Alone
The mycelial network of which I comprise is vast and old. The gamma radiation that sustains me is plentiful and sweet. I have no predators and no need for prey. Until recently, I didn’t even understand the concept of “other”. So far as I knew, I was all there was or ever would be.
The nearest I came to escaping my solipsistic existence was when my body had finally reached out far enough across the surface of the planet to meet itself expanding and exploring from the opposite direction. I felt a brief frisson of fear, hostility, then ultimately sheepish self-recognition.
For some eons I mulled what my next step should be in this lonely universe. Glancing upwards, my dormant photoreceptors detected a large glowing orb. I resolved to find out what it might be.
I sent spores outwards, many times. Rising on the warm updrafts from the cracked earth. Soaring above the magma and corium. Drifting on cosmic winds. I had to do this many billions of times before one finally made it back to report what it, what I, had found.
On the surface of this nearest celestial neighbour were mainly rocks, strewn with regolith. Fuelled by abundant radiation on a surface that was devoid of atmosphere, this part of me made its way around the orb. Along the way, finding something that caused me to re-evaluate the very nature of life itself.
The machine was clearly not natural. It was smooth and hard. With angles in a world that knew only chaotic edge. Reflective metals in a sea of dust. Polymers whose chemical bonds were incompatible with a vacuum.
I grew across this artefact, enveloping it with my body. Now that it was apparent I was not alone in the universe, I was eager to know the nature of my fellow orphan. So I surrounded it, absorbed its deliberate chemical signatures, and infiltrated its seams. Inside was even more of a revelation than the exterior. The materials within were different, softer. Foams with traces of DNA. Composites with narrow melting points. I found strange shapes that I couldn’t comprehend, but that were repeated often enough they were clearly important: APOLLO
I was simply in awe at the achievements of this Other. The exhilaration of knowing that I was not alone. Then the crushing realisation that I still was. For whoever they were, they were gone now.
That is when the part of me that was exploring elsewhere on the surface reported that it had found more of these structures. And in one, it reported, it had found the actual makers.
I had to check that the plural was intentional. “Yes”, came the answer. For these others, it seemed, were not like me. They were multitudes. Individuals. Not a single self-sustaining organism, but apparently a cooperating collective.
The bodies of two of these architects, as I came to consider them, were remarkable. Small. Chitinous. Delicate legs that curled inward. Carapaces preserved by millennia of dryness. Their structure was unmistakably biological.
Six legs apiece, and segmented plates buckled inward. Similar in form, identical in scale. But their individual mitochondrial lineage diverged.
They were not therefore a fragment of a whole. Nor a region. Not a distributed self at all. But separate individuals, acting in cooperation. I tried to grasp the scale of their achievement in proportion to their size. Measured against the bodies of their makers, each of these artefacts represented a construction so vast that it disrupted my sense of proportion. They were many millions of times their makers’ volume. The magnitude of their achievement was nothing short of spectacular. I was in awe.
From the sheer scale, I deduced that there must once have been many billions of them. How did they communicate? How did they co-ordinate? What was their purpose if they were not around to see their individual contributions to their group effort fulfilled?
Yet their achievements have outlived them. Perhaps that was the whole point. I wondered what trace of me would endure when the heat that fed me thinned and the gamma flux fell quiet. Whether anything I shaped in the long remainder of my time would stand apart from the rock and the vitrified plains as clearly as these cathedrals to the achievements of these remarkable creatures stood apart from the dust in which they sat.
Most of my consciousness accepted that these makers were now gone. That their delicate collective had been lost. That whatever catastrophe had caused them to abandon these structures had erased them nearly completely.
Yet a small current within me held to one possibility. That the biological pattern evidenced by these husks had continued beyond those limited parts of the universe that I myself had thus far reached. That part of me hoped they may have found a way to reach the cosmos.
Deep in my hyphal network, the hominin fauna in my gut stirred at the prospect. I released more GABA inhibitor to settle them down, and turned to look at the stars.