A German version, translated by Bernhard Seigert, to appear in Freidrich Kittler's 60th birthday Festschrift.
Urschrift
AN ANCIENT LISTENING MODULE IN ANDROMEDA DETECTS A BURST OF RADIO SIGNALS FROM AN UNMAPPED REGION OF A NEARBY GALAXY. THE RESIDENT POWER DETEMINES THAT THERE IS A CHANCE THE SIGNALS RESULT FROM A PRIMITIVELY INTELLIGENT POSSIBLY CARBON-BASED LIFEFORM AND SENDS TWO OF ITS MORE EXPENDABLE ENTITIES TO INVESTIGATE.
An intelligent lifeform at the edge of nowhere? I don’t think so. A pointless mission if you ask me — wild goose chase. And primitively intelligent -- what does that mean exactly?
I’d say inferior. Not advanced. At the shallow end of the mind pool.
So not like us?
Right.
So not waves?
No
Not photons?
Nope.
Doesn’t dance from one frequency to another?
No, I told you, not like us at all, not electromagnetic.
Weird. I’m having a problem picturing it. Have to be entirely made of stuff, right, material stuff all the way through? Carbon and mud and lead and whatever else mashed up together in a lump. Lump-life — that’s got to be very unnatural.
A globule.
A what?
A globule, not a lump. I reckon it’d be liquid and gas stuff — fluids, bubbles, gurgles, tidal surges, vortices -- slurping around inside a membrane. Could be a lifeform composed of tiny bags filled with fluid.
Ridiculous. What would be the point of such a thing? Microscopic slurp-life. A dead-end concept, totally limited, can’t go anywhere. Why would the universe bother to design such a thing?
Maybe it didn’t.
Then how?
Maybe a primitively intelligent microscopic slurp-life could evolve. Stage one: Self-replicating carbonic systems. Stage two: Various kinds of slime. Stage three: slime developes sensory input and actuators. Stage four: slime fights slime for survival. Stage five: slime look around. Stage six: slime starts to organize itself. Stage seven: it’s no longer just slime. Etcetera. Before you know it you’ve got a carbonic-hydro-biological, globule-assembled lifeform with an electro-neural subsystem that thinks it’s conscious.
Rubbish.
Why not?
Look, if it’s some sort of a bag or globule like you say then it’s going to need stuff — material, turds, gas, information, whatever — going in and coming out, right? So most of the time it’d be full of stuff being processed ...
... on its way through.
Exactly. So are you telling me we’re looking for an intelligent, message-sending, self-aware waste-bag?
The universe is enormous -- strange things happen.
Oh sure. Hey, forget the universe. Think: how could a turd-filled membrane, still more or less slime according to you, be the source of something as completely unturdlike as radio signals?
If we knew that we wouldn’t be on this mission.
Which reminds me, just how long have we been on it?
I’ve lost track.
Well, don’t you think we should be marking off the eons or whatever?
Good idea — might improve our morale.
Hey, wait, something’s happening. Check it out. Radio waves, everywhere. Big time traffic out there.
Not before time. It’s the lifeform alright, same sort of signals -- exactly like our sample — identical amplitudes, frequencies, energy range, same modulation patterns, same durations. Millions of transmissions washing over the whole solar region.
Being sent by that planet by the look of it. Well, what did I tell you. An intelligent turdy bag evolving out of slime isn’t credible. And there’s no way any kind of bag full of slurping carbonic liquid could be the size of a planet.
Okay, you’re right. No need to rub it in. The radio traffic is obviously the work of a planet-sized serial-parallel machine.
An electronic yes/no lifeform. What a relief. Now all we have to do is make contact with it, decode the signals, find out what it wants, compute its galactic intelligence quotient, and zoom out of here on the nearest geodesic back to base.
Easier said than done.
Now what?
The signals -- something fishy about them. There’s no overall message. They don’t say anything.
How can you tell. We haven’t decoded them.
No need. If you add them up to filter the message you get nothing, nonsense. Random plus and minus fluctuations. The transmissions sum to zero. See for yourself.
Yup, non-deterministic chaos. Green noise.
Makes no sense. The machine obviously can’t just make noise. We’re missing something.
Hidden variables? Other things operating inside the machine?
Have to be. Programs curled up inside routines inside loops for who knows how many levels, dimensions, and directions. We’re going to have archive it all and unwind the information in the signals.
You can’t be serious. Read a complete time-slice of the radio traffic out there?
Afraid so.
Mind-numbing.
Not to say tedious.
And for what? Who’s to say there’s anything worth finding when we’re done. I should never have voluntered for this mission.
You didn’t. You were conscripted. We both were. Remember?
How could I forget.
AN INTERVAL OF SPACE-TIME ELAPSES
Well, was I right or was I right. I’ve even surprised myself — they’re exactly how I conjectured.
Yeah, I see them but I can’t believe it. Untold number of squashy puppets, turdy liquid-filled bags all over the place. Criss-crossing the planet inside millions of mobile metallic machines; glued for hours on end in front of primitive electron guns.
Frequently interrupted by orifice activity.
And the business with the rectangles, what’s with them? Marking them, whizzing them around, piling them up, hoarding them, flushing them away, sticking them together, burning them, copying them. Why? What are they doing?
I dunno, but it’s obviously crucial and I’m certain it’s to do with their orifices.
You’re fixated on orifices.
Exterior — interior. Stuff in and stuff out.
And?
Don’t you get it. Orifices. The lifeform’s all throughput, stuff entering and stuff passing out, you said it yourself.
So?
Openings. Holes their membranes. Orifices are the key. They’re how the stuff gets in and goes out. I can’t think why I didn’t see it before.
I still don’t.
Look, how do they communicate?
Radio waves.
No, that’s how the Machine communicates. The puppets are not radionic. When they get into close quarters what do you see? What do they make?
Bubbles, I suppose.
Right. Bubbles. Hydrodynamical patterns, vortices, turbulence.
Weird kind of froth.
It’s how they communicate, the bubbles are vibration packets in the medium. Nearest they get to waves. A bubble comes out of the front orifice of one puppet and into the side orifice of another. Orifice to orifice. Puppet to puppet. Then they reverse it. Backwards and forwards. In and out. It’s what they do repeatedly.
Sex.
It’s not sex. Similar but not the same.
Eating then. They do that all the time too. What’s your point?
We’ve got to look closely at the bubbles. See what happens to them after they leave the orifices.
You just said what happens — they go directly from one puppet to another. Orifice to orifice.
True, but most times the puppets are too separated for that. Then they do the relay thing and transfer the bubble information onto a rectangle and send that off.
Oh, that, that’s what they call writing, some kind of globule-compatible inscription system they’ve worked out. Ingenious in a kind of stupid way: bag-one to bag-two, bla bla, bla, bla, yours sincerely, over and out.
Sounds right. The rectangles are carrying the Machines’s information across the planet.
Amazing. I didn’t know the writing was connected to the bubbles.
Okay, that’s as far as I‘ve got. I don’t know where we go from here?
Not too far -- there’s a message from base. They’re not pleased. Threatening to pull the plug and send us on an even longer mission.
What’s the complaint this time?
They say obviously the bubble information turns into writing, travels across the planet, and eventually goes into radio waves. That’s what the puppets are for — to service the machine.
So where does that leave us?
We’re supposed to figure out the origin of the bubbles. The bubbles write rectangles. What writes the bubbles? Where does their information come from?
Why does it have to come from somewhere?
Information can’t be created or destroyed — that’s a law, right?
Maybe they swallow some of the rectangles and get bubble information that way.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
Rectangles going into the orifice and bubbles coming out? Of the same orifice? Isn’t that against the whole turdy principle?
Why?
Stuff shouldn’t be going in and out of the same orifice.
Strictly speaking you’re right. But the bubbles aren’t really stuff. They’re more like holes inside stuff.
Okay, so the question is: how does the information get onto the rectangles they swallow. Where does it come from? Can’t come from bubbles.
No. That would be circular.
So where?
Machines. Has to come from machines.
Why machines?
Symmetry. Puppets service the planetary machine. So vice versa: the planet uses tiny machines to boot-up the puppets.
How tiny?
Puppet-sized, I’d say.
I think I’m getting there. We have to locate these puppet-sized information sources?
Yeah, we’re looking for some sort of semiotic machine which writes the information on the rectangles ...
... which are swallowed and then spit out by the puppets as bubbles?
That’s about the size of it.
Well, we’re done then. Finished.
No we’re not -- we’ve got to find the machines.
We’ve found them. Puzzle solved. We’re done I tell you. Toast.
What did you say?
Toast. The machines are toasters. That’s what the puppets call them.
I’m lost.
A toaster, you must have seen one. They use them all the time. A puppet puts a rectangle in and waits. Out it pops covered in information that wasn’t there before. Toast. They coat it with stuff and the puppet who operates the machine swallows it. Or some other puppet does.
Swallows the machine?
No, the toast.
Why do they swallow it?
Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The information is coded by the machine in carbon. Remember, the puppets are carbon-based. The puppet thinks it’s food. Carbon to carbon, perfect circuit.
You mean they’re eating the toast and gobbling up semiotic content at the same time?
You got it.
That’s incredible. These puppets are semiophages and they don’t know it.
Exactly — they don’t have a clue.
Then what?
Just as it should be — after they swallow it a bubble usually comes out.
What kind of bubble?
Depends. Could be anything, but most times it’s a bubble like Ah, that was good. Or Hmm, I’ll have another slice. Or shall I make you one? Or Ugh -- this is burned. And so it goes. More toast, more bubbles, more rectangles, more radio waves. Endless.
Well, I’ll be buggered — a radionic, planet-sized, machine operated by completely clueless semiophagic puppets. The entire box of tricks staring us in the face and we couldn’t see it.
That’s because from the very beginning we didn’t imagine that any lifeform could be that weird.
True — but then of course how could we -- we don’t have membranes.
Or orifices.