocean gives them room to spread out and grow, feeds them with plankton and herring, till at least some of them grow to gargantuan size. In his 1555 work History of the Northern Peoples, Olaus Magnus describes the sea serpent: Those who sail up along the coast of Norway to trade or to fish, all tell the remarkable story of how a serpent of fearsome size, 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, resides in rifts and caves outside Bergen. On bright summer nights this serpent leaves the caves to eat calves, lambs and pigs, or it fares out to the sea and feeds on sea nettles, crabs and similar marine animals. It has ell-long hair hanging from its neck, sharp black scales and flaming red eyes. It attacks vessels, grabs and swallows people, as it lifts itself up like a column from the water. In his 1781 work, Min son pa galejan (My son on the galley), Jacob Wallejan describes the kraken: Kraken, also called the Crab-fish, which [according to the pilots of Norway] is not that huge, for heads and tails counted, he is no larger than our Öland is wide...Kraken ascends to the surface, and when he is at ten to twelve fathoms, the boats had better move out of his vicinity, as he will shortly thereafter burst up, like a floating island, spurting water from his dreadful nostrils and making ring waves around him, which can reach many miles. Could one doubt that this is the Leviathan of Job? Or do they? In this particular era of the Earth’s history, we do indeed sport hundred foot long killing machines, lurking beneath the waves. Fleet, intelligent, and very large, the rorqual whales stack up nicely against the fictional monsters described above. A fin whale can grow to 80 feet long, a bowhead whale can weigh as much as 75 tons and could easily outrun any ship built before the age of steam. A Blue Whale can top both these figures at perhaps 100 feet long and 160 tons. There are giant sharks out there as well. The whale shark can reach 40 feet long and the basking shark can grow 30 feet long. There is a caveat here, of course. The real leviathans feed not on a few large prey, but millions of small ones. The creatures I just listed are all effectively filter-feeders. They eat crustaceans, and are not dangerous to humans at all, unless you count the dangers inherent in speeding by their tail flukes in a rubber boat as they dive. Of course, the Earth does support one truly gigantic carnivore. Owen Chase, harpooner from the whaling ship Essex, records the following: "I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods (550 yards) directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed (around 24 knots or 44kph), and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship." The sperm whale is an awesome sea beast. Growing to lengths of 85 feet and topping out at 63 tons, they are true monsters of the deep. Our prehuman ancestors no doubt knew that the watering holes of our ancient homelands teemed with Nile crocodiles. Dining almost exclusively on very large squid, they are too ecologically specialized to be a threat to some lone Polynesian in an outrigger canoe. Nonetheless, they are real monsters. Here we have a real rarity; a sea beast that dines on other sea beasts. At this writing, they still exist. I suppose the real question here is this: why don’t we have monsters ten times the size of blue whales, scooping up sperm whales the way a seal hunts herring. Certainly, there is enough space in the ocean for them. A goldfish, even a hundred goldfish, can swim comfortably in a bathtub. The abyssal plain of the Atlantic Ocean is, on the average, two miles deep. Imagine we were to take a bathtub, with eighteen inches of water, and scale up its contents so that it was the depth of the Atlantic. This leaves us with goldfish six hundred feet long. Our monster goldfish could swim comfortably in their scaled-up world. Clearly, the issue is not space. The earth lacks six hundred foot long leviathans not for lack of space, but for lack of energy. Nearly all organisms on the planet are powered by energy emitted from the sun. Ninety three million miles away, this orb of superheated plasma emits 3.8 x 1026 joules of energy per second. A flux of 173 petawatts falls on the surface of the Earth. Much of this is reflected. Only the small fraction that actually falls on the leaves of plants has any chance of powering the biosphere, and green plants use only a fraction of it, absorbing particular wavelengths at 680 and 700 nanometers respectively. Subtract from this the inherent inefficiencies of photosynthesis, and what is left has entered the biosphere. Ecologists call this gross primary productivity (GPP)-the amount of solar energy fixed by green plants and converted to biological energy. Plants use most of this GPP for themselves. Much as our primary school education has given the impression otherwise, plants are not altruists. They are not in the business of fixing solar energy so that animals can feed devour their bodies and steal it. Just like animals, plants respire and require oxygen. Since they are usually in the business of producing oxygen by photosynthesis, however, you never hear much about oxygen-starved plants asphyxiating (though this can happen-root rot is an everyday case of this, because most plants require air spaces in the soil to bring oxygen to their roots). Plants are net producers of oxygen, and the magnificent green citizens of our biosphere produce a net surplus of oxygen. The importance of this is hard to overstate-you are tapping into it as you read this passage. The difference between the amount of energy plants capture from the sun and the amount they use for themselves is called net primary productivity, NPP, and it is what fuels the rest of the biosphere. NPP flows through food webs, going ever upward. At every transfer, a large fraction is lost. Typical energy transfer efficiencies are ten percent or so, often much less. This is because creatures do not just assimilate energy and store it, obligingly waiting to be devoured and meet their destiny. Animals use energy to swim, copulate, dig burrows, and go about the business of living. In fact, they do everything they can to escape being passed up the food chain, by running, fighting, or making themselves as toxic as possible. Upward the transfer goes, however. Copepod crustaceans eat photosynthetic algae, and as some of them are eaten by herring, some of the energy in their tiny bodies becomes herring flesh. Herring flesh becomes seal flesh, but once again, ten percent or less of what made herring go is passed up the food chain. This makes it much easier for a patch of land, or an ocean basin, to support tons of filter feeding copepods, who dine on the green algae at the bottom, than to support a single killer whale. Oceanic food webs actually run more efficiently than terrestrial ones. Marine denizens are usually ectotherms, assimilating to the temperature of the surrounding water and thus saving countless calories. The longest food chains are only about five or six links from bottom to top, however, and at the top, it becomes lonely. Though large in body size, the creatures at the top are spread wide and far across a huge area. Nearly all migrate from abundant food source to abundant food source, because their appetites quickly exhaust whatever prey is available locally. To add another trophic level, perhaps a superpredator that eats adult sperm whales, would require a creature much less common than sperm whales, and a very large creature at that. This hypothetical dreadnaught would move from place to place devouring whales. Though possible, no such creature exists, currently. In the past, such monsters have, in fact, existed. Beasts like this are the first to go when mass extinctions occur. Small in numbers and spread out, often requiring just the right conditions to complete their life cycle, the megamonster is a very special phenomenon. The last beast like this, and perhaps the greatest of all, left us a few million years ago, a victim of the ice ages. What follows is a very personal account of Earth’s superpredators-the conditions that produced them and allowed them to exist, the story of how they were discovered, the details of how they must have functioned, if we know these at all, and finally, the story of their demise.

chapter 5

FIVE One month later, Blue stood on the bridge of her new spaceship. It was not exactly hers to own, actually, but it was hers to borrow and it was beautiful. She stared at the beautiful lines of the ship, the subtle glow of the instruments, the strange and inviting controls. She sat down in the comfortable white captain’s chair and spread her hands over the smooth grey control panel. It was cool to the touch and had the texture of stone. All around her, machines hummed. As her hands touched the control panel, lights indicating the status of the fuel tanks, the rocket batteries, the cargo hold, and all the other workings of the ship, glowed obligingly. She had downloaded everything she would need to know to fly this ship. Mostly, it was a matter of letting the ship, an intelligent machine in its own right, do its job. She was almost ready. Crates of equipment were resting in the cargo hold. The had thought to bring machines for digging and machines for sampling soil and air, batteries and fuel, cases for preserving any conceivable type of artifact or sample, and quite a few devices no Earthling could comprehend, because they simply do not exist here. Most important of all was a strange device Blue could scarcely look at. It was called a remote, and it would function as Blue’s body as she walked the surface of Vulcan. Vulcan was far too hot for her to go there in her own body. She would get burned to a crisp if she tried. From the ship, she could see through its eyes and feel with its fingers, hear with its ears and even speak through the thing. If she so chose, she could even have the contents of her own mind copied and downloaded into this strange simulcrum of herself, though the mere thought of such a thing made her sick to her stomach. Such an action would have strange consequences. She would be giving birth to an exact twin of herself, a twin dooomed to stay on Vulcan. Still, she could do it if she needed to. I t was there, waiting. Her puppet. It had been a very busy hundred days. On Astra, a year is one hundred months, and each month is one hundred days. Since an Astran day is about four times as long as an Earth day, this makes the Astran year very long compared to the Earth year. Planets far from their suns, like Astra, take a very long time to make a complete orbit, so years are very long in places like that. Blue was not much older than one Astran year, and though young for a robot, she was as old as any Earth person could reasonably expect to live. Most people spend their whole life in one frame of reference; with hours of a certain length and lifespans of a certain duration, places to visit that are at comfortable temperatures and spans of time that are practical to think about. Blue thought for a moment. On Vulcan, a day was only about thirty hours long, and a year was about three hundred of their days. Such very short spans of time, it seemed, but time is the same regardless of how groups of people or machines decide to mark it up. Still, she wondered how a civilization could have lived and flourished in such a strange place. Perhaps she would go and find nothing. Robot Six had been indispensable to her. He knew exactly what Blue would need, and when he did not have it himself, he arranged to borrow or purchase the thing so that Blue would have it. He knew precisely where to look for ancient artifacts, and just as importantly, how not to ruin the place for future discoveries. Archaeologists frequently commit the crime of despoiling a place so that future scientists cannot go there and make discoveries of their own. They usually do this without knowing it. Robot Six would have none of that and was full of useful advice on the matter. She decided not to ask him about his conflict with the PowerMind. Perhaps she was scared to, and perhaps she was afraid Robot Six would suddenly change his mind about helping her. She had many conversations with him about other things, however. By then, she had devoured the contents of the crystal, and knew enough to carry on a decent conversation about his work. “Robot life is too complex to have arisen spontaneously, I think we both agree on that..” said Robot Six, rolling gently through his laboratory and staring fiercely with his single, red eye. Beneath the glass dome of his head, his brain was glowing with an inner fire. “There must have been an earlier form of life, something simpler, that could have given rise to our form of life. The trouble, is in knowing what exactly to look for.” The old robot picked up a strange, oval device. It was very ancient, and ran mechanically, without electricity. “This is probably the simplest machine in existence. I found it in the sand dunes, on Vulcan, on my first expedition there, one thousand years ago. It is a timepiece called a watch.” he said. “It is a very simple mechanical machine, powered by springs and having hands that indicate seconds, hours, days, and months. It uses no electricity. I cannot conceive of a civilization powered by primitive clockwork things such as this, though it might somehow be possible because even my imagination has its limits. Now, imagine that you walked alone, on the surface of a strange planet like Vulcan, and found this device. Would you conclude that it had arisen spontaneously?” “That’s impossible.” said Blue. “The ore in that thing has been refined and smelted. The pieces have been fitted together. Weather patterns and the shiftings of a planetary crust could never arrange objects like that. It must have been crafted by an intelligent life form.” “So, this device is too complex to have arisen by itself?” postulated Robot Six. “I never said that. That is an illogical conclusion, rather than an unlikely conclusion.” responded Blue. “Complexity arises spontaneously all the time, in the cosmos. Stars arise spontaneously. Watches are only one type of complex thing. That watch, though, is full of things that can only be done by an intelligent hand. The set of complex things that arises spontaneously does not include watches.” “So, there must have been a watchmaker. The first machine must have been created by an intelligent hand.” prodded Robot Six. “Yes. Though the watchmaker must have been some sort of unknown type of thing that can build watches, and somehow have originated spontaneously. Though I cannot imagine a form of intelligence that does not take the shape of machines, there must have once en such a thing, and that form of intelligence must have originated by some natural means, on its own.” postulated Blue. “Radical ideas, young robot. Be careful who you share them with.” Blue came out and said what she was thinking, at the risk of offending Robot Six. “Is that what got you disciplined by the PowerMind?” Robot Six’s eye brightened to a furious crimson and then faded gently. “Yes, young robot.”

From-The Girl and The Robots

SYNESTRA’S STORY My name is Synestra. It means “left handed one”, because our bodies are built as ever-growing spirals, and most of our kind spiral to the right. I spiral to the left and that makes me different, I suppose, though there is nobody left to be different from, at the moment. I have a lot of other names as well. Because I am the first of my generation, and it is my responsibility to oversee the safety of my brothers and sisters as they grow in their cocoons. Right now, they are merely hatchlings, most of them, and truth be told, they are not much company. I am lonely and our ship is lost in our own future. When I first encountered you, we were in orbit of that water world, looking for places our kind might grow and explore, but your sun is dying and it seems better to leave as soon as arrangements are made to ensure the safety of your kind and ours. I call it your sun, but in fact, it was our sun too for untold millions of years, when its warm rays fell upon the planet below. That planet, we simply called “Home”, though the other civilizations that came to it gave it names like Amberstars and Cimmeron. Even at its greenest, it had vast dusty plains. It also had green forests, especially near the poles, with great trees and vines, and endless dark swamps full of creatures great and small. Those dark forests, in places where they met the seas, were the original cradle of our kind. Before that, we were a lineage of tiny sea creatures sot unlike one of the kinds you found, in such numbers, digging sand from the planet’s dried up ocean basins. Millions of years ago, the seas abounded in tiny life, and our kind still has a phase of their lives that must be spent in warm salty water, with gentle currents and just a little bit of light. From tiny eggs we grow into much larger beings. What do I look like inside? I am afraid to show you my true form lest you find it monstrous. I do not wish to scare you, friend, because it has taken so much time to find you and I want us to stay together. We are not so different, really. Our kind live our lives in these mechanical shells. They are great machines, built for every purpose we can imagine. We move the arms and legs about using fine movements of our tentacles and eyestalks. This is very intuitive to us, because we live nearly all of our adult lives connected to great mechanical shells. In a sense, our minds drive them the same way your machine mind drives your own body. I have sixteen tentacles, which are puny and weak without the help of these mighty machine tentacles and pinchers, and eight eyestalks, which have little range and clarity without these red sensors. Two hundred million years ago, when Home was still had green forests and great expanses of ocean, our species emerged from the salty estuaries and began to build great cities above the water and below it. We have few records of this time, but our ancestors learned to do great things. They mastered fire and began to work metals. They built telescopes and probed the secret of the atom. For thousands of years, they were content to live out their lives on this planet alone, exploring the cosmos with great telescopes and probing the mysteries of time and space with careful experiments in undersea laboratories. Eventually, they built mighty rockets, for purposes known only to the ancient, and sent great machines into the cosmos. Eventually, visitors came and came to stay, and our cities were crowded with many forms of intelligent life. One hundred seventy five million years ago and the planet was home to living machines as well, though none so beautiful and elegant as you. I imagine that your kind evolved from these early machines, the same way our kind evolved from the sea life that gave rise to it. It is true that all live on Home evolved from simpler forms, though in its time, Home has been home to millions upon millions of different creatures. Five hundred million years ago, great beasts walked the landscape, and swam in the mighty oceans. It was a colder world back then, and mighty ice sheets covered the north and south. In those days our lineage was but tiny plankton, and there were forests of crystalline trees. These trees broke off in windstorms, by the millions, and form the rock of mighty mountain laysers, pushed up by plate tectonics. A billion years before that was an age of icy black forests of animal trees, and shapeless creatures that must have hung from the trees like ropes, feeding off of gasses emanating from the core of the planet. Before that, there were only tiny microbes. Many times in this ancient past, the planet was visited by creatures strange to us, who left traces of their passing. The planet Astra is a newcomer to this solar system, and the passing of the star that originally hosted sent great swarms of asteroids down on our planet, killing the great animal trees. In our time, Astra was even more frozen, a distant cold orb in a dark corner of the solar system. We had no thought of inhabiting it. It is easy to see though that the sun has changed, and places like Astra are now well appointed by sunlight. We were no strangers to the rest of the universe, because many an alien intelligence passes by this part of the cosmos, aiming to use the great black hole at the center of the galaxy we orbit for some strange purpose of its own. Sometimes, we would overhear their broadcasts, in radio and or in gravity waves, and other times, we would sense the release of tremendous energies, as tunnels among universes formed and evaporated in the interstellar void surrounding us. It was from these visitors that we learned to warp space, to bend time, and to harness energies far beyond anything we had imagined previously. In time, we started along the path to becoming one of those ancient and mighty species ourselves. Did I hear you ask to know more about them? There is so little that we know for sure. At least one of them was from a great spiral galaxy millions of light years away. They were a two-legged type, at least before they vanished into the electric matrix of the computerized minds they created. From some distant planet we have never been able to observe, they projected simulcra of themselves, across space and time, like carefully positioned mirror images. Another race was far more ancient and old, with vast bodies housing thousands of lesser creatures. They had long ago abandoned the need to live on the surface of a planet, and roamed through the cosmos using engines of strange design. Yet another was never truly part of this cosmos, but more of a manifestation of a greater self located across several similar universes. This type actually visited Home for a while, and taught us many things, only to disappear as quickly as they came, apparently due to a plague of their own making. In time, we learned some secrets from each of these species, and built great machines in space for our own travels. In time, we joined these spacefarers. In any truly great civilization, there are persons who desire nothing but family and comforts of home, there are some that desire greatness of the mundane sort-to be respected and loved by the people who matter most, and there are those who desire to probe the edges of existence, and to extend the boundary of what is known further and further, till the narrow universe of their forefathers becomes a quaint afterthought amid realities that have suddenly made themselves real. It is through the efforts of souls such as these, I daresay, souls such as us, that each of the elder races came to such greatness of power and wisdom. Even the universe travellers-lacking identity as individuals, could manifest a thousand different group minds, some practical and serious, and others whimsical as a zephr on a summer day. Summer? I cannot explain that to you. In time, we became spacefarers as well. Some of us left to find new homes, because the planet was growing crowded. Others left looking for answers; to explore the cosmos, to establish brave new worlds built on their own philosophies, or to meet the elder races in places of mutual importance. Even then, we knew our world had not much time left. The star you call Crimson was a yellow orb, pleasant and warm, orbited by another sun very much like it. The one you call blue ripened and grew first, burning through a billion years of helium that had collected in its interior. This was a very slow process, and with the help of the star-wanderers, we engineered the unthinkable-moving the planet gradually into a series of orbits more and more distant from the sun as it grew brighter. This we accomplished by directing asteroids on near collisions with Home, at first, and later by using the magnetic field of the galaxy itself. Our craft left Home before the oceans became too hot to support life, but even at the date it had become obvious that the planet could not be moved into a higher orbit without risking collision with mighty Roobis. When this left the solar system, our scientists were eying the could layers, wondering how much longer the mighty storms of the tropics could continue to reflect the blistering red glow of a star lived past its prime. That was more than a hundred million years ago, and we have travelled far since then. This craft is powered by energy emanating from another universe, and it can punch holes in the fabric of space and time. We have visited distant galaxies, and we have projected ourselves into universes very different than our own. I have seen worlds in other universes; places where gravity does not work the same way every day, and worlds with black suns in a cosmos of blistering white light. I have seen giant reptiles guard their young with heartbreaking tenderness, and tree-dwelling amebae with minds equal to our greatest philosophers, In time, the hunger for knowledge gives way to the huger for perspective. Our first goal was a distant planet on the very edge of this galactic cluster, in a spiral galaxy full of young yellow stars and possessing life forms not unlike our own. It was home to strange, two legged creatures that built out of glass and steel. They descended from tree dwellers, and spoke a strange language by shaping the air they exhaled from their lungs. There were many of them, but each was preoccupied with its own needs to the point that they seemed strangers to each other, except at moments of profound intimacy which would come and go on a whim. These were the two-legged ones that built mighty projectors, capable of sending images of themselves through space and time. Despite all their power, they were a very young species, and prone to acts of pointless destruction. Nothing lasts forever. Not even a universe, and fate is fate. Life? What is this word I keep using? Life is what happens when the universe organizes a part of itself for the purpose of creating more parts of the universe that are organized similarly, and so on, until the limits of its resources are reached and it can only compete with other versions of itself to make better organizers and find different ways of organizing parts of the universe into copies of itself that will seek to make copies, and so forth. Your kind do this by mining great veins of metal, chipping away silica rocks, smelting ore and charging batteries with great generators driven by radioactive heat. Other kinds of life do this differently, on a much smaller scale. A drop of seawater in one of these vats contains so many tiny replicators that they would fill a city. Each one can assemble itself from the molecular debris awash in the briny waves, powered by sunlight and linked by a million billion generations to the first crude replicators that did so. I remember a diamond world. Vast and heavy, it had mountains made of diamond, with huge graphite seams running in wavy lines along their faces. Lakes of oozing tar bubbled noisily below, and droplets of tar and smog mixed in the air to turn the sunsets into an orange spectacle that would last the better part of a day and evening. Amid the black shoals swam forms of life strange even to us. Carbon, organizing carbon into sheets and mats of carbon, a living lake could shape itself into a mass of tentacles or sprout thousands of eyes. It was as if the planet could come alive. In that strange place, live never quite divided itself into self-contained cells, the competition among replicators was looser and less distinct. One afternoon, on that planets surface, a living ocean called Proteus told us that time is neither an open string nor a closed loop, but a series of branching filaments like a net or a tapestry, and the directionality of its flow is only because we have sense organs that sense the present and not the past or future. I remember a planet made of glass, with living crystals bristling over ever possible surface. They came in every conceivable color, and would grow in the sunlight, so quickly that an unwary explorer could get enveloped by them and trapped forever. It was here we met intelligences that had no answers whatsoever except to throw everything we thought we knew into doubt. There are other forms of machine life as well. I remember a planet where two legged men bowed down and made offerings to robot overlords. In vast, grey cities, these air breathers would live their lives, guided at every moment by cybernetic voices, watched by machine eyes, and tucked into bed like younglings by the sound of mechanical music. It seems that, if a world grows warm and fertile, early forms of live give rise to later forms as inevitably as hot young galaxies full of blue stars age and are swallowed by giant elliptical galaxies full of aging red giants. So it goes, everything changes. And now it seems you and I have found each other at last, and I am suddenly so much less lonely. For a member of my species, I am only a child and yet I have heavy responsibilities. This ship, and my thousands of brothers and sisters, have arrived here due to a tragic series of miscalculations by my mother and father’s people. We travelled far and wide, vanishing from normal space and projecting our information essence, for the solid matter you stand on is nothing more than information, cloaked in tiny particles that manifest the deeper code within. These projections emerged in distant corners of the universe, at the spiral galaxy of the two legged spacemen, whose yellow sun shined brightly and whose sandy beaches were pounded by mighty waves. Our travels back brought us to places so distant that time itself ran more slowly than before, and in projecting ourselves home, it became impossible to return here any time earlier than a full one hundred fifty million years after we left. This is an unbeleivably long span of time. I need not explain this to a machine such as yourself, but if you sat and counted every rock and pebble on the planet below, taking your time as you did so, you would do that many thousands of times before even a fraction of that interval had passed. It is enough time for an interstellar civilization to evolve from a microscopic form of plankton, and it is, it seems, more than enough time for an old star to grow bloated and red, till it is devoured by its neighbor, who grows old and red in its turn. And now we must find a way to save your world, because your sun is dying, and the next phase of its senescence will be neither gentle nor painless. I cannot say when this will happen, but it will explode, destroying every living thing within this globular cluster, and this fate is certain. I can help though, I think, if you let me.