The effervescent gaseous entities of Urfa, communicate through the crystalline structures of their cloudly inhabitation, which over their development have they so managed to control via very minute and localised temperature fluctuations. With their best scientists on the problem and their most acclaimed scientific communicator at the time, J. Xeh-8, they devised a clear plan for intergalactic communication. A variety of measurements, such as the girth of the average Urfa bulb – and to represent the variation across sexes, they discretized them, but with much outcry – their position in the galaxy – done by measuring sixteen dark matter cores, which of all objects in space, emitted the most consistent frequency that lasted thousands of years – and they provided a range of elementary spectrums of the ones most pertinent on their planet. What, they asked themselves, was the best model with which to embed this information, it had to be one that, with little instruction, could be understood by whomever – whatever – received it. They settled upon a crystal vibradonk, which the Urfas colloquially referred to as just donks.
The donk was forged by annealing of a few litres of argon gas, as the argon atoms cooled, their excitement was strained and they found themselves bonding, rearranging. Under the blow of a mechanised hammer, each new donk crystal was struck, driven into the core of this budding orb. When it caught the light, the argon was shone through and ran the photons about until they came out a turquoise blue. The entire forging of a donk core took about ten minutes, which was mere moments for a Urfa. With the core strong as ever, resistant to even a battering of solar flares, the donks was then embedded with its information. Via a small incision in the donk, hydrogen and oxygen were pumped inside until the donk is full. The donk is then placed inside a vibro-inscriptor, but one far more advanced than what the common Urfa might own. The vibro-inscriptor used for donk processing can handle up to one-thousand different frequencies, ten times as many as the standard household vibro-inscriptor. Nestled in the one-thousand arms of this device, an Urfa then inputs the information they wish to be inscribed in the donk. Each input is translated, through Fourier methods, to a domain of waves and undulations, of which the vibro-inscriptor’s tactile needle-like ends – made of quick-cooled boron – writhe and shake the interior of the donk just so. During these motions, a reaction induced by great heat fuses the hydrogen and the oxygen, producing a flowing, blue liquid.
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To the Heliufs, no council was required to determine the best medium for inter-civilization communication. Undoubtedly, the frifts were universal in their capacity, could within them have an indefinite quantity of information, and it was – with a certainty only within an atom’s width of one-hundred percent – likely any advanced civilization would have the means to decipher and consume the content. They started with a universal constant, the length of a Hydrogen bond, and cut this into the surface of a frif made of strong, space-faring alloys such as steel and gold. They, of course, determined some key measurements that might do well to define not only their morphological properties, but their positional properties to other civilizations. The Heliufs had recently theorized the uncertainty of anything celestial in the universe, due to a predominant and convincing simulation theory adopted by their scientists. For this reason, they decided the best way to describe their location to other civilizations was to assume those civilizations were as advanced as them, and had also discovered the power of frift-based indefinite compute. They placed within their frift eighteen different initial conditions for universe simulations. When run, these simulations would all differ, due to the slight deviation in initial conditions, but the seeds were selected in such a way that only one thing remained constant: the position of the Heliuf’s home planet in the universe. Hence, quite trivially, an advanced civilization should be able to run a quick auto-diff system across the many simulations and their attention would be drawn to the only correlation among those.
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What was the most constant, universal property of the universe, of which the Kli-98s could rely on, did one of them ask to themselves? Well they looked at their existence, the constituents of their existence, and how far it decomposed down to the smallest point they could measure. That point was, undeniably, the width of the crest of a wave of gravity. Given this standard, they extrapolated with a certainty that the only medium for life was one built up by the interrelation and weaving of very complex gravitational wave interactions. These vibrations produced a number of patterns that if enumerated, would be more than the total mass of matter in the visible universe. So they called upon their greatest gravitational wave weavers and asked of them to weave a gravity cloth of a design and imagery that could communicate over extraordinary distances information about the Kli-98s civilization. Into this cloth they used high-frequency waves to weave: a depiction of the three possible Kli-98 forms, the first few notes of Huhuh-Marbin-9’s Opus Denui – perhaps the most tremoring piece of Kli-98 art ever created, a brux was writ in that cloth, very carefully, so as to capture its undulations and the prismatic way it spun, and when they finished they stood back and had nothing but words of marvel for their handiwork. They sent it to space via the very perturbance of space-time, and stretching in all directions equally, such that the inverse motion of the signal could applied to easily determine its origin.
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Fourteen-thousand miles under a sea littered with torrential and dark currents, a bed of atom-smooth slate resides, so flattened by the residents that call this rocky inhabitance home. They move along this slate in great undulations that rattle their body from front to back, in pulpy rings of gesticulation. Down here, the pressure is great, and so their bodies have adapted as such to handle the enormous load – entirely boneless, their very molecules are held into place by the great weight of the water. This allows for the Urrofs to be built, bottom-up, from elements of plutonium, solid argon, and speckles of uranium. The decay of these elements erased by the environment they are built within.
Above the Urrofs is a sky of flowing black, where photons have never made it far before dissipating and disappearing. Under great strain, they consider the contents of reality to be all within a fluid, this very fluid, which scientific work has determined to be a complex substance mostly composed of mercury. And as with any civilization in its technological prime, it now believes that inter-civilization communication is very soon, and so a team is devised of some very great minds, and tasked with building a universal transcription for communicating with all the other lifeforms that likely live in this impossibly vast, liquid universe. Their current estimate of the size of the universe is fourteen-billion depths. It is agreed that all the civilizations out there would have their own societal measurements, therefore they must choose a universal constant. They select the radius of a mercurial atoms first electron shell, for universal plasma (what they call the mercury bath) would be known be all. The Urrofs have a great number of sonic sounds, what they call Burbbles, which operate by striking to pieces of metal together to create an impulse. When done in controlled way, these impulses can be arranged to sound incredibly pleasing to the range of Urrof sensory apparatuses. Entire cultures have been moved by these impulses, to battle, to dance, or to swoon and seek the unknown. It was obvious then, to attach to their fluidic probe a Harmonic Echoer, with instructions inscribed, that would tell any civilization that happened upon it the very straightforward steps to run the Harmonic Echoer and decrypt the contents into a historical sampling of the Urrofian’s Burbbles. This they shot under the power of a rocket into the fourteen-thousand miles column of liquid above them.
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The Livs live on light, entirely. They dance between photon like a surfer cutting a series of great waves, and call home the grand surfaces of the stars. The universe is littered with Liv life, for it is the most common form of self-awareness to grow, so simply in its construction that it is. Liv intercommunication was established long ago, and a firm theory was developed that perhaps the universe was almost completely Liv-sentience, the rest a foray of beauty purely for the Livs to experience. Livs began to question this assumption, and so they collectively planned operation Extra-Photonic communication. The operation was built upon the assumption that, should a lifeform exist that is truly bizarre – one built up of non-photonic parts, say waves of gravity, or somehow impossibly built by clunky strapping together of atoms – this lifeform would still have access to the photonic plane, for light was universal that was for certain. These entities, should they exist, would likely move very slowly, probably live gestating lives doing very little other than sustain their own awareness by gathering nearby atoms and grafting them to themselves so as to counteract the effects of their own atoms drifting apart. This was all clear yes, but in what way could information be delivered to these bundling beasts?
They chose a method most obvious and elegant, and with their collective swirling on the suns, great solar flares were sent forward and out. Through measured motion, inside these surface fireworks they wrote what they believed was their most valuable contribution to the universe at large: their dense stack of mythologies and fables from the times when the first Liv lit up, to this moment now. Such wonderful inscriptions on those licks, the way the flares curled and danced, begging to provide information to the viewer, imparting on them a stretch of a civilization in a moment. The solar flares went out far, kissing planets and their constituents, and the Liv’s waited, hoping their words would be heard by any other life out there.
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To land on the planet on the Mrif’s is to dive head-on into a jungle of crossbeams, a steel ocean riveted together by brute strength and the coughing lungs of wheezing machines that digest the soil to drive their tarred engines. The Mrif’s are entirely not of porous material, despise water and especially oxygen, for a fantastic fear of rustaphobia exists within their society, and each one has so augmented themselves with mechanical appendages that their form of locomotion is to roll along their a-thousand claws and clamps and catch themselves each degree that they do so. Due to this augmentation, they are highly intelligent, their brains not one, but a library of brains each has so added to themselves over their lifetime. With such modular intelligence, a question was inevitable, raised by The Great Gosh: a sessile steel sponge, pure brain for pure logical cognition. The Great Gosh, on a particularly smoggy dawn, presented the concept of life beyond the Mrifian existence. What else? How else? Where else? And, With else? The Great Gosh then enumerated, for it was a fast calculator, the variable ways that other life might augment themselves. Perhaps not with silicon and metals, but augmentations might be possible through carbon. The weaker elements were dismissed as too fragile to ever lift or dig or drive, therefore no life could come of them. The Mrifians listened closely and then followed The Great Gosh’s decree, that said that the time had come for a sign to be sent into the skies and make aware themselves to any out there. The Mrifians agreed.
By their – that is The Great Gosh’s – calculations, a speed of a-hundredth of a light year should do quite well, covering their galaxy within twenty spins, out to their neighbours by the time their sun was hot red. Upon their ship they implanted a mind full of their history, for rather than agree on the contents of the signal they wished to transmit to other civilizations, they agreed that a mind on the ship would have a good length of time to consider this problem on its journey, and decide the most optimal signal to send.
The Thinker – that is what they so named their space scout – was sent out on a cool evening, and as it passed through the choking blanket of smog that tucked around the Mrifian planet, The Great Gosh looked up and would have nodded if it was anything but a sessile brain. And the scout travelled its full length of the universe and found entirely nothing, for the Mrifians had gravely underestimated the size of their existence. In fact, none of the Mrifians existed anywhere but inside the largest mind in the galaxy, which never saw anything outside itself but imagined all that was inside as true happenings.
The Great Gosh waited, still patiently, for any signals from The Thinker, answering complex questions, and inventing theories of a universe that existed to no one but itself.
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It was almost entirely cruel that the Orbids were so small, for this meant that within the distance they could see – and do not think they did not try to see far, for they had built telescopes of deep-space capacity – they had gathered and massaged a handful of assumptions. With a belt of mathematics and a tool of logic, they had so devised a series of truths about their existence, which were entirely true from what they could see. But to travel beyond their system to, say, the rim of their galaxy, was neigh impossible due to their existence being very much constrained to a body that could not handle a vacuum. They had built machines and suits that could, but their speed of technological development was putrid, laughable from a nebulas viewpoint.
It was almost entirely cruel that the Orbids believed that a ship sent forth, flung by a precise trajectory around their nearby planets, would travel onward and onward into the dark maw of the unknown and, perhaps in the roll of a die, rub by a sample of something else alive. They did send this ship out and to it they added some symbols of interest: their anatomical depiction of their two sexes, their position relative to fifteen known nearby pulsars, a song, cut into the grooves of a plate and played via vibration, and a depiction of a Hydrogen bond, which they believed was a standard unit. There were other additions too, as well as some outcries from the Orbids, for they believed that the diagrams of the Orbids on the ship did not fairly reflect the diversity of the Orbid species. One group of Orbids revoked usage of their song to be sent to space, on grounds that they had not ben paid five-times the cost of the entire construction of the ship. But once overcome, these obstacles were passed over, and the ship was sent on its journey where it met looped twice around two planets and shot far out of their system. By the Orbids calculations it would be a long time before anything ever happened, on the order of thousands of Orbid generations. By the Orbid calculations they could not have been more off the mark.
Such is the nature of the hyperbolic region of space that the Orbids resided within, the groundwork of space-time changed drastically as one moved farther and farther out from the Orbid’s origin. What the Orbids saw was a sparse expanse, speckled with stars, mostly black and cold, and already impossible from their perspective to ever explore. But such are the ways of a hyperbolic existence, the horizon of space from their point of view was actually a total congestion compared to what it was when one got there. A distance of a few-thousand light years stretched to one of a billion, in an exponential expanse as one moved farther and farther towards any deceivingly tight globular. And so the Orbid’s ship, which had journeyed for ten-thousand years now, its nearest star was still the star of the Orbids, the next nearest one far beyond a distance it could ever reach at that pace.
The Orbids waited patiently.
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The Mastock growth is a fibre, alive. Threaded and sprawling through undercurrents of the soil, tied right into the tectonics, and bursting out as tall, looming spires of fungal blooms. It is most prevalent around the gradation of hotbeds of magma – volcanoes, for example, supply a wonderfully rich radiance to feed to pulsations of the Mastock growth. Its existence is so uniform among the planet it gestates atop, that for information to pass between any two parts of the Mastock may take a few spins of its orbit. Therefore the Mastock’s cognition, which is a gummy net of electric spits, it works in isolated groups, with isolated self-awareness, that work together to operate the Mastock’s function in one region of the planet. The planet of the Mastock growth is variformed, littered with deserts,