Something about it was disturbing; how was unclear. The way they just sat there, like a granite face of a cliff that undulated only through centuries of pawing hands of the ocean, or like trees which hum their wise group-think around you as you wander through them. But unlike trees these ‘stiff’ thinkers moved fast, fast enough and with sharp intent to make it clear they were planning, pondering, and proliferating. They stretched and slapped along their concrete pyres – the architecture was a stark contrast to their own build. Why not build wet formations in the eye of their own construction?

He wasn’t here to judge them, but one can’t help but toy with subjective thought reels inside a mind, even in the realm of science. Science, the discipline charged with saving their world in the next two years. Two years before their natural power source, Segmund, loudly declared the end of it’s life to all planets within forty billion miles. The transaction for having expended its resources to support the life around it is that you must follow it into the darkness of the next life. Nothing comes for free in the universe.

He rotated his head a few times to mix some thought patterns around and contemplate what he was now seeing. An individual from the species was vertical before a gathering of other individuals. They were tightly packed within a room that slanted back and upward from the front, in a steeped pattern like a curated Bismuth crystal. The ones on the slant were perched on their dorsal sides while the one at the front seemed to be facing the group, bellowing notes and hitting a longer stick against the wall behind it. And none of them moved. To be precise, the one at the front moved here and there to wobble his long device here and there along the wall, and a sputter of wetness sometimes erupted from the audience. But that was not unlike the wind shifting the branches of a great oak or the river tying eddies around rocks. Simple motions. They weren’t moving. And yet there was communication and intelligent behavior clear as a cold cross-wind. What was apparent was that symbols were being added and removed from the wall behind the one at the front and somehow the information contained in these units was processed and re-exposed to those in the group. It was unorganized and inefficient. He spun his head a few more times as an idle thought tried to drag him along a different axis of mind. Observing such alien organization required focus and pinpoint rotation. His head hummed.

Spin this one for me, he tells himself. Self-didacting was the way the ancients had done their greatest theorizing and he had practised hard to mimic his idols. Now something else. Here a smaller individual, again positioned like the ones in the group, just there. Unmoving, for what now clocks at a quarter of the rotation of their home planet, and undisturbed. But he was far from unmoving, he was positively whirring, unsettling. Somehow it is apparent that the individual is performing a task over an information source with the same symbols as last time, only smaller. Some subtle movements of the end-effectors adjust the information piece but it just stays there. Where is the intelligence, the focus, obvious cues that input is being processed. “Intelligence is an axis on which when a velocity is applied, the information sources represented along that axis of rotation cross over and intertwine, just like the intertwining of two organisms in a mating ritual,” Juv Hurst, A Treatise on Multidimensional Rotation and How It Pertains to Intelligence. Hurst had condensed so eloquently in his four-hundred and thirty-two page piece how all intelligence, from the spin of solar objects, to the turbulent hydraulic periods of the single-cellular, expressed an obvious progression of intelligence by how the rotated. But here was a crack in the structure of a beautiful theory: an alien that remained as rigid as a the most dead rock you could find, but acting as if it had purpose.

A little experiment. He stopped spinning his head. For a moment he hesitated, feeling self-conscious and childish to present himself like that with colleagues so nearby. But he had baked into his mind stories like Klapus who hurled himself off a train to experiment with momentum, or Vendit de Rou who in a manic rage once rooted his head to a wall and spun his abdomen instead – science demanded acts of insanity. He didn’t stop spinning his head so easily, there is always an idle spin which his subconscious control demands, like overriding a heartbeat or a reflex response to touching a hot oven. But he managed to settle into a rhythm of slowing going deeper, pushing a little here and there on muscle control he didn’t know he had. Slowing down, slowly. The slower it got the harder it became to focus, thoughts seemed like the tangle of transitions in wild dreams. Standing by an ocean reaching for a pebble and then suddenly the pebble is a steaming cup of chocolate on a balcony of an uncapped city block. Slower. The cup of chocolate hissed and the bubble became the face of his mother as she reached out to stroke a face. The face was falling backward and splashed through the liquid surface of the balcony and it was underwater. A polished slab of dark stone hung in front of him and in the reflection he studied the face and a sense of self collapsed onto the image. The face was his. But the thread was lost when the image of the water around him gave way to a space-line. What was once bubbles spread into nebulae palettes of gas that smeared along the edges of his vision. Some fish had been caught in the transformation and wound up as fish-shaped galaxies smeared into a multi-armed spiraling smile. The space kept stretching and time was going by quickly. A galaxy buzzed like a saw and flung some of its unfortunate civilizations into eternal darkness. The face swallowed the galaxy. More galaxies, each its own chosen color of firework chemicals, shrunk into the space as he grew. Each one slowly eaten. This bounded yet blurry space lost its main feature: the ability to focus. Everything was where it was in that space and nothing would or could be the object of attention. It hung there, pinned at this visual like the granite face of a cliff studies the lapses of the ocean.