by Momir Iseni
The beginning is always the same.
Through eons of impacts, the matter of the accretion disk builds up dust and sand. Pebbles become rocks; boulders assemble into cosmic mountains.
The amount of material accumulated increases, along with pressure and temperature. The layers separate: heavier elements to the center, lighter ones above.
Finally, the energies are high enough to ignite the bowels of the future world. A planet forms, with an active iron core shrouded in the mantle and crust.
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Volcanoes litter the granite-basalt metamorphic surface. Their calderas shudder, rock and crack, crumble and collapse; monumental eruptions spew hot bombs and solid blocks, lapilli and ash for miles in a billowing soot-filled atmosphere. For hundreds of millions of years, tephra, meteors and earthquakes shell and grind the rocks; torrents of lava, pumice and scoria chisel ravines, gorges and canyons. The mountains pierce the skies only to, crushed again into regolith, be reborn.
On an infinite conveyor belt, reactant ratios and types of bonds are tested, adopted and rejected, thermodynamic systems streamlined to steadier, more sustainable patterns. The cooling down of the barysphere establishes zones of geographic and climatic microbalances in which destructive winds take on distinct properties.
By the final shutdown of core and magnetic field, plate tectonics grinds to a halt and the atmosphere is reduced to traces. Without prerequisites for biological organization, the outcome of epochs of commotion remains an arid, barren world.
Until, in one narrow area, the relentless passage of time brings about a change.
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The oblong valley is enclosed within sandstone cliffs peculiarly eroded by winds. Mainly horizontal, stepwise lamination and bedding of walls sifts, brakes down, amplifies and softens the gales, separating them into streams of discrete velocities whose contact layers are accelerated, slowed down and swirled by mutual friction. Instead of being scattered by jumbled whirlwind, more and more particles remain inside separate currents. Rising Aeolian activity further intensifies corrugation of walls; recurrent collisions modify the exteriors of individual specks.
By denting and bulging of contact surfaces, a sufficient number of impacts end in aggregation of particles into clusters, momentarily held together by weak forces and strewed by relentless blows. The rising number and power of crashes lead to stronger and longer adhesion.
Over time, the “population” of these lumps is balanced with free dust. The exchange is limited to removal of grains from the “spores” and their replacement with the free ones.
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The position and relief of the valley, along with drastic difference in day and night temperatures, establish a cycle: after the night-time lull, the particles and their “communities” whirl away on the winds in blurred sunlight.
More and more of them are responding to motion and heat with minor adaptations. Collisions and the energy of light photons foster the vibrations of crystal lattices that occasionally transcend blunt mechanics and, conveying information about structure, acceleration, direction and orientation, engender rudimentary “cognition”: although forged of inorganic matter, the spores start to “feel” the environment.
None, of course, realizes the nature of its surroundings: that the soil on which it spends the night is the same one it rested on countless times before. Only some, from a transient vibration of establishing and breaking the bond with the soil molecule, flutters with frequency that part of its structure “perceives” as “familiar” and “reminiscing” of something. But inanimate pre-consciousness cannot remember: simple structure does not allow for data storage.
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The aggregations of silica and iron oxides show further, subtler “aspirations”.
For instance, “seduced” by wind interweaving, they “seek” to spin through loosening the molecular grid, in a sort of “letting go” to “desirable” resonances.
Or, the density and intensity of light create a temperature gradient between the surface and interior of the spore, which its structural components recognize as “pleasant”, with a “need” for orientation that prolongs staying in this “enjoyable” condition: let’s call it the simplest antecedent of longing. When, however, the “desired” shift follows, the spore is unable to distinguish its own contribution from that of airstreams.
Finally, the undulating walls that direct and mix the currents create a curious phenomenon. Mutual, as well as contacts of spores with dust, are soundless; collectively, they build an acoustic image that can be heard. The layering of wind streams quantified the number of possible collision patterns, and hence the volume of the resulting sounds—isolated first into “voices”, and then “words”, eventually taking the form of a song whispered in the rustling language of dust and rock. Impacts in certain streams release characteristic “verses”, seemingly bearing meanings—perhaps the names and descriptions of conditions they are the result of?
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The spores of the hidden valley comprise the entire “biosphere” of the planet. Their simple architecture and environs make further complexity impossible: the degree of “awareness” achieved represents the ultimate reach of evolution.
At night the temperature plummets. The wind wanes. Regolith rests on the ground; occasional spore illuminates with a “sense” of static reality.
Daylights are continuous frantic flight in mellow golden haze: all is a vague premonition, insentient dream of existence. Come tomorrow, after newly lost “visions” of inertia, the spores will gain and lose “impressions” of moving in the glow of distant sun.
The “remembrance” of positions or states will sparkle, remaining unfinished, forever on the doorstep—just as the “words” of the song that the dusty “beings” are “singing” but, unaware of their creation, will never hear.
Unfortunately for them, the glints of “memories” fade much too quickly.
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Two million nine hundred and eight thousand kilometers from the rocky world, the fabric of spacetime gives way, opening into a blue circle sixty meters across.
Through the twinkly veil a black wedge emerges, riddled with a variety of modules. As soon as it leaves the wormhole, the quantum fabric dissolves into vacuum.
The crew is checking the parameters of the star system. One rocky planet and the gas giant definitely do not support life: everything is fit for the test.
CI raises the status of the new weapon from “ready” to “operative”.
In its cocoon of amniotic fluid, Command Brain touches the virtual button with virtual flagellum. Combined Intelligence confirms the receipt of instruction, which the Command Brain feels like a wave of bliss.
The launcher on the port side dilates like a pupil, ejecting the missile. Inside the black casing shorter than a meter, algorithms deactivate layer by layer of exotic force fields.
When, in less than fourteen seconds, the projectile is nine kilometers away from the planet, shutdown of the last field releases the entangled quantum vortex.
The rocky world is shrouded by storm of blue-white glow under which, like a grainy negative, the planet outline can be glimpsed. Its edges are disintegrating, caving in on themselves. A colossal web of cracks cuts into interior, severing pieces the size of continents that, chewed up by a spectral web of self-energizing field, decompose into bubbles of brilliance. Within seconds, the jagged Cyclopean jaws swallow a quarter, a half, the entire planet.
CI reports that the quantum disruption front exceeds projections: instead of knocking it out of orbit, it destroyed the small world.
On an unbroken wave of calm, the Command Brain instructs the return to mother system.
Designers will be pleased. The enemy shocked. It was about time.
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The beginning is always the same: billions of years to set the stage and raise the curtain.
The end comes in a second.
Blown into the vacuum, the last spores of the former valley drift in the solar wind.
Without gales and shifts of day and night, their structure, as well as “experience” and “expectations”, loses its meaning and purpose. The long established vibration matrix untangles: without collisions and the incorporation of new grains, high-energy stellar particles decompose it into dust.
Far on the rim of heliosphere, stray photons bring the surviving spores into arrangement that for one last time foretells the old “delight”. Still gathered remains encounter it in a “known” way: “expecting”, in their current orientation, a “desirable” warmth or touch to follow.
They, however, do not come because the conditions cannot create them, and the structure, “conscious” of the lack of response from surroundings, produces a quiver of “suspicion” that the “pleasant” sensation will never happen again. We may say that the spores are in a position to “experience” something which, had they stayed in their planetary “habitat”, they never would—“nostalgia” that, being transient, immediately disappears.
Fortunately for them, the last glint of “memory” fades quickly.
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Bio:
Momir Iseni (b. 1972) has so far published five short stories: two in Serbia, and three in Croatia. His strongest literary influences are Peter Watts, Stanislaw Lem, J. G. Ballard, Christopher Priest, Dino Buzzatti, and Alastair Reynolds. „Memory“ was first published in Croatian SF magazine Marsonic. This spring, his short story “The Gift” will be published in Polish translation, in the magazine Nowa Fantastika.
Philosophy Note:
As the years pass, I think more and more about time, as well as the place of life, especially memories, against the scale of the universe. In “Memory”, I imagined the long and delicate process of the coming of inorganic matter at the very threshold of the ability to feel and remember, and the possibility that the whole process could forever, carelessly and unconsciously, be interrupted in an instant. (Similar feeling I get from reading Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”, Watts’ “Blindsight”, Anderson’s “Tau Zero”, or the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.) Making inorganic particles the protagonists was natural decision, and enabled me to further emphasize my idea.
