One small step

Today our university has convinced the Council that it is now possible to visit our nearest neighbour. What was once a God, then a simple wonder and now a cultural curiosity will open its secrets to us. It measures our calendar, it fills our vision and now it is within our reach and we will find out if someone has been staring back at us. We will seek out life in ways that our ancestors would be proud and astonished by.

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It works! We managed to maintain a link with our Sending for over ten hours, and we almost brought it back in one piece. If we hadn’t run into some unexpected geography it would have been a complete success. However, we have obtained a second round of funding!

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Failure. Our Sending touched upon the face of the Otherworld and…well, it failed. I don’t know why yet. We will recover what we can from the broken spirit and its familiar and begin again. I look out upon our still world, its silent and unchanging beauty and then our target, its constant change, its blurring surface and I ask the same question over and over again. What is so different over there? Can life survive the darkness in some way that is unknown to us?

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We launched privately this time. We could not risk our funding on another public failure and I needed to prove my new approach would work. Thank the Otherworld that it did!

Details, details… I developed a new shell for our Sending. I used our glorious dust to form a thing I called a vessel and it protects our work from the rampant geography on the Otherworld. So many meetings, so many blessings were required. Finally one of the priests convinced them that it was no blasphemy to send the dust to the Otherworld, indeed if we called it a sacrifice then it was a noble thing.

Our Sending will be back soon and we will have learned more than our forefathers could ever dream of!

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Time passes so quickly, we have done so much that I can’t even believe how backwards we were! We, no, I have re-written all we knew about the Otherworld. We have landed Sending after Sending on our neighbour, we have mapped so much of it and found so little life. Not none, just so little that it drives our researchers mad. Some insist that what we found fell from here or try and blame me for contaminating it myself, some believe that we are witnessing the beginnings of life itself. Only time will tell. My ‘vessels’ are now a thing of beauty and I will present my new plan. I will tell them that this is the end of the beginning and lead us into our new sciences with clear eyes and real knowledge.

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What fools we are! What we have called ‘Geography’ is complicated beyond my understanding. Everything moves, rolling across the light and dark as if it made no difference to them. Some of it has behaviours beyond my understanding! For such as us, living in our stillness, in our perfect forever day, this is beyond my imaginings but it is undeniably true. I used a Sending to follow a movement, a ripple that moved only in the day and ceased at night. The Sending claims that it had decided to do it!

A new branch of science has been founded and they can have the data, I will hand it over with nothing but relief. I will build the Sendings better and we will move together into this new understanding.

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Wretched Sendings! I have built them too well and now they are in the hands of children and godless savants!

I am now suspended from the program, they claim an issue with ‘Medical Impairment’ according to the University.

I disputed their findings, their idea that ‘life’ can survive and thrive in the Otherworld. They speak of sending one of us to land upon the insane surface. It is a death sentence and I will not build a vessel for it. They point to centres of complicated geography, of Otherworld dust that moves in repeated and clear patterns as if we had not watched such things for years. To suddenly decide that they are in some way alive makes a mockery of our understanding!

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I have been retired. The University threw a huge celebration, and many noble members spoke fondly and enthusiastically about my work. I felt like I was attending my own funeral.

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I have nothing but time, time to read all the data that I brought from the Otherworld. I sit and watch as it passes in front of me, as beautiful as on my first day, in a life of infinite days. Now I know things, things that frighten me and would frighten all of us if anyone was willing to listen to me. They were right and I was wrong. I have spent decades fighting reality and I have lost.

The geography on the Otherworld is alive, alive in a way that is invisible to us and it seeks to grow. I suspect it is staring back at me even as I watch it spinning. I track the Otherworld dust as it grows in complexity.

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I have realised that we will be ghosts for this type of life. We cannot see them and I suspect they cannot see us. We do not travel, we don’t build from the dust! No one but a madman like myself would have even dreamed of such a thing. The data is clear that whatever they are is sophisticated and growing but none see the correct conclusion. They will reach out to us as we reached out to them and they will be as blind as we are.

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Today the Otherworld reached out, a ball of dust sent spinning around us, even into the dark where we dare not go. Our endless silence is about to be broken, our beautiful endless day shattered by the noise and movement of the Otherworld. In our darkest imaginings, we never looked down, that the dust itself would learn to think and build. That it would learn at all. How does it perceive the universe, where we share a space and yet can walk blindly past each other? So many questions that we never asked and I am frightened by what the answers will be.

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Today they arrived. My people stand silent as the dust stirs, it swirls like the Otherworld and we all stand voiceless.

“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”