Kranti is already in the immersphere, going straight from this world to Shikasta 464b. I don’t know what she sees when she practices immer— immer on this world, I mean. She never talks about it.
Chirag:
Avi is increasingly following his own ideas. Of course we can’t send him commands and expect him to comply immediately—we are separated by four light-years, after all. But he has a communication protocol that is clearly being violated. He is modifying his own algorithms, ignoring, for example, the need to add commentary to his reports, or to explain what he is doing. I have seen him move lumps of magnetic debris in a way that looks like an attempt at communication with whatever it is he thinks he sees here. I think he has crossed the blurry boundary between non-life and life. We are estimating that Avi’s Walker Index is probably around 8.3.
There’s one more strange thing. It’s to do with Bhimu. When she and Avi were separated, literally made two, they had already laid the foundations of a new communication system. A private language analogous to what identical twins sometimes make up, but one that makes no sense to us. I’ve started to look at their old transcripts again. In the patterns I am finding similarities to some of the signals from Avi. In Avi’s transmissions, what seems like random noise overlaying the signals is revealing regularities astonishing in their subtlety. Am I deceiving myself, seeing what I want to see? Or is this a hint that Avi is trying to reach Bhimu—that perhaps she is still—alive?
We have been listening for Bhimu all these years in vain. It is strange that Avi’s twin, who was to stay with us on Earth, was the one we lost. After the raid you escaped with her. For her safety you didn’t tell us where. They captured you—but not Bhimu—in a remote region of the eastern Himalayas.
You were at their mercy how long, none of us can bear to think. How long before the picture of you was circulated, lying on the forest floor with gunshot wounds to your chest? They dressed your body in the uniform of one of the insurgent groups, and circulated your picture as a triumph of the progressive state versus the terrorists. Allegedly you had been hunted down after days of tracking you through the forest, yet the uniform was recently ironed, with its creases intact. Later we tried to find Bhimu among the tribals of the Northeast, and then, among the new hunter-gatherer anarchist groups. There are so many of the new groups, so many different philosophies: in the West, the gun-toting Savagers and the peace-loving Edenites, and here in India the Prakrits of MadhyaBhum and the Asabhyata movement’s adherents in the East. I hope that wherever she is, Bhimu is well. And that she’ll forgive us for separating her from Avi.
If Avi’s Walker Index is up to 8.3, what might Bhimu’s be? We have no way of knowing.
And if Avi is talking to the aliens—what is he saying?
Kranti:
Living things, always they contextualize. That is what adaptation is, a constant conversation with the surroundings, a contextualization intended to maintain life as long as possible. Ancient systems of medicine like Ayurveda talk of life force, what we call prana. It is called chi by the Chinese, holy wind by the Navajo. There are complex paths through which the life force flows in the body, and in Ayurveda the prana flows are part of a greater network, the cosmic prana. Could it be that life force inside living beings is a kind of metaphor for the communication channels? With the difference that in living beings beyond a Walker Index of 8, the information flows are top-down causal, shaped by the constraints and demands of the highest scale at which an organism exists … .
Living things have boundaries and sub-boundaries. But there is no absolute boundary because we are all open systems. In that sense what you define as life depends on the cut you make. Ancient peoples, forest dwelling people, desert tribes, they have always made different cuts in the world than scientists. Sometimes I make the cut as a scientist, sometimes as an Adivasi. I can slip from one world to another very quickly.
Chirag:
Kranti’s not being concrete, of course. Her mind has always moved faster than her words can keep up with. What she is trying to say is that if this is a life-form, it is communicating via local magnetic fields, and it may actually be morphologically distributed. She is saying that perhaps its body is here, there, and everywhere. Maybe the universal constructor, the control unit, is distributed too. Either that, or we have a superorganism of some sort. There is, after all, no a priori way of telling the difference between an individual and a community of individuals. And there are life-forms on Earth, Kranti points out, like slime molds, that can exist as individuals as well as collectives. Those survey flybys that Avi did, if we are interpreting them correctly, are like the view you get when you rise up in an airplane over a
