Generations

by Francis Rosenfeld

  "Child. Young. Learn." commented the ocean.

  "How would you know? You're not human, you can't understand me!" Lily retorted.

  "Life. Young. Teach." it replied.

  "I don't care how you teach your young, what does that have to do with me?" the girl yelled back.

  "Wait, Lily, I want to know more about this. I didn't know they had children," Jimmy said, curious.

  "Life. Start."

  "The thought of you starting out, you live forever, I assumed..." Jimmy continued.

  "Dark. Gamma. Space." the ocean whispered.

  "I don't understand what they're saying," Lily mumbled.

  "Time. Back. Long." they answered, strangely contrite.

  "I get it, you're old," the girl replied trying to hide her self-consciousness.

  "Dark. Gamma. Life." they kept on. "First. Dark."

  "There was never dark." Jimmy contradicted them.

  "Dark. Long." the ocean insisted. "Gamma. Dark. All. Dark."

  "You can't possibly be that old! You were there when the universe began?" Jimmy exclaimed.

  "Dark. Long." the immortals continued. "Gamma. Dark. Wave. Capture. Matter. CH3CH3CNH3O2GeO2CH3CH3..." they softly recited the seemingly infinite chain of organic components that constituted their molecular structure. "Wave. Capture. Wave. First. Dark."

  "What about your young?" asked Jimmy.

  "Parent. Half. Child. Half." the ocean whispered.

  "They multiply by cellular division" Lily translated. "That would make the children and the parents the same, I don't see how that could possibly apply to our culture. They don't teach, they duplicate themselves."

  "Parent. Knowledge. Child. Knowledge. Division. More. Knowledge. Different. Knowledge." said the ocean. "Neuron. Different."

  "You don't have neurons," said Jimmy.

  "Chains. Hive. Same." the ocean whispered.

  "How young is your youngest?" asked Jimmy.

  "Now. Birth." they replied. "Young. Giant. Speak."

  "I think they are allocating a portion of their hive to communicate with us, their newborns," Jimmy turned to Lily.

  "Many. Speak." the ocean corrected him. "Chains. Microwave. Giants. Slow."

  "And this is definitely the low point of my day, a microscopic boron eating bacteria called me slow," Lily threw in the towel.

  "Child. Young. Learn." the ocean tried to mollify her. "Gamma. Fast. Sound. Slow."

  "So what?" Lily snapped.

  "Current. Fast. Girl. Slight. Teach." the ocean doted.

  "What on earth are you two doing?" asked Sarah, who had just joined the common conversation as it was time for vespers. The children didn't answer, they just expressed unspoken unease at the intrusion and got up to leave. "Jimmy, do you want to help me with something?" Sarah asked.

  "Yes, sister," the boy answered, grimacing towards Lily to express his frustration as he headed for the shop.

  Chapter Six

  Of Being

  Seth kept following the rhythmic sequences of 0s and 1s that moved fast before her eyes; the bits turned into words and pictures, sentence structure diagrams and collections of synonyms, commas and exclamation marks, menus and bubbles, a whole new chamber music user interface written for a gamma radiation string quartet, with octets condensed into measures and harmonized in thirds.

  It was strange and wondrous this mainframe generated music, an eerie blend of monotone ison and whale song, melodious and random at the same time. Seth was so transposed by the unearthly series of sounds that her psyche became completely impervious to her surroundings and started existing in a different world, one without scale, without Newtonian physics, floating in an immaterial pattern of vibration and wave interference.

  It was so soothing, this music of the spheres, so revealing in ways impossible to explain, that the leader began wondering if her human limitations would ever allow her to perceive the meaning of the overlapping harmonies, if it was even possible for the brain to process them at the same time. She got so humbled by the extraordinary capacity of the immortal colony, this unbounded brain that kept growing in understanding since time began. She wondered how much knowledge was stored in this extraordinary biological machine whose fluid and swift patterns could incorporate anything, including the clunky, inefficient and slow human language, a means of communication that must have seemed to them as effective as carrying water in a sieve.

  Uneasiness hit her all of a sudden after all those decades of being afraid of nothing, of challenging the universe as if it were a toy, in the face of this vast benevolent intelligence, so patient with her limitations, so protective, so self-denying that it approached godliness. This intimidated the leader who, for all her audacity, had always yielded to the will of God.

  "Are you making progress?" Sarah's thought fell on the silence in the gentlest way but its echo boomed like a cannon inside Seth's altered consciousness. The leader shuddered, jolted.

  "Progress? Yes, I guess so," Seth answered, as if from another world. "They will certainly understand any language, the most complex system of communication we can come up with at the pinnacle of our civilization, I'm just not sure we will be able to keep pace with it ourselves, it is too much."

  "What do you mean?" Sarah continued prodding, blending the thoughts with the feelings behind them in an attempt to understand what Seth meant. She sensed the awe, the excitement, the uneasiness, pride and exhaustion in a way that made the redhead worry that the leader was at the end of her rope and this mental exercise was going to fry her brain like excess voltage overloads a circuit.

  "Maybe the shorts will increase my brain's efficiency," Seth regained her bearing and sense of humor. It felt as if the room was suddenly filled with static electricity that made their hair stand on end.

  "Can't be that scary," Sarah continued gently.

  "Not to you, I'm sure, flower child. Not all of us are comfortable with this intimate level of understanding, I feel like I'm stripped of my skin." Seth frowned.

  Sarah stopped for a second to ponder what made Seth think she felt comfortable with her every thought and feeling exposed, it was something she learned to live with after so many decades but not something she would have chosen if asked. It came as a given, it was the rule of their community and equally uncomfortable for everyone concerned. Sister Joseph could be particularly caustic with her unspoken diatribes and one couldn't avoid the disturbing mental imagery they generated, Sarah was sure she could do without those, for instance.

  "I know, I know," the leader conciliated. "She makes me cringe at times."

  "That's 'cause you can't tolerate the truth and only talk to the cat-brained kumbaya who thinks what you want to hear!" sister Joseph's commentary surfaced immediately, harsh as sandpaper.

  "Thank you, sister Joseph," Seth responded, still retiring before the overwhelming complexity of the language.

  "She's gone off the reservation, for sure!" sister Joseph mumbled, morose, then found something else to occupy her attention.

  "Can you listen to this for a second?" Seth asked Sarah and set the musical wave generator without waiting for an answer. The eerie music started again, lulling the latter into reverie and a deep peace that seemed to radiate through her skin. She didn't understand the message, of course, but it felt familiar to her, she could almost swear she heard it before, maybe in a dream.

  "What does it mean?" she asked, enchanted.

  "It is not a phrase, it's an image, an orange crocus." Seth answered eagerly. Sarah kept listening to the picture with a delighted look on her face that made the leader wonder if those microscopic inhabitants that lived on the inside surface of her cells had something to do with it.

  "Cat. Sister." the leader joked unconvinced. The redhead's level of comfort with the music of the spheres gave her pause.

  ***

  "Water is blue," said Seth.

  "Water. Blue." whispered the ocean softly.

  "Is," said Seth.

  "Is," answered the ocean.r />
  "Water is blue," repeated the leader.

  "Water. Blue." said the ocean.

  "Is there something wrong with me? I've been repeating this sentence for the last four hours, I know you can say 'is', why don't you?" she said, exasperated.

  "Is," said the ocean.

  "Is blue," insisted Seth.

  "Is. Blue." said the ocean.

  "Water..." said Seth.

  "Water." repeated the ocean.

  "Water is..." said Seth.

  "Water. Is." the ocean continued.

  "Water is blue," said Seth.

  "Water. Blue." the ocean whispered proudly.

  "Sarah! Roberta! Jesse!" Seth screamed.

  "What?" they answered through the neural interlink.

  "Come here, please, if they tell me 'water. blue.' one more time I'm going to lose it!" the leader thought in response, with a tinge of insanity that let them all know she meant it.

  "Maybe they think we use too many words. 'Water. Blue.' is enough to convey meaning," said Roberta.

  "Whose side are you on?" Seth jumped, upset.

  "Water. Blue." Roberta laughed.

  "They don't get verbs, they think all words have the same weight and can be used anywhere in the sentence, I'm not even going to attempt adverbs or conjunctions," said Seth. "What would be the point?"

  "What. Point." whispered the ocean.

  "You are smart," said Seth. "Why don't you get it?"

  "You. Smart." said the ocean.

  "Add pronouns to that list," Roberta laughed again.

  "I think we are going about this the wrong way. How about word-image associations?" Jesse suggested.

  "They know what 'is' means, they just won't say it," Seth replied frustrated and left.

  Sarah sat on the soft sand next to the water, smiling. "Such a beautiful afternoon," she thought, "so peaceful."

  "Sarah." the ocean whispered.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Sarah. Is. Sister." the ocean continued proudly.

  "Oh, so you can use verbs, why didn't you tell Seth? She was really disappointed!" Sarah asked, more baffled than upset.

  "Water. Blue. Funny." giggled the ocean, with the vocal inflexions of a little child.

  ***

  There is a level of wisdom one acquires in time that allows one to accept that dealing with living entities is an eminently unpredictable process. If one is a scientist, especially in one of the hard sciences where one plus one is always two, parallel lines never meet and the mixture of hydrochloric acid and lye always yields salt and water, one gets more frustrated than the average person by the logically flawed, physically impossible and emotionally charged reactions of unfamiliar living things.

  The beautiful surprises though are the breakthroughs you don't expect, the unexplained recoveries, the unconditional love. Despite all its vast body of knowledge, its long life, as long as the universe's, the immortal ocean fell in love with the limited, arrogant and bratty newcomers.

  There was no logic behind the affection this immense pseudo-brain poured on the slow giants, no reason why they cherished their relationship and wanted to find out more, no fretting over hidden motives, no reservations. Of course one would argue that the benefit of logic told the vast intelligent community that the out of scale newcomers couldn't pose a threat to them even if they wanted to, but logic had never entered the argument. The ocean was trusting, open, with no defenses.

  Sarah adjusted quickly to this closeness, after all she had spent decades surrounded by children and the liveliness of an untarnished spirit was all too familiar to her, but the spontaneity and the boundless energy of the childlike giant wrecked havoc on the nerves of the more hardened sisters. If sister Joseph ever needed additional reasons to be always angry at the world the kindergarten level of conversation that didn't cease for even a second so she could regain her wind pushed her to the limit. Just like a four year old the ocean never stopped talking, a total chatterbox that mixed revelatory knowledge with nursery rhymes and enthusiasm over the most mundane activities, like for instance when it was in awe of sister Novis's graceful gait and thought putting one foot in front of the other as a means of locomotion was miraculous in terms of evolutionary progress.

  Seth had mixed feelings about the interaction. On one hand she was instinctively drawn to this personality so open to learning and change because she felt there was no limit to what their joint efforts could bring forth, on the other hand she wasn't a very patient person and was used to communicating with reasonable adults who could express themselves eloquently and keep their emotions under control, and the seemingly endless occurrences of toddler-like tantrums drove her nuts.

  More than once she swore to abandon all efforts of communication and run away to the mountains to live off the land, with no neural interlink bracelet and no responsibilities whatsoever. Sister Joseph and the immortals were two extremes of the mind spectrum between which logic and sanity couldn't possibly survive.

  "There is no way to stay rational while communicating with this entity who recites the mathematical formulas of the grand unified theory while wondering what butterscotch popsicles taste like! We're just not made for this, it's like trying to swallow the ocean, it can't be done!" she screamed, exasperated, when after several hours of seemingly encouraging progress the immortals asked her what was the meaning of the word 'BE'.

  "They sure got love fast enough!" sister Joseph mumbled. "Why don't you ask cat-brains to explain existence to them, maybe they'll listen to her," she continued, in a surprisingly unique attempt to be helpful.

  One thing to be said in defense of the immortals is that they had stopped trying to aggravate the leader and only asked questions because they really wanted to know, not to amuse themselves.

  The hive intelligence never irritated Sarah who was in awe of everything it could do, even the doldrums. She spent a lot of time on the beach talking to the ocean, listening to its worries and feelings and questions about life; in a way the ocean thought Sarah was its mommy, just like a Roc bird hatched in a sparrow's nest looks up to its mother hen. The eternal child didn't care that mommy had human limitations, it sensed her unconditional love and felt happy.

  So cat-brains set aside a few choice words to share with the grouchy Joseph later through the neural interlink and set out on the difficult challenge of explaining to the immortals what it means to be. Secretly she allowed the ocean to use shorthand so that the back and forth of communication wouldn't be slowed down by formality despite Seth's strict instructions that the immortals should use proper grammar at all times.

  "I am," said Sarah.

  "You. Purple. Sanctuary. You. Purple."

  "No, I am not part of the hive mind, you just live inside me."

  "Purple. Inside. Sanctuary. Think. Inside. Ocean. Think. Same. Think. You. Purple."

  "No, I am not, there are only a few of you that live inside my cells, compared to your total population, your collective intelligence. I have my own mind, my individual intelligence."

  "How. Many. Make. You."

  "I don't know, I never thought of it this way, us humans are not used to sharing consciousness."

  "Neural. Interlink."

  "Yes, but every specimen of our race can exist independently. We don't need to share our thougths in order to survive."

  "Purple. Individual. Survive. Alone."

  "Then purple is, that is what it means to be."

  "Common. Think. Not. Be."

  "Yes, if you exist collectively, you also are."

  "Purple. Think. Sanctuary. How. Many. Make. You."

  "I don't think any amount of purple would make me not me. I have intrinsic characteristics that make me what I am."

  "Purple. More. All. Cells."

  "I guess if I had more purple beings than human cells that would theoretically alter my human status, but you already modified my DNA and I'm still me."

  "Joseph. Sister. Possible."

  "As delightful as that sounds, I don't th
ink any amount of purple DNA would alter the sister's charming personality."

  "Aren't you the gossiping Judas, cat-brains!" sister Joseph protested through the interlink. "Keep your opinions to the meaning of life and leave me out of it!"

  Sarah would have liked to protest that she didn't bring that up, but realized it would dilute the conversation and let it go.

  "If. Purple. More. Than. You. How. You. Not. Purple."

  "I don't know, I guess it is my soul, it doesn't depend on the physical body."

  "Purple. Not. Soul."

  "I'm sure you have spirit, individually and collectively, I can't tell if it takes a single individual or your entire collective to bring it forth."

  "Sarah. Colony. Soul."

  "It is possible that the immortal colony inside me can reason autonomously."