Kay looked. It seemed the same as everything else they’d seen. Except there was a lot of mottling and discoloration, now she really looked. But then, what was a well-preserved Ediacaran biota supposed to look like?

“This patchwork stuff is the source of the…field whose shadow you picked up? Where does it come from, though? Is there a centre, some…emperor brain creature?” she queried.

Cam spread its hands again, populating the space between them with a dense forest of calculations. “We believe the field to be global in scale, from this harvested data,” it explained. It spoke so smoothly now that she constantly forgot she was hearing a schoolchild version of its thoughts, watered down for human comprehension. “The homogeneity of this Earth’s life leads us to believe it is acting as a single organism on a global scale. It is able to generate forces permitting it to interact with the universe to manipulate Outerward space. This has resulted in alternative timelines, where this life was succeeded by other forms.”

“Resulting in us,” Kay finished, a first-person plural that included humans, Neanderthals, rodents, trilobites and the long-dead creators of the Ice Mind. “And now it’s dying.”

Interlude: The Ediacaran

Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence, revised second edition, by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

In this world, long ago, something awoke.

The supine sprawl of the Garden of Ediacara, all that weirdly fractal, quilted life: in our shared history, nothing that followed it was kin to it. It was just a failed experiment in multicellular living, soon to be outstripped by the more active monsters of the Palaeozoic, blown to pieces by the Cambrian explosion. But not in this world. This is the original, and in this world, this is all there ever is. In the beginning, the Ediacaran ecosystem arose and spread, following bacterial herds across the sea floor. It put out its crenulated flowerings—even adapting, after millions of years and with extreme difficulty, to the harshness of the land. It is a weird, undifferentiated life, sans organs, sans neurology, as though evolution had tried to shortcut its way to larger forms without taking any of the prerequisite steps.

As below, so above. If the individual Ediacaran entities represent a ham-fisted creator’s attempt at larger life, then something comparable occurs when we look at the leap to sentience. This is a world where hard borders never existed: not between plant and animal, not between single and multicellular, not between species or individuals. It is a frontier town kind of world where the rules don’t apply.