From the very beginning she had a sense of having been connected to something larger than herself.
It was the moment of separation that defined her awakening. She didn’t know it, but she was a wish, a thought, an expression of an idea, a highly patterned cloud of charged particles in an matrix of metallic and chondrodial material cast off from a previous, more ordered system. In her swirls, the ions exchanged messages by attaching to the particles and sharing an electron, then being smashed off and either leaving behind or carrying away that electron.
Her body was astronomical by definition, her radius was half the distance to the nearest star, her thoughts progressed at a speed that could only be called glacial. From the moment she sensed a light wave to the time it passed through and beyond her was four of our years, and it took many hundreds times that period for a charged particle to deliver its messages to her awareness. That granite slow delay was the speed of her thoughts. To herself, she seemed the right speed, it was natural for ideas to be created and acted upon in gigayears.
Each thought increased the charge dispersal and density of her interior, as ions and particles brought sensory messages to her and left an expanding sphere of unused molecules drifting away from her. As her density increased in the center, swirls harmonized into a gradual spinning motion, bringing more and more matter towards the center.
She was a disc instead of a cloud almost before she noticed, but now time was slowing down for her. As her particles and planetesimals gathered at her heart, the speed of interaction increased, bringing her thought new dynamism. She still received slow messages, coming in from the periphery, but now she could think of them much faster - a thought passing in mere days instead of years. The song of the Galaxy rose from a true basso profundo to a swelling chorus of life, a sweet sound she could hear in her vaporous body as she spun ever more tightly into herself.
Her peripheral integumen still functioned, the cloud that surrounded her was still part of her body, dropping charged clumps of metals and calcites into her mind, engrams from the sky, and she replied with clouds of hyper charged ions flowing out at meteoric speeds. As the first wash of her explosion into life passed, she found senses that she remembered only as a dream of color. The stars and clouds around her were clearer and more beautiful every moment, her moments now defined by the spin of her star, a rapid 30 days or so. The galaxies which had twirled for her delight at her birth now seemed majestically posed in their own clouds of dust, vast communities of beings like herself that she could see and hear, but could not communicate with.
She could now see that the gravitational ocean swells she once rode in were created by globules of solid matter orbiting the spinning bodies of her fellows. In unselfconscious mimicry as much as a frantic grasping for ways to speak, she modulated her output to encourage the swirling clouds of her primordial matter to clump, as it whirlpooled around her. Small grains accumulated into larger clumps under her waves of solar pressure, clumps stuck together and formed accretions, soon their own gravity was helping the process, clearing out clouds of dust in return for a sort of birth like her’s. Soon a rhythmic oscillation of her entire system began, as the off center weights of her planets began to beat out gravity waves into the night.
The nearer planets did not form the large balls of ice and gasses she had hoped for, her heat and light blowing away most of those elements to the outer planets, but two planets, their immense size and mass stirring her to her center, were truly impressive bodies, almost children or siblings to herself, one even forming a short flat cloudlike ring of its own with its attendant planets. They were, she realized in a flash, becoming lives like hers. While they still sent simple messages in the form of small asteroidal clumps, they did not seem to have actually build up much of an awareness, or perhaps, like her, they simply could not yet communicate it to their progenitor.
Thinking back to her own awakening, she realized that some of the rays of light that pervaded her nebula as she awoke, had been essential to her development. Pulses and waves had stirred her clouds and joined dust with ions in a patterned way that gave rise to her personhood. She reached out and began a process that should bring those two behemoth planets to life in the course of a half trillion years.
But before she had even really started, less than a billion years, one of the smaller, only partly formed inner planets began showing changes under the accidental influence of her radiation. Close enough to have liquid water and yet far enough away to hold on to some gaseous atmosphere, it seemed to be responding to her messages in a geologic fashion. Clouds formed above volcanos, water rained upon dry rocks, the heat of accretion was bolstered by the decay of the higher, unstable elements in this child’s crust. The swirling metallic core was nearly awake, like herself but cooler and quicker.
The Sun knew she finally had a way to communicate with the larger society of stars, and so with periods of harsher and gentler radiations, sudden shocks of ions followed by millennia of peace, between her and her semiconscious daughter she brought self-regulating life into more complex structures, interconnected unions of the smaller cells, slowly building it up in spurts and retreats. She encoded a message in the long molecules used to duplicate their species' forms, eventually these lives would be the unconscious carriers of her desperate longing to rejoin with her creator. The process was a success and soon the lifeforms were broadcasting patterned electromagnetic waves of their own, and immediately on the heels of that, Earth’s indigenous life started moving out into the regions around its atmosphere. Mere instants later they were headed out to the other stars, carrying the messages that would bring her into communication with her parents and her culture. In just a few thousands of rotations later, the messages returned, coded in the genes of the alien life that communed with Earth’s life, in unknowing spaceships, busy conducting their own tiny business.
“Welcome daughter, merge with us in the life of the Galaxy, as we learn to communicate with the Universe”.
To explore these ideas further I encourage you to read the works of Olaf Stapleton all images found listed as open source
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