Dream Dance

Day 119 - The Petty Tyranny of the Intolerant

Doul is still using "DAF". After all that pressure he gave me to formally assign them a common name you'd think that he'd use it. But no. I was glancing through his status reports today and he's writing "DAF this" and "DAF that". A less well-adjusted person might take it personally.

Of course Doul ta-Singh is a chauvinist. He's made it very clear from the outset his objections to my presence on this expedition, objections that were considered inappropriate by the board. Provided I could demonstrate the proper commitment to physical excellence SCN protocol did not prohibit someone like me from interstellar missions. Doul has never agreed, proving that he's basically a cyborg bigot.

Cyborg is a rude word, I know, and so is bigot. I shouldn't be using them to describe the chief of zoology and my immediate supervisor. Nonetheless it's people like him that make the word an epithet in the first place. After all, even the unenhanced use medical appliances and implants. I would have degenerated into a pool of goo by my twentieth birthday if I hadn't had my lymphatic system biochipped, and many of the Lost Generation have had much more invasive and dramatic interventions. Are we that much worse because it was done based on need rather than preemptively at birth?

Many people do feel that way, even though they would never directly acknowledge it. I could see it in people's reactions. I don't look like an e2 and I'm too young to be an e1, so people know what I am right away. I'm tall, I have stubbornly fat thighs even with all the running, I have a bustline, and one with a left breast that droops slightly lower than the right. I'm imperfect. I'm not saying that everyone who met me during training looked down on me -- most were completely charming and supportive. But even if they weren't as overt as Doul there were some who took one look at me and I could see them thinking "How the heck did she make it here?"

I answer them in two words: Martian Megathon.

Day 115 - Recalling Life in the Global Social Monoculture

Rise of the global social monoculture has coincided with the depletion of individual achievement. While we all (at least in the developed world) enjoy the benefits of the common comforts of our uniform lifestyles, the creative impulse has receded in direct response. While only a century ago we could look to different cultures, different ethnic heritages, different deep historical identities for the spark of uniqueness and challenges to our well-worn and well-rehearsed ideologies -- those are all but gone now. Erased by the monetization of the familiar, the uniqueness of alternate ways of viewing the world can no longer stir us out of our complacency and our acceptance that what is now must ever be. The urgency of our renewal stands singular, to which we alone and naked must rise.

We sometimes forget that we live in exceptional times. The words above were written over 200 years ago by the brilliant Reawakening philosopher Nils Konieczny (more familiar for his scholarly books than this revolutionary screed) in a world that we can scarcely imagine. At the end of the Financial Age there was nothing that couldn't be bought or sold, and that included the comforts of childhood. Towering edifices of capitalism rose all over the globe as monuments to churning pleasant memories into goods, comfort into services, and even moments of daring and exploration into safe thrill rides. Regular people would sell to others like themselves by day and buy from others by night, all the while grinding more and more of the difference and interest in the world down to a fine paste that would be palatable to less and less open-minded consumers.

The power elite skimmed off some of the excess activity and lived like kings, or so they thought by the standards defined by the mindset of the Financial Age. Power meant wealth, and wealth meant comfort, despite the fact that every day they contrived to make comfort such a bland product that what they purchased for all their "wealth" was qualitatively no different from anyone else. They might travel more places, but the places they would travel would be no different from the places they left.

The governmental structures of the age were past the point of corruption to the degree that they were little more than extensions of the corporations they served. Financial Age thinking was unable to solve the global problems it -- or the Industrial Age that preceded it -- created. At the time Konieczny and Princeton and the rest began their quiet revolution sea levels had risen 20 centimeters in the previous century, half of that just within the previous 25 years. Infrastructure designed in the Industrial Age lay in disrepair while ineffectual politicians marketed as bland, comfortable products defended the status-quo with cost/benefit analysis while nothing ever changed.

I try to remember. I read their words and the histories and try to understand what it would be like to live in a world where creativity, discovery and invention have no value unless they can turn a profit. It's hard, but it's worthwhile. We are children of a different age, and it pays to understand how we got here -- and on whose shoulders we stand.

Day 109 - Running in the Tanzen's Shoes

I went for a run today. Protocol required that I wait 100 days after returning to full gravity before engaging in vigorous exercise. Of course that assumes that everything else I've been doing wasn't exercise -- very funny concept if you've ever had to single-handedly set up a solar collector, which I did on day one here. I've felt my muscles itching to run for weeks. It felt good. I didn't even mind the heat so much.

The problem of course is where to go. My little clearing has a perimeter about as long as the track I used at Kepler U., but I don't really enjoy running circles. It's boring and the turning only one way bothers my hips. The jungle is impassable, so that leaves the Tanzen trails. So that's where I ran. There's naturally a chance of encountering one of them, so I programmed my monitors to alert me to movement so I could move from trail to trail and keep away from any of the natives.

It's nice to be in nature. I used to do research from my treadmill when I was training for the megathon, so I know how to focus my mind, but out in the field I can let my thoughts roam freely. Naturally I thought about the Tanzen. As I ran their paths I pondered the problem of symbolism.

Humans think symbolically -- one object or concept can be represented by some other object or sign. A map, for example, stands for the landscape. Show a map of a maze to a rat and it will have no chance to figure out where the cheese is located. Even the simple act of pointing is symbolic. The finger acts as a symbol for the thing that it's pointing at. Point something out to a cat and the cat will sniff your finger.

We know the Tanzen have no language, but do they think symbolically? It might be that they still mentally represent one idea or concept with another. This mode of thinking would suggest the possibility of sentience -- at least by the accepted definition -- and perhaps some way to find common ground with humans.

The simplest example of symbolism would be territorial markup. Tanzen modify their environment like we do -- for example by making trails through the woods. Perhaps there are standard ways to make their trails so that another Tanzen using the trail knows where they are or where they are going. Perhaps a certain type of branch in the trail indicates that the path leads to water, for example. Perhaps the distance between branches indicate something; perhaps paths pass large trees on the left or the right. Or perhaps the trail is exactly what it seems -- just a trail, not a symbol of anything.

I spent a lot of time looking at the features of the trails as I ran. There are a million different attributes that might have meaning, but my pattern-seeking brain didn't see anything. I need to run a regression; perhaps something will turn up. I doubt it though. I think the entire part of my research plan looking for human-like mental function is a waste of time. The Tanzen are not like us.

Day 91 - Strangest of All are the Crabs

When I was seven I got a new library card. My old card was a baby card that could only access baby books, but the new card was like an all-access pass to the wonderful world of young adult knowledge. Also it was bigger -- it could expand to nearly 40 cm on a side. I used to lie on our floor on long winter nights with the card spread out in front of me, slowly working my way through all the new books I could read about young girls and their horses. Yes, I was that shallow.

I'm not sure how I ended up reading about them. Of course I knew about Crabs. They were something of a worldwide mania about the time I was teething, so as a child of my culture I thought I had them pegged too. Technological creatures on a nearby star, different from us but proving once and for all that we're not alone; there's other intelligences like us in the universe; the brave explorers taking humanity's first steps toward galactic concordance of all living, thinking beings. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

I had no idea how wrong I was. Until I was seven, and stumbled on Strangest of All are the Crabs.

It was the pictures mostly. Incredible panoramas of their cities, crazy organic shaped buildings, walkways teeming with writhing masses of such strange and incomprehensible action. Those short videos screamed in my brain. Alien, disgusting, filthy, every neuron of revulsion lit up in horror. And yet, fascination, wonder, disbelief. And in part of me -- the latent scientist -- beauty.

I think Crabs are most engaging because of their size. Tiny little things -- you could have them as a pet. We think that small things can be smart -- we imagine the internal life of our dogs or our dolls -- so why can't Crabs be smart? And yet we know they can't be. Their brains are simply too small, even relative to their body size. As I read deeper it became crystal clear that these were not our brothers, our long-lost siblings separated by circumstance, eons and 40 light years. The Crabs were not the recognition that we and our ilk, the cognitive and introspective talkers, were the natural and eventual masters of the universe. There were others out there, and they followed a different path.

And that became my destiny. Once I read that book, and the many that it linked to, I was set in my path. I became determined, at age seven, that I would understand the mystery of the Crabs. How they did what they did. What quirk of Darwin allowed a complex, technological, space-faring species to evolve that had no consciousness, no language, and no world-modeling intelligence. My parents -- usually a calm oasis in a desert of confusion -- even they could not help me. It was the first real intellectual challenge of my child mind and it set me on the path that led me here, 518 light years from where I was born.

And it was solved, by the most brilliant mind it was ever my privilege to meet.