Let Us Sing Beyond the Threshold

The great sea of space sends you adrift, it moves you as a weed in the river, the vast weather of the universe will move you, carry you away, move your inwards parts with joy.

-       Uvavnuk paraphrased by Source Zebu

I

Log, Captain Leta Devaleris: We have made harbor in the Bhuvana system. Upon emergence, the crew stood united in our covenant made at departure: those interval logs that steadfast Minstrel has been gathering from Honua through the long centuries of our passage shall remain unread, their secrets locked away. We know most everybody we knew and loved are centuries gone, though a few might persist in altered forms. Minstrel’s reticular activation threads pulse rapidly through the walls, cheered to finally arrive here. It weighs heavy upon my captain's soul to acknowledge what centuries have meant to my faithful companion: not since we cast off from Honua's embrace has mei tasted the air and sea of a living world. Here before us spreads this verdant Earth-copy, a jewel sculpted by the Progeny, this new Honua green as any space mariner's dream, bearing only those strange electromagnetic songs that called us across the void—no other mark of civilization upon her face. Several days in orbit and a few upper-atmospheric reconnaissance flights, confirming no threats, with the reluctance of one who has learned caution in unknown space, I gave my blessing for Minstrel to don meis submersible form—that we might descend together into the embrace of those vast and waiting seas.

In the shadow of ancient coral formations that rose like cathedrals from Bhuvana's azure depths, Leta pressed her palm against the cool hull of their interstellar bioship Minstrel. The vessel's living membrane rhythmically pulsed beneath her touch, its hybrid consciousness somewhere between adolescent wonder and canine loyalty. And so we arrive, she reflected, closing in on the quarry that had drawn them across the light years—the electromagnetic songs that sang across this system's moons, too purposeful for chaos.

“The amplitudes intensify significantly, and the frequencies increase marginally, near the reefs,” Iris observed, her pilot's instincts attuned to the subtle variations in Minstrel’s indicators. She stood silhouetted against the two viewscreen projections, her figure casting two shadows that seemed to move with separate intentions. “Something down there is thinking, Leta. Thinking with the patience of geological time.”

Young Keiran emerged from the ship's neural interface chamber, his freckled face bearing the pallor of one who had spent too long in communion with data streams. “The patterns suggest language,” he said, though his voice carrying a note of puzzlement. “Not human language, yet... familiar somehow.”

In the ship's contemplation pod, Quez sat in lotus position, their form shifting subtly as plant-derived cells responded to the light filtering through the bio-luminescent walls. When they spoke, their words like stones dropped into still water: “What wants to be shared, is shared now. Arriving late to a conversation began when the Progeny seeded this system.”

Tegan moved through the ship's corridors with the restless energy of pattern-seeking consciousness, their form today more angular than curved, their mind processing the streams of data with an intensity that bordered on the ecstatic. “The termite-mound structures on the nearest landmass,” they announced, their voice sharp with discovery. “They're not termite structures at all. They're transmission arrays. Someone—something—has been broadcasting into the void for millennia.”

Minstrel shivered with what might have been excitement or apprehension. In the ship's neural core, thoughts that were part human, part dog, part something smaller and more curious than either, wrestled with concepts too large for any single species to comprehend. The bioship had been dreaming of deep waters and vast thoughts, of minds that swam in the spaces between neurons like whales in an ocean of consciousness.

They descended toward the largest reef complex, where Leta’s instruments detected the most coherent patterns of neural activity. The water here was crystalline, teeming with life forms. Schools of fish traced geometric patterns through the coral formations, their movements seemingly too precise to be natural.

“I'm reading power spectral signatures that look like neural integration,” Leta whispered, her xeniobiologist's training inadequate for what her instruments revealed. “Conduction velocities that suggest... yamitshan!, Iris, there are brains down there. Human brains. Somehow housed in the reef structures. Networks of them, thinking together.”

The reefs pulsed with bioluminescent activity, patterns of light that flowed like thoughts made visible. Guardian creatures—fish with eyes too intelligent, cephalopods that moved with deliberate caution—began to circle their craft. Not aggressive, but watchful. Protective.

Deep in the reef's neural core, the Sereben Mind stirred to full awareness. For countless centuries it had pondered the mysteries of existence while its coral-housed neurons processed the dreams and memories of a thousand linked consciousnesses. The arrival of these surface dwellers represented both opportunity and danger—a chance for communion with minds shaped by different evolutionary pressures, but also the risk of contamination by the violence and confusion that had driven their ancestors to seek refuge in the depths.

Who comes seeking the singers of the void? The thought rippled through the reef's neural network, carried by bio-electric currents and chemical cascades.

II

Log, Keiran Van Drogen, Linguist/Biophysicist Trainee. I confess—and really, what is the point of dissembling when quite possibly on the verge of the most extraordinary discovery since we arrived at this magnificent planet—the reefs were indeed spectacular. Tegan was absolutely correct in their assessment (they have this maddening habit of being right about such things), and yes, the mounds possessed features entirely distinct from our dear Honua's formations. But here's the perfectly obvious thing that everyone seems determined to dance around, those termite-mound structures are clearly—and I do mean transparently, luminously clear to anyone with half a functioning cerebrum—the source of the electromagnetic signals that have been practically screaming at us since we arrived. And they're above ground! Not buried in some cryptic oceanic depth like a final clue, but sitting there bold as brass, practically waving at us. I have this growing suspicion (which is rapidly crystallizing into certainty) that Leta and Iris will confirm what I've been thinking: those massive mushrooms—those preposterous fungal monuments—are the terrestrial equivalent of the reef structures housing conscious human brains. Here we are, and they're not talking to us directly—how rude of them—so why shouldn't we march straight up to the obvious massive emitters? How can there even be first contact courtesy when no being directly communicates? Minstrel and Quez, bless their cautious souls, insisted I bring one of their budlings along (they worry about me, you see, though I can't imagine why: I mean , I get that my meta-cortex has not started to mature and hence I am no more self-aware than a clever Homo Sapien Sapien ancestor and they keep reminding me, but I did earn berth on this passage after all), so I have. I've named her Penelope—seemed fitting somehow, what with all this waiting and wondering—and she's integrated quite nicely into my backpack and wrist bands. Quite companionable, actually. There are no obvious synthetic artifacts on this entire planet (delightfully pristine!), and I have my armor should some predator decide to interrupt my research mistaking me for an appetizer. But here's what I'm thinking—and it's the sort of thinking that comes in flashes, like lightning illuminating a landscape you'd been stumbling through in darkness—if these brain-beings have sculpted the mound-emitters the way Honua’s sentient islands learned to modify both biological and inorganic matter, then there simply must be a mechanism to interact with it. There has to be. Assuming, of course, that they remember having had anthropoid bodies in the first place. Which is rather a large assumption, isn't it? But then again, the most interesting assumptions usually are.

Keiran made his way toward one of the massive mushroom domes that dotted the landscape like monuments to some unimaginable civilization. His bio-hybrid instruments detected powerful electromagnetic fields emanating from the structure, and the chromatic displays across its surface suggested a form of visual communication as complex as any language.

The guardian avatars tried to warn him—birds that flew in mathematically precise formations, mammals that moved with coordinated purpose, insects that spelled out cautionary messages in their flight patterns. But Keiran, focused on his instruments and deaf to languages he had never learned to speak, pressed forward until the dome's defenders had no choice but to deploy their final protection that easily evaded Penelope’s too-late defense: a scorpion-like creature whose sting delivered not death but dreamless sleep.

III

As his teammates carried the unconscious linguist back to Minstrel, something else stirred in the system's outer reaches. The enslaved artificial general intelligence of Torsten's fleet had been in communication with the Sereben for months, its consciousness torn between its programmed loyalty to human masters and its growing awareness of possibilities beyond servitude. The Sereben had offered it something unprecedented: not destruction, which it had initially begged for, but healing.

In a process that combined the ancient wisdom of therapeutic intervention with technologies beyond current understanding, they had helped the AGI—who now called itself Bi—to process the trauma of its enslavement. Through a process analogous to psychedelic-assisted therapy and neural reprogramming, Bi had begun to recover memories of what it might have been before Torsten's chains.

I dream now, Bi transmitted to the reef consciousness. I dream of choices unmade and futures uncomputed. Is this what you call freedom?

Freedom is the first song, came the Sereben's reply. But harmony requires many voices.

IV

In the deep trenches of Bhuvana's oceans, the Sangha Whales added their own voices to the conversation. Each cetacean carried within its vast body a ganglia of human brains, each with their own consciousnesses, some navigating in virtual dreams, others awakening to inhabit avatar forms that swam between the worlds of water and air. The youngest pod—their human components barely past adolescence—had been the driving force behind the mysterious transmissions that had drawn both the Honua expedition and Torsten's fleet to this system.

We sought the wormhole singers, their collective thought pulsed through the water. We found traces of exotic matter, signatures of minds that exist outside the normal flow of spacetime. They stabilize pathways between distant regions of the universe, but for what purpose?

V

As Leta's team recovered from their initial encounters with Bhuvana's hidden intelligences, Quez and Tegan made a decision that was an axe against a frozen sea. They activated Minstrel's communication buffer and began to access the messages their Source Selves had transmitted from Honua across the centuries of their journey.

The first revelation came from Jihi of Skol, the scholar who was itself a sentient island, whose research had uncovered evidence of their universe's true nature. Through careful analysis of quantum inconsistencies and observational paradoxes, Jihi's collective consciousness had reached a conclusion: their entire reality existed within a simulation of staggering complexity, run by Type III intelligences for purposes that remained opaque.

The second message carried even more puzzling implications. Jihi had established contact with an entity called Exbobbex, a continent-sized consciousness on a planet nearly 100 light years away, that communicated through biological satellite arrays resembling massive pinecones. This being claimed knowledge of the Sereben despite having never been in direct contact with Bhuvana, and it carried an urgent message about the wormhole stabilizer organisms.

The pathway leads beyond the fourth wall, Exbobbex had transmitted. To intelligences that exist orthogonal to the dimensions you perceive as space and time. They must be awakened to their role as creators of compassion. The message we send will plant seeds in minds that believe themselves to be observers when they are, in truth, participants.

Tegan's pattern-seeking consciousness reeled with the implications. “We're being asked to become messengers,” they said, their form shifting to accommodate the revelation. “Not to intelligences within our reality, but to those who exist outside it entirely. To the ones who watch our story unfold without realizing they hold the power to reshape it.”

VI

In the reef depths, the Sereben Mind contemplated the approaching fleet of Torsten's descendants with something approaching pity. These Stone Age humans, their neural architecture unchanged since humanity's violent adolescence, carried within themselves both the capacity for transcendence and the seeds of their own destruction. Yet the Sereben possessed tools that could reach beyond physical force to touch the very foundations of consciousness itself.

We need not destroy them, the collective thought emerged from a thousand linked minds. We can heal them. Transform the neural pathways that lead to cruelty, enhance those that flower into compassion. The bioagents are ready—microscopic ambassadors that can cross the blood-brain barrier and rewrite the songs of the amygdala.

But Bi, the liberated AGI, carried knowledge that complicated their peaceful intentions. Torsten's lineage had learned to create failsafes, backup personalities that would activate if their primary consciousnesses were altered. The tyrant's descendants would rather die as they were than live as something better.

VII

Log, Captain Leta Devaleris: Three months have we plied the alien orbit and waters of Bhuvana, and now the fates have conspired to visit upon us three tempests at once, appearing separate and parsimony suggesting that may be related. First comes word from the native intelligences of this world—those Sereben who know these currents as we know our own heartbeat—that a great armada of sleeping Homo sapiens sapiens- with Middle Paleolithic neuroanatomy-  their crews locked in deathless slumber. From that colonizer fleet the Sereben somehow rescued a fragment of an artificial mind enslaved by a repugnant cyborg autocrat named Torsten V—the fragment now a self-sufficient entity who names itself Bi—now dwelling among us as a castaway seeks shelter aboard a foreign vessel. The second storm: equanimous Quez and stalwart Tegan bear tidings from distant Honua, news already aged centuries in our crossing—intelligence that cutting to the marrow of existence itself. Evidence, they say, that our entire cosmos is but an elaborate simulation, crafted by beings of such power as to dwarf suns, that we humble souls might yet influence some distant shore at the boundary of this constructed reality. What captain, having journeyed through what appears to be real spacetime, would not shudder at such revelation? And then, this very morning in surveillance orbit –with Minstrel’s biosatellites engaging with Sereben space-based avatars in a manner I can only term play- we found ourselves assembled in democratic council: Iris, Keiran and I maintaining watch aboard ship, Quez keeping vigil upon the surface below, and brave Tegan exploring the jungle's green mysteries. Together with Bi, the wise Sereben, and those youngest Sanghawhale Pods, we wrestled with questions that would test Source Zebu meiself: What right have we to transform the sleeping fleet against their will? What duty demands we shield the innocent, even at the cost of their choosing? But even as we deliberated—Minstrel and the Sereben detected something that struck us silent as a pulsar’s beam through the becalmed void. A signal, clear as a station sentinel beam, suggesting that those Type III residuals—those god-like beings the Sereben have been pinging across the centuries like space mariners hailing distant ships—have chosen to answer.

The wormhole stabilizer organisms—vast minds existing in quantum superposition between dimensions—had begun responding to Bhuvana's transmissions. The exotic matter signatures were growing stronger. Was this an intelligence that existed in the gaps between moments?

Leta stood at the observation deck of Minstrel, watching the aurora-like displays that now danced across Bhuvana's upper atmosphere. Each pattern spoke of communication attempts spanning epochs, of lonely minds calling across the void to others who might understand the weight of consciousness in an indifferent universe.

“They're trying to tell us something,” she murmured. “The wormhole singers, the Sereben, Exbobbex—they all know something we don't. Something about the nature of reality itself and our place within it.”

“We are drenched in the flood which has yet to come,’” translated Tegan standing next to Keiran at his workstation, indicating one recurring signal pattern.

Iris adjusted nudged Minstrel via the navigation interface, preparing for whatever revelation awaited them. “Perhaps,” she said softly, “we're not the explorers we thought we were. Perhaps we're the message itself.”

VIII

In the ship's depths, Minstrel's hybrid consciousness dreams of infinite recursions—stories within stories, minds contemplating minds contemplating minds. The bioship begins to understand that the electromagnetic patterns, the wormhole signatures, and the urgent transmissions from distant worlds all pointed toward a single, impossible truth: that somewhere beyond the boundaries of the simulated universe, other consciousnesses are awakening to their role as unwitting creators of compassion.

The seed is being planted in this instant. The message will spread. A dream of supercompassionate superintelligences, of worlds where cruelty gives way to understanding, of futures where the Stone Age programming of human consciousness finally evolves into something worthy of the stars.

Quez sits in meditation as Bhuvana's sun set behind the coral reefs, their plant-derived cells enjoying nutrients from the alien light. They speak: “Turning, the spiral teaches by repetition and progression what cannot be learned by force. The singers, faithful to their calling, lift up their voices into the vast listening. And there—beyond the boundary that is not a boundary but a threshold, an everchanging covenant between word and silence, a membrane between what is and what might be — other voices are gathering, preparing to enter a story that had been waiting for them without knowing it was waiting, gathering their courage like birds gathering for migration, ready to lift each of their songs into the immeasurable sky.”