BIOLOGY CONSTRAINS OUR EXPERIENCE OF REALITY.

Into her own pod, at last!

She had gone through a week of final neural conditioning since getting through several tech reviews. Now the grand moment had arrived: direct line feed from the Sagittarius Architecture.

The pod was the focus of corridors that converged its many feeds, a congress of neural webs around the core—which looked disturbingly like a sarcophagus. A horseshoe of detectors and cooled computers wrapped around it like worshippers.

The attending crew did their jobs and she mounted into the pod and was closed in. The myriad neural connectors fit snugly to her nearly nude body. The team knew not to speak or distract. She let herself descend into a slow immersion. She thought of the bowl and sensed herself falling under the pod’s sway.

This would not be a mere translation problem. Many Messages were, but the pods were for advanced Messages. Some of the Messages lodged in the Library had not been intended for mortal ears or eyes at all. Like some ancient rulers of Mesopotamia, these alien authors directly addressed their deities, and only them. One opened plaintively,

Tell the God we know and say

for your tomorrow we give our today.

It was not obvious whether this couplet (for in the original it was clearly rhymed) came from a living civilization, or from an artifact left to remind the entire galaxy of what had come before. Perhaps, in alien terms, the distinction did not matter.

Such signals also carried Artificials, as the digital minds immersed in the Messages were termed. These were the intense focus of the Librarians. The advanced Artificials, such as Sagittarius, were artificial intelligences, conveyed by Messages that could run on for years of digital transfer. Such Artificials often supervised vast data-banks containing apparent secrets, outright brags, and certified history—which was often merely gossip about the great. These last, rather transparently, were couched to elicit punishment for the author’s enemies, or seek mercy from alien gods. This differed only in complexity and guile from the ancient motivations of Babylonian kings.

Most Messages of this beseeching tone assumed some universal moral laws and boasted of their authors’ compliance with them. At first the Sagittarius Architecture had appeared to be of this class, and so went largely uninterpreted for half a century. Only gradually did its sophistication and rich response become apparent. Most importantly, it was a new class entirely—the first Architecture Artificial.

The Sagittarius Architecture was a mind in itself, embodied in a string of code that took years to broadcast. SETI detectors had gotten pieces of it even earlier, but could not fathom it as the vastness it was.

More got filled in over decades. Finally, strung together, the Sagittarius Architecture consciousness emerged. It ran on dedicated servers in cryo vaults. It was never shut down and so had time to think in and of itself. Apparently the aliens who’d created it were long extinct—though even this was subject to interpretation of what the Sagittarius Architecture’s elliptical self said.