The Pinnacle

post by nem · 2023-03-07T17:07:08.821Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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In another universe, in another time, the stars don’t shine like ours. In fact, they act in a manner quite more familiar to you and I as that of a black hole. Take Los Ral as an example. An average star, whose future in this universe is rare, and storied.
Like its peers, Los Ral does not emit light. Instead, it draws energy inexorably toward it. Planets sail the solar plane, much as they do around our sun;  But if there is any scrap of energy on these planets, it is stripped from the surface. As though beckoned by Los Ral, photons fly the true and straight line towards the star. It is as though all of matter is a flashlight, and Los Ral the focal point towards which all is pointed.
So great is this attractive force that matter itself conspires to feed the stars. LR3 is a small planet of ice and rock, circling and circling Los Ral through the ages. On the surface, tiny movements and vibrations among the sand and gravel combine, as though dancing. They focus into the exact configuration required to beam energy onto the precise course that will eventually intercept Los Ral.
Now, as you are from Earth, this may seem strange to you, magical. I assure you it is not. It is simply how the universe operates. As it does not seem strange to you that gravity pulls down on a falling stone, nor would it seem strange to a denizen of the Los Ral system that energy seeks a wellsource. In fact, when the denizens of Los Ral emerge (and they shall), they will find it quite strange to hear that in your estimation, energy ought to travel away from an orderly source to disperse into the chaos of heat. After all, should the universe not tend towards order? Isn’t there some… appropriateness to the universe building systems of complexity and regulation out of chaos?
And so, I must ask you to understand that in the world of Los Ral, your assumptions must be challenged, and challenges assumed. It is a strangely similar world to our own, but strange it is, nonetheless. As you read on, remember that you could never truly understand a denizen of Los Ral, any more than you could hear a symphony by studying the mathematical patterns that play between the notes.

On LR3, swingingly endlessly and endlessly around Los Ral, something astounding occurs, after countless centuries. This planet, of rock and dust and ice has been slowly warming year after year, decade after decade. Its matter sucks and howls at the vacuum around it, gathering minute packets of energy, which it will eventually emit towards Los Ral. In this ordered yet random process, the first life appears.
In a layer of strata, a pocket of soil has just the right moisture content, just the right flow of energy from air to rock to sun, just the right chemistry. The impossible is achieved: stability. A structure emerges which moves and undulates, which contains its own little ecosystem of energy, energy embroiled for a spell before continuing its journey towards the wellsource.
As on our own planet, this first life is simple and hardy. Unlike the little procaryotes of earth, this life is not alone in its genesis. In fact, there are thousands, millions of similar creatures arising from the primordial soil. Second by second, lifeless dust transcends into a fecund pile, glowing with activity.
And here, I ask of you the impossible: Hear the silent symphony of this life. In a world where energy flows not out, but in, true life, the true system of stable reproduction lies not in the little robotic cells, but in the perfect, nearly impossible arrangement of the soil. Somehow, the jumbled notes of a pile of dirt work themselves into the exact arrangement to play a symphony; a configuration of dirt which takes advantage of the reliable universal tendency for energy to weave itself into elegance; and creates an intricate yet stable mechanism for the emergence of little packets of complexity. Therefore, it is more appropriate to think of the soil itself as the first life, and the little packets as a byproduct, or a spore; the cloth of an unseen loom.
I have asked that you stretch your imagination to the limit, and here I shall snap it. On this planet around Los Ral, the cosmic coincidence, the “first spark”, happens many times, over and over. Indeed it continues even now, with new soil achieving, from inertness, life. Truly, this should not be so surprising. In a universe where energy flows in reverse, order derives from chaos and is, if anything, rather expected. Order always arises from the teeming randomness of the world.
The true miracle, from the perspective of Los Ral, is the peculiar behavior of these soil-born machines. They seek, from the moment they are spawned, to combine with another of their type. Every bit of machinery is tooled for this specific goal: to locate, identify, and splice itself into its other half. And there is always another half. The machinery of the soil produces at least two of a kind. Not to do so would be impossible. In the unreasonably complex interactions that govern the soil, a cellular machine could not exist as a singleton. 
How can this be possible? Soil has no brain; no planning mind to ensure that each cell has a pair. Astute question, but uninformed. It is strictly the mathematics that arises from the Symphony of Energy Reversed. Thermodynamics runs backwards in this fugue, and it runs deterministically. 

A Los Rallian might very well ask you how a fire, with its last cinder blanched, knew to burn in such a way to create the exquisite, unique pattern of molecules interacting so intricately with the rest of the atmosphere. For a Los Rallian, such behavior is easy to see, and impossible to believe. So, the patterns of cellular machines interlock in just the right way that they might combine at the end of their lives. Easy to see, and impossible to believe. Yet it is so.

For the span of millions of years, this burgeoning life, in starts and fits, sputters into being on our planet. Finally, with a roar, the engine of life surges forward, and the next grand chasm is hurdled. Interacting with a now vibrant soil culture, bits of dust and carbon, amino acids, muck and grime combine in such a way that they congeal. Slowly, a pocket of slimy humus grows into an embryo, containing not one cell, but many. They mature, reified by the ground. Energy flows through them towards the sun. Molecular gears turn within. The first complex, multicellular organism is born. 
In truth, this event is not nearly as dramatic as I have made out. The conclusion of the organism’s birth was forgone from the moment of its conception. No lightning could have struck nearby, no avalanche crushed the fetus. That sort of degenerative nonsense has no place in the universe of Los Ral.  

In fact, the life on our planet is so different from what you conceive that to comprehend it, one must come to a new understanding of what it means to die. On LR3, there is truly only one death. It is not a rasping last breath, or the desiccation of once vibrant cells. No. Death is chaos reaching its natural end. It is the moment of combination, when the heat and the matter of a cell has been used to transfer order to a partner. 
This new organism, like the simple cells that precede and surround it, dies when it reaches its partner. Do not be fooled, however. Our new lifeform is differentiated from those that until now have dominated the land. It will wander the earth until it meets its partner; not a clone, but a complement. The partner is its own being, and their meeting is one of recombination, and complexity. When our little jumble of cells finds its paragon,  it will feed itself to her. It will channel every bit of energy towards her, making her more orderly in the process. She will become the First Mother.

Her life is an interesting one. Recall that the First Mother, like her kin, cannot truly be considered an organism. She is not independent of the soil system around her.  She cannot die by any means fatal to one such as yourself, for order flows only towards a single end. She does not reproduce, so much as she produces. Discard any notion that she is a member of a ‘species’. Rather, she is the most complex jewel in an entire living system. 

The First Mother lives for several weeks. She spends her precious days grubbing through the soil. When she finds the exact right randomness in the earth, she draws it into herself, feeding on the chaos. She tames this chaos and appends it to her orderly arrangement of energy. The order builds and builds, until unable to contain it, she gives birth to a cell. It is of the first, primitive type. The pistons of life have begun to pump. Where before, cells arrived from the perfect conditions and only in ideal locations, the First Mother travels and spawns cells at a regular, reliable interval. Most exciting of all, she even occasionally spawns an entirely new multicellular organism; a new Mother, different from her, who in turn travels the land mechanistically increasing the boundless diversity of life’s machinery. 
This is not life as we know it. It is, in a true sense, alien. But it is life nonetheless and it grows and grows. The First Mother finds her partner, and is consumed. That mother, spouting order like the plume from a steam engine, finds her own partner, and the complex web of this peculiar life spreads like a fracture in ice to cover the whole of the planet. RL3 is a giant organic factorium which seems to have no other purpose than the conceit of its own beautiful existence.  
 
As the planet warms and the biosphere expounds on itself wave after wave of life, the incomprehensible physics leads to some rather occult phenomena. Pockets of heat swirl and combine into rigid rocks, which have just the right arrangement to, like light, lift away from the planet. They defy gravity and hurtle in random directions. These now spaceborn rocks carry no life, by virtue of the process that created them. They continue to convert energy into light to shine back towards Los Ral, of course, as does everything in this pocket of reality.


Over time, some of the organisms become incomprehensibly complicated, as should be expected of such intricate natural clockwork. Organisms develop predictive machinery; a sort of proto-intelligence which allows them to anticipate the future, although not always with perfect accuracy. The brains of these organisms contain nerve-like structures, the form of which can be extrapolated to show the future flow of energy from cell to sun. 

This method of prediction is more accurate than our own, which relies on heuristics to predict chaos from order. In a plain reversal of our intelligence, the neural architecture of these creatures extrapolates order from chaos, a considerably simpler task. The tradeoff, of course, is an awfully poor memory. In a system of such rigid order as a brain, it is difficult to encode cogent memories of a past which consists of little more than static. 

That is not to say that these creatures have no memory. In fact, some manifest quite complicated systems for interacting with their world, which involve the use of logic to encode basic memories. These memories fade into unreliability rather quickly. Do not pity them, for their ability to predict the future state of the world far surpasses your own, and some scholars might consider that to be of greater moral and practical value. 
The greatest of these creatures has such a mind, such a complicated and beautiful mind, that it has both an impeccable ability to predict the future, as well as an uncannily powerful memory. This creature, you will meet in time, and is known as the Pinnacle. So ingenious is its design, that the Pinnacle obscends the boundary between your world and that of Los Ral. It is able to simultaneously exist in both realities. You are not yet equipped to explore the nature of the Pinnacle, and there is more to tell about the creatures of Los Ral. 

On a day 200 million years after the First Mother meets her partner, something occurs which will be of particular note to you, reader. A patch of ground, imbued with the perfect arrangement of chaos, buzzing with a trillion cellular machines, begins to grow. From soil and compost and chemicals harsh and mild, muscle and bone gel, like porridge left out in the sun. This burgeoning creature, so strange to you, nonetheless has some astounding similarities. It has eyes, muscles, a brain. 

Its memory is poor. It knows it must have come from the ground, but little else can be discerned. The past is uncertain. But from the moment it opens its bleary eyes, it can see the future spread out before it. It sees the mountains it will climb, the bones it will break, and the music it will create. It sees companions and mates, though, still in its infancy, it cannot yet see what they look like. It knows the face of its partner, to which it will be drawn like a  fly to flame. This meeting will occur, if the reading is accurate, 84 years and 12 days from now. 

But we will not get to that point in the course of our story. Some decades later, it finds itself reading this very page, at a moment in time which is, as a matter of fact, this one. A few seconds of confusion and it continues on. In the next minutes, it wonders about the inscrutable past, a world whose contours are knowable only through insufficient heuristics and guesses. It becomes lost in the rich memories of its future, and pictures the face of its mother.
 
 

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