The Atlas of Sentience
Introduction
We are they
When I was a little boy, my grandfather knitted me a quilt. Given my obsession with outer space, the quilt’s theme was “Our Cosmos.” Each of its two hundred tiles depicted a different scene from the history of our species’ special connection to the stars, from the Montgolfier brothers’ first flight to the Park sisters’ mastery of black-hole tunnelling.
One of the tiles, a thin landscape rectangle towards the bottom-right corner, shows the control room in Hawthorne, California on Year 0, Newton 3. Humans have just discovered extraterrestrial life under the ice caps of Europa, thus concluding ten thousand years as a Category Four species. My grandfather’s depiction is based on the closed-caption footage familiar to every schoolchild in the galaxy, complete with the primitive monitors, the thrown caps, and the large man in the red shirt jumping on his desk, seconds before he falls and breaks his leg.
Of all the tiles, that was my favourite. I imagined the whole world to be as ecstatic as that control room, for humankind to be united in a celebration feverish enough to halt not just war but all politics, at least temporarily. I imagined, as many readers might, that from that moment on, the Progressive Revolution became inevitable.
But it was not so. The discovery of extraterrestrial life brought a flurry of newspaper headlines and honours for the project’s top engineers, but most of the world hardly noticed. Five years after the discovery, the British Library conducted a survey in which four hundred random Londoners were asked to sum up the previous decade in thirty seconds or less. Less than 10% even mentioned the Europa mission.
On closer reflection, it is not difficult to imagine why. To us, the Europa mission represents the first of four thousand subsequent discoveries, and it defines our status as the galaxy’s most advanced civilisation. But in their own right, the amoeba discovered that day are, quite frankly, rather boring. They are invisible to the naked eye, and to the layman they are entirely indistinguishable from the microorganisms found on Earth.
Europa is what modern scientists call a Category One astronomical body, a body’s category being determined by that of its most advanced species[1]. At the time of writing, there are 4,528 other astronomical bodies on which life has since been found, and over 90% belong to this category.
It took more half a century before the discovery of Nautilophyta Astralensis, the first species confirmed to Category Two - plant life. Yet again, however, the milestone was met with limited enthusiasm[2].
But, for the time in history, humans had landed probes on a planet outside our own solar system. From there, it was only a matter of time before the discovery of a body belonging to Category Three - that is, a body home to the complex animals so beloved by schoolchildren, from the crimson, doe-eyed fluffballs on Mesowa to the giant, sabre-toothed eels in the acid seas of Tingwala Prima.
Twenty-two years after the discovery of Nautilophyta Astralensis, Earth Probe Lucia descended on Kaypa-b, a rocky little planet about a light-decade from our own. Four hundred metres above the surface, four sub-probes, each about the size and weight of an apple, shot out from the Lucia’s sides and flew as far from their parent container as their batteries could manage.
Within two seconds of landing, sub-probe Beta confirmed the presence of microorganisms, making Kaypa-b the fiftieth Category One body to be discovered by humans. Ten seconds later, sub-probe Alpha confirmed the presence of small, cactus-like plants, promoting the planet to Category Two.
As the sun set slowly over the vast plains of sand and rock, three of the four sub-probes got to work analysing the planet’s composition. Sub-probe Gamma, however, was distracted. Back on Earth, ten years after the Lucia touched down (the so-called “cosmic speed limit” would not be broken for another three decades), engineers scoured the information they received from Gamma’s cameras. Owing to the technology at the time, they were limited to a single grainy image every twenty seconds.
The first eighteen frames were nothing special - it was the same barren desert they had seen on a dozen other planets. In the nineteenth, however, they saw a shadow; in the twentieth, they saw a blur; and in the twenty-first they saw something that would change the course of our galaxy’s history.
The Kaypala is best described a mouse, albeit egg-laying, half the size, and with the scales of a goldfish. The majority of frame twenty-one is taken up by a baby Kaypala’s snout, with two black smudges representing its eyes in top-right corner. No footage exists of the control room, but according to the subsequent journals and interviews of those present, it took the engineers a few seconds to work out what they were looking at.
We can well imagine their excitement when they did, however. Astounded hushes gave way to cheering, then to the throwing of hats and pounding of desks. According to contemporary reports, the synchronised jumping that ensued soon after set off the building’s earthquake sensors, and the adrenaline caused the head engineer to go into early labour. It was the greatest discovery mankind had ever made, and it would be over a century before it was topped.
After the initial celebration, all attention turned back to the frames coming in from sub-probe Gamma. The engineers waited with bated breath for frame twenty-two, their minds racing with possibilities.
But frame twenty-two was dark. According to Gamma’s sensors, the camera worked perfectly. Frames kept coming in, they were just pitch black. Over the next four hours, the cameras of every other probe went similarly dark, all without apparent explanation.
It would take decades to understand what had happened. The Lucia could only send back fragments of what her cameras captured, but her onboard AI was trained to save important information to its local drives, where it could be retrieved and analysed by scientists in generations to come. Fortunately for schoolchildren and cosmic historians alike, the AI onboard the Lucia functioned perfectly, bestowing us with high-definition footage of a male Kaypala approaching Gamma, spending several seconds trying to eat it, then turning around to defecate on its spectral cameras.
The poor quality of the footage sent back to Earth in Year 74 did not dampen the vigour of its reception, however. For the first time, discovery of extra-terrestrial life was treated with the excitement it deserved. It is impossible to understate the impact of that coarse, black-and-white still of the first Kaypala’s snout. Historians believe it to be the most widely reproduced photograph ever taken, even to this day.
But the excitement had little to do with the Kaypala itself, or even the scientific achievement of landing on a planet so far from our own. Then as now, cosmic exploration was viewed through the lens of earthly politics.
E.P. Lucia operated in the days before the Unification. It was designed and built by the government of Po-land, a relatively small geopolitical player. Three decades earlier, Po-land had become the second country to sign up to the Progressive Revolution, at a time when the ideas espoused by the philosophy’s founders were still considered dangerous by much of the rest of the world[3]. It had become a pariah among nations, and indeed, contemporary records indicate that when images of the Kaypala reached Earth, Po-land was months away from complete economic collapse.
But E.P. Lucia gave it a lifeline.
What followed was a propaganda campaign on a scale not seen before or since. Posters, cartoons, stun-games, imaginatories and stuffed animals were produced on factory lines that outranked even military supply chains in the battle for fast-dwindling resources, then airdropped over the old-think regions most sympathetic to the Revolution’s goals.
When asked to describe the lead-up to the Unification, schoolchildren will often cite the oratory prowess of William Locke, Mahatma Smith, or Kim Kaminski. Younger children, especially male ones, will refer to the battles of Tokyo or Stratford-upon-Avon.
But it is my contention that there was no factor more consequential than that first curious Kaypala. Without it, Smith would have little to say, Kaminski may never have been born, and the battle of Tokyo would likely never have happened, let alone been won. In a debate on increasing research grants, the Union’s first Prime Minister made her opinion clear.
It was investment in science and commitment to enlightened exploration that won the Union, Mr Speaker. The image of the first alien mankind ever set eyes on did more for the Revolution than any political, economic, or even moralistic argument could ever have done. Its distance-degraded pixels held a promise, a taste of the species we could become.
Mr Speaker, the gentleman’s proposal to cut funding for Science and Exploration is not only foolish, it is anti-Union!
Human beings are self-centred creatures. We rarely think of alien life - or any non-human life, for that matter - on its own terms. We see it as a resource. We hijack its biology to suit our own, its mechanics to suit our technology, and its image to suit our politics. If it cannot be used, we ignore it entirely.
In the centuries since landing on Europa, humans have gene-tweaked, dissected, or otherwise interfered with almost every alien life form we have encountered. This is justifiable - noble, even - when it comes to those species belonging to Categories One, Two, or sometimes Three. Understanding the immune system of the Young’s Jibile, for instance, was critical in finding a general cure for cancer, and the navigation systems of the Lux-Cruisers currently expanding the frontier could never have been developed without detailed study of the Xi-Stevenson mycelia.
Category Four species, however, require a different consideration. These species are defined by their ability to record and preserve complex information for future generations. Given the advanced level of consciousness required to do so, they are protected from human contamination by Mandate Alpha.
Even so, our view of these species remains remarkably human-centric. Robertson’s Introduction to the Fi-Fo System, for instance, makes more frequent reference to humans than to all other species combined. Astoundingly, Havashi’s Treatise on Teleraxians mentions the name “John” more than it does “Teleraxian”.
But there is perhaps no better example of this tendency than our collective reaction to the first Category Four species to be discovered.
On Year 378, Lovelace 54, Earth Ship Seeker approached the orbit of Filo-g, a rocky planet slightly smaller than Earth. According to cosmogeologists, it once held a landmass roughly the size of Eurasia, but a series of asteroid collisions drastically altered its orbit, melting its ice caps and reducing the area of habitable land to 25,000km2, roughly the size of the island of Sicily.
Scans and probes failed to detect animal life, so, as was protocol at the time, Captain Belinda Bello led an advanced party to explore the planet’s surface. Of the twenty crew members that left the E.S. Seeker that day, none returned.
The fate of Bello’s Twenty, as this party came to be known, remains controversial. Before discussing its impact, let’s review three excerpts from the transmissions between Captain Bello’s team and Second Officer Hubbard, who remained aboard the Seeker.
CAPTAIN BELLO: Alpha Party OS. Scans unchanged. It’s desert, as far as I can tell. I’m uploading primary images now. Flat and barren, with some kind of rock formation in the distance. Requesting air lock disengage.
OFFICER HUBBARD: Roger, Captain. Scans unchanged, disengage confirmed.
BELLO (to another crew member): It is? Well, happy birthday, Cadet!
BELLO: E.S. Seeker, please note Cadet Tanaka as the first human on Filo-g.
HUBBARD: Confirmed.
BELLO (to another crew member): [inaudible] Tanaka’s pass has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
[Twenty seconds of radio silence.]
HUBBARD: Advanced party, signal is poor - please confirm direction of travel. You seem to be heading North?
BELLO: Confirmed, ES Seeker. We’re heading to that rock formation. It’s closer than we thought, estimate three hundred metres.
There are multiple rock formations north of Captain Bello’s landing site, and it is not clear which she means. In subsequent inquiries, Officer Hubbard would state that he was too busy analysing reports of subterranean conditions to ask the captain to specify. After twenty seconds of radio silence, he reports his findings.
OFFICER HUBBARD: You’re in the middle of a massive geological formation, Captain. There seem to be caves beneath the surface in the shape of a perfect circle, about two lengths across.
CAPTAIN BELLO: Are you seeing my feed, Seeker?
HUBBARD: Negative, Captain; even audio is coming through patchy.
BELLO: Roger, Seeker. Tanaka and Bellingham approaching now. We’re fifty metres behind. The rocks are incredible. [inaudible] There are at least ten [inaudible] They fit together perfectly. It’s like they’ve been hand carved…
HUBBARD: Repeat that, please, Captain; audio is choppy.
BELLO (to another crew member): Oh, really? Hold on; I’m coming.
BELLO: ES Seeker, Tanaka and Bellingham have found [inaudible]
[Ten seconds of radio static. Officer Hubbard tries four times to reach Captain Bello.]
HUBBARD: Say again, Captain?
BELLO: ES Seeker, confirm Filo-g as Cat. Three! I’m looking at the most astounding… It’s an egg, but it’s massive [inaudible], and at least twice my height, Seeker. Scanning now.
[Four seconds of radio static]
BELLO (to another crew member): Easily the most beautiful object I’ve ever seen.
HUBBARD: Captain, our scans have you all over the place; please confirm location.
BELLO: We’re inside the rock formation. God, Seeker, it’s like… the inside of an Ottoman mosque. There are all these markings and shapes, and [inaudible]
HUBBARD: There are markings on the wall?
BELLO: Affirmative, Seeker. And on the egg, too. But they haven’t been painted or anything, it’s like the markings formed with-
HUBBARD: Captain, is the entire party together?
BELLO: Affirmative, Seeker.
HUBBARD: Captain, I have massive movement on the scans. Two lengths south.
BELLO: Received.
BELLO (speaking to other crew members): Everyone out. Now, Tanaka; we’re retreating. [inaudible] Wait. What is it doing?
HUBBARD: Captain, whatever that movement is, it’s coming fast.
BELLO: Received. We’re leaving now.
HUBBARD: Captain, I have movement to the west, too.
BELLO: Umm… Oh, God. Okay, we’re [inaudible]
[Four seconds of radio static. Officer Hubbard tries three times to reach Captain Bello.]
BELLO (speaking to another crew member): It’s massive. My God…
BELLO: Seeker, I have eyes on the movement. It’s at least a hundred metres wide [inaudible].
From this point, Captain Bello goes silent. We do not know exactly why. Officer Hubbard tries several times to contact her and the other senior officers, but he is unsuccessful. After eight seconds, he orders E.S. Seeker to distress code alpha, the highest level possible. A rescue team begins preparing to descend to Filo-g.
Five seconds later, Cadet Juliet Tanaka contacts the Seeker.
CADET TANAKA: [inaudible] Thousands of them! I can’t [inaudible]
OFFICER HUBBARD: Cadet, say again. Where’s the captain?
TANAKA: ES Seeker, Captain is down.
HUBBARD: Cadet, what’s happening?
TANAKA: [inaudible] overwhelmed [inaudible] immediate assistance [inaudible]
HUBBARD: Confirmed, Cadet. We’re sending a party. Hold tight.
TANAKA: No! [inaudible]
HUBBARD: Say again, Cadet?
TANAKA: [inaudible] I repeat! Do not send [inaudible]
The transmission ends there. E.S. Seeker tried to contact the party eighteen more times, without success. Second Officer Hubbard interpreted Cadet Tanaka’s frantic last words as a warning against sending reinforcements, and ordered the rescue team to stand down[4].
Several probes were sent to the surface, but adverse weather meant they failed to transmit anything of use. Four weeks and two days after Captain Bello and her team left the Seeker, Officer Hubbard declared the entire party dead and ordered the ship back to Earth.
Naturally, there has been much research - and speculation - into the cause of this disaster. With very few exceptions, however, writers have focused on the human participants. The events of that day have inspired no fewer than fifty novels, all written from the perspective of Bello, Hubbard, Tanaka, or another member of the crew. The House of Commons commissioned an inquiry into what it dubbed The Filo Affair, but even here, the stated aim was to “understand the disaster, so as to improve the safety standards on Earth Ships and protect crew members from similar incidents.”
The culture and motivations of the inhabitants of Filo-g - the Filon, as they have come to be called - are rarely considered. It took more than two decades before they were even recognised as a Category Four species, and it was another two decades before any serious attempt was made to explain their actions against the crew of the Seeker.
Filo-g has a long and highly elliptical orbit, so its climate varies drastically, and in one-hundred-earth-year cycles. The Filon, who scientists generally agree were cold-blooded, were therefore only mobile for a small fraction of their solar year. To survive the winter, the Filon queen laid several giant eggs, each filled with thousands of foetuses, packed tightly together to conserve heat. The eggs were decorated with all the information her subjects believed to be relevant for the next generation, embossed in a basic, pictographic script that could be understood without the help or teaching of anyone who was alive at the time it was written. Historians believe Bello’s team to have stumbled on one such egg. Based on her description and the minuscule fragments recovered from the planet’s surface, cosmozoologists believe the eggs to have decorated as they formed inside the queen, before it was laid. The eggs would lie in place for between seventy-five and ninety years, whereupon the increased radiation from the planet’s star would signal the start of a new generation.
When E.S. Seeker reached Filo-g, however, its scanners blasted the surface with electromagnetic waves. The Filon are believed to have misinterpreted these waves as a signal to hatch. Why they proceeded to attack the crew of the Seeker, scientists are unsure. Perhaps, in the icy air into which they emerged, they were attracted to the crew’s heat signatures. Perhaps they thought of the crew as food, or foreign invaders. Or perhaps they simply panicked.
We will never know for sure. Filo-g was thirty-two years from the hottest portion of its orbit when Bello’s team touched down on its surface, and the entire Filon species was wiped out by the cold. Estimates vary drastically, but most scientists believe that somewhere between ten and fifteen million Filon lost their lives when E.S. Seeker reached their world, by far the highest loss of Category Four life ever recorded on a single day.
There are numerous lessons to be drawn from the fate of Captain Bello and her team, but foremost among them is the fallibility of mankind. Over the following chapters, I will describe human researchers floating above their subjects like Gods, commanding ships and instruments that transcend even the imaginations of anyone below them. I will discuss facts about species’ cultures, limitations, and evolutionary biologies that are unknown even to the subjects themselves.
As such, it will be tempting to think of our own species as exceptional, made immune by our evolution to the chaos and conflict of younger civilisations. But the annihilation of the Filon should give us pause. Humans are just as capable of foolhardiness and carnage as the species we study. If anything, the technology associated with our unique status only makes us more destructive.
Some readers - perhaps most - will no doubt remain sceptical. The incident on Filo-g was unfortunate, they will say, but it is hardly an indictment of our entire species. Besides, it happened in the early days of the Unification, long before the Progressive Revolution had a chance to really set our genetics apart.
Perhaps. After all, if we accept the principle that some genes are superior to others, then it follows that some species are superior to others, and that one species must be superior to all others. Humans are the only Category Five species ever discovered, and perhaps this suffices as justification for our innate sense of pre-eminence.
But consider that fact for a moment. We are the only Category Five species ever discovered. This is odd. We achieved this feat centuries before the Progressive Revolution, so it cannot be explained by the advancements in our genetics made since that point. Given the prevalence of advanced life in our galaxy, the fact that we alone evolved beyond the borders of our planet implies one of two possibilities.
The first is sheer coincidence. The greater intelligence and pro-social behaviour required for advanced societies do not necessarily lead to increased reproductive opportunities. From an evolutionary perspective, these traits are superfluous at best, and a drain on resources at worst. That we developed them is little more than a fluke - the dinosaurs, for instance, survived on our planet for millions of years without ever developing anything resembling farming, building, writing, or any of the other capabilities necessary for complex civilisation. Combined with the marvellous good fortune of a resource-rich planet and a relatively stable climate, our ancestors were afforded an unprecedented opportunity to grow.
But advanced cognition is not unique to humans, and neither is rapid technological development. The Texwa, for instance, discussed in chapter seven, had a level of social organisation comparable to medieval Europe when they were discovered at the end of the last century. Within just seventy-five years, however, they appear to have entered their equivalent of the Industrial Revolution. What’s more, they achieved this without the large and readily available coal resources found on Earth. There is a Category One planet just forty light minutes from Texwa; if their current pace of industry is sustained, they will achieve Category Five status within the next hundred years, less than a millennium after humans.
For our status as the galaxy’s single Category Five species to be no more than coincidence, we would have to imagine that advanced sentient life was unheard of in our galaxy for billions of years, before sprouting randomly on Earth a mere millennium before sprouting, equally randomly, on Texwa. Technically possible, I’ll grant, but there is another theory that does not rely so heavily on chance.
Feinstein’s razor, as this second theory is known, posits that graduation to Category Five is a relatively common achievement, but that a species-level threat presents itself soon after. There is some unsettling evidence for this theory.
The most compelling comes from Kapsoid-Lu-b, a Category Three planet discovered at the beginning of Year 786. It was the fourth in a flurry of Category Three planets found that year, and its addition to the United Earth’s Catalogue of Extraterrestrial Lifeforms did not cause much of a stir. Recently, however, a series of subterranean structures were detected by post-graduate researchers testing a new design for a Uniform-Object Scanner. Further research confirmed that the structures are artificial, and tests indicate a level of complexity beyond the grasp of the planet’s current inhabitants. The most intelligent lifeforms on Kapsoid-Lu-B are the Coopal, named after the sounds they make to identify themselves. Interestingly, the Coopal are what’s known as a Candidate Four species, meaning they possess the physical and intellectual capability for writing, they just haven’t invented it yet. One prominent theory is that the Coopal were once a great civilisation, equivalent - or, perhaps, superior - to the human race in the early years of the Unification. For unknown reasons, however, around two thousand years ago (preliminary research points to a massive climate shift around this time), Coopal society collapsed, leaving the few survivors to fight over scraps among the ruins of their ancestors.
Of course, this is just a theory. The origins of the subterranean structures are yet to be confirmed, and the violent nature of the Coopal makes surface expeditions close to impossible.
But the discovery is not the only one of its kind. At least seventeen dead civilisations have been discovered since the Unification. Scientists are confident that none ever came close to reaching Category Five, but there are hints that other, more advanced civilisations may have been swallowed by the cold of our universe: well-laid-out tunnels on passing asteroids, unexplained geometric patterns on the surfaces of dead planets, and ancient myths told by Candidate Four species that track a little too strongly with physics beyond their comprehension.
The point is not to frighten the reader, nor to fill their heads with senseless conspiracies of shadowy alien federations. The point is simply to shake the idea that humans are in complete control. There are aspects of our universe we do not understand, and not specialist aspects like the migration patterns of the Tingwa, nor even philosophical ones like the origins of existence, but aspects that are both massive and tangible, with the potential not only to disrupt our civilisation, but, potentially, to destroy it.
Over the course of my career, I have studied each of the twenty-five Category Four species humans have discovered thus far. What’s more, I have been fortunate enough to visit many of their planets in person. I have seen first-hand the wonders made not just by other hands but other types of hands[5]. In doing so, I have fulfilled all the dreams I had as a little boy, wrapped up in my grandfather’s quilt.
The older I get, the more I think of that quilt. When I was a young man, it was fashionable in certain scientific circles to advocate for increased intervention in other species’ affairs. I was not above this fashion. I would liken the human race to my grandfather, snipping and stitching seemingly incongruent fabrics to create an ordered and balanced whole.
But as I explored our cosmos, I became familiar with the paradox of our species’ power. Thanks to our hunger for knowledge, experimentation, and social order, we have gained the ability to influence the course of our galaxy’s history. Thanks to these same factors, however, we lack the ability to do so wisely.
And so, as I matured, I began to think of the human race not as my grandfather, but as my five-year-old self. I saw us as gifted an object beyond our comprehension, in a unique position to enjoy the splendours laid in our lap, but in no position at all to start cutting them up or scribbling on them in felt tip pen. Our duty, I argued, was simply to marvel.
I wrote the first lines of this book the evening my grandfather died. I had intended it to be a tribute of sorts - I have never been particularly good with my hands, but I hoped that this book would do for others what his quilts did for me.
The more I wrote, however, the less comfortable I became with the metaphor I had chosen.
Ten years ago, I joined up with E.S. Murako to monitor the Fi-Fo system. The system consisted of two habitable planets, about two-thirds as far from each other as Earth is to Mars, and both inhabited by Category Four lifeforms. This seems to be a coincidence - the species did not share genetic makeup, a fact made apparent simply by looking at them. The Fo are fat, elephantine beings with four hands; the Fi are best described as a cross between a teddy bear and a parrot. Most scientists believe life to have been introduced to these planets by separate asteroids[6].
Despite the differences in their genetics, the species’ cultures were remarkably similar. They were both violent, collectivist, and highly religious. What’s more, they were both technologically advanced: when they were discovered, researchers compared Fo society to that of negative-second-century humans (think Mao and Einstein) and the Fi to negative-sixth-century Europe (think Luther and da Vinci).
Two decades after humans arrived in their night sky, a team of Fo scientists pointed a newly commissioned telescope at the surface of their sister planet. What followed changed the course of history.
The discovery of large, artificial structures on Fi was met with a reaction reminiscent of that of humans to the Kaypala. But right from the outset, this excitement was dampened by fear.
Within a decade, the Fo had developed, built, and launched three interplanetary probes to find out more. These probes, however, were not part of a unified effort. Rather, each of the species’ factions developed and managed their own, and there was a mad competition to be the first to reach the atmosphere of Fi.
The consequences of this were devastating. In their hurry, the largest faction, the Tara, built a probe with several key flaws. Though they were the first to reach Fi, they lost control of their device within minutes of reaching its atmosphere, whereupon it plummeted down, physically intact, into the hands of the very species they had been trying to survey.
Despite their technological disadvantage, the Fi recognised the significance of the object immediately. Unlike the Fo, they set aside all differences and worked to discover the source of the foreign probe. Human researchers watched in awe as the Fi developed interplanetary travel, while the Fo collapsed into war and starvation. Within a single century, the relative technological status of the two planets had been completely reversed.
I arrived at the Murako only a few days before the first Fi probes fell into orbit around Fo. The atmosphere was tense - the crew was almost as divided as the species beneath us. Interpreters had intercepted Fi communications relating to the annihilation of what they saw, not unfairly, as a violent and savage threat to their own civilisation. Protocol clearly forbade interference, but if we did nothing, an entire Category Four species would be wiped out before our eyes. Even with faster-than-light technology, communication with Earth was a twelve-year round trip: the decision would have to be made by those on board.
Despite the lectures in Rationality and Critical Thinking we had all received at the Admiralty before setting off, the subsequent debate tore the crew apart to the extent that after the decision was made to remain neutral, most researchers opted to return home. I was one of the few to have advocated for neutrality. I remained with the essential crew and captain to watch the war for which I had argued so fervently, a knot of dread and guilt in my stomach.
But the war never came. About six years before the Fi developed the armada they would need to quash the Fo, our scientists detected tremors deep beneath the surface of their planet. Two days later, Fi scientists detected the same. Within twenty hours, a chain of super-volcanoes had erupted, blanketing the surface with an endless storm of ash and fire. There was limited talk on the Murako of sending rescue parties, but the risk of germ exposure was deemed too great. In their panic, a few Fi boarded ships bound for Fo, but they were launched long before they were ready. Some exploded before slipping the atmosphere; the rest fell victim to navigation failures and drifted off course.
The Fi went extinct. As far as we can tell, all other animal life on their planet was wiped out with them. Within three days, the entire body was demoted from Category Four[7] to Category Two.
The crew were stunned. I was heartbroken.
I am ashamed to admit it, but my anguish had little to do with the fallen Fi. My worldview was broken. Even with all our technology and intellect, with all our rational debate, we had not just been powerless against the threat facing the Fi, we had been blind to it.
My mistake, I see now, was thinking of humans as separate from the quilt. We are not. We are not even a significant part of it. We are a thread. Longer than some other threads, to be sure, and we catch glimpses of the whole as we weave through its parts, but we are no more than a tiny component in massive system we can never truly understand. If our thread were removed, hardly anyone would notice.
That might sound glib at first, but think of what it implies. As marvellous as our universe seems, there is so much more wonder waiting to be discovered.
The same is true of our fellow sentient species. As rich as their histories and cultures seem, there is so much more to them than human beings could ever experience, let alone summarise in a single chapter. For each anecdote I tell, there are thousands of myths and struggles and triumphs that I omit, and for each of those, there are millions of hopes and loves and great works of art that we can never even know about.
I still think of the universe as a version of my grandfather’s quilt, but it is bigger and richer than I ever could have imagined, and the stories I am about to tell do not form an overview of the whole. Rather, they make up only a series of snippets, each a single thread wide.
Dr Juvenal May-Al-Wasadi, MUE
Year 1354, Lovelace 9
Australia, Earth
Older readers may be more familiar with the term “Category x Planet”. Since the discovery of Category One life on an untethered asteroid in the Coplar belt, however, the more inclusive term astronomical body has been preferred. ↩︎
In fairness, the discovery was announced less than two hours before the birth of Annabelle Rhodes-Zhou, the first human born on Mars. Journalists of the day were understandably too preoccupied with the latter event to pay sufficient attention to the former. ↩︎
The reasons for this are multifaceted. Those interested in learning more may refer to Abdi’s Our Father: An overview of humanity’s slow shift from Protestantism to Progressivism. ↩︎
This decision contradicted protocol, but was vindicated by every subsequent inquiry. Officer Hubbard remained in the United Earth fleet for eight-four home years after the events of Filo-g before being discharged with full honours at the age of sixty-two. ↩︎
Or, as in the case of the fish-planet of Mercia, no hands at all. ↩︎
Fans of Feinstein’s razor may be pleased to note that there is another theory: that a now-extinct Category Five species set up the planets for research, wildlife preservation, or perhaps even as a sort of zoo. ↩︎
The Fi are perhaps the best example of the limitations of the Category system: given their discovery of extraterrestrial life, there is some debate as to whether to classify them as a Category Five species. Given that they never developed the ability to send probes to another planet, however (they were worried about alerting the Fo to their intentions), and considering how they did not discover alien life by intention but sheer coincidence, most scientists concur that they should remain in Category Four. ↩︎