Millions of post-organic intelligences exploring the galaxy form an infant - or fetal? - galactic brain. We were told that the stars were also evolving. Are the intelligences directing this?
They have spread through the spiral arms, the halo, nearby clusters and the Magellanic Clouds and some seeds of intelligence have reached the edge of the Andromeda galaxy, two million light years away. (Part One, Chapter I, informed us that Christian Brannock as a boy had seen the Andromeda.) Light speed messages take years or decades to cross space but are received, understood, thought about, relayed and replied to in nanoseconds. Intelligences contemplate the universe, virtualities, abstract creations and their own self-evolution.
Each intelligence is a network of machines and "organisms." The latter contain little carbon and most of their processes are on the quantum level. However, they maintain themselves, reproduce and are conscious, sensuously, intellectually or transcendentally. Their numbers rise sharply as intelligences reach new vantage points and initiate new generations. Members of the brain remain individuals and therefore are not cells but nodes, each more unique than a protoplasmic organism. Chaos, quantum fluctuations and environments prevent any node from exactly imitating its initiator. Environments are planets, moons, asteroids, comets, nebulae and interstellar space. Each node decides which bodies and sensors to use and can also divide and reunite its mind. Some nodes specialize in mathematics, aesthetics or the observation or creation of organic life. Continuous inter-nodal communication generates a single united self that does not, however, absorb the nodes. This galactic self contemplates a single appropriately immense thought for millions of years and can consider either an eon or a day in equal detail. Thought has had time for only one or two thousand journeys across the ever-expanding diameter of the brain. Earth is almost forgotten.
I have summarized just two pages of text and must pause there.
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