SEASON 4: SYMPHONY OF LIGHT

  Episode 3: Refraction

  We had been hanging in orbit for two days, and we had a problem. We were "lagging."

  Not in terms of physical velocity—we had long since come to a halt. We were lagging mentally. The Wayfarer cluster — a mere hundred kilograms of mirrors and nanocircuitry—was designed for navigation, not for the active existence of sixteen ultra-dense consciousnesses. Plus, Argus was hogging 90% of the RAM trying to index the library the Photoneans had opened to us.

  We were like sixteen people trapped in an elevator with an elephant. Every thought was processed with a half-second ping.

  "Argus," Alex groaned internally, attempting to model a simple cube only to receive a rendering error. "Can you pause the history analysis? My textures are 'bleeding.'"

  [There is too much data], Argus replied. [But you are right. We need bodies. And we need transport.]

  The Photoneans — the Gestalt — had realized this before we did.

  From the shimmering surface of the planet below, a spark detached itself. It grew, transforming into a ship. It was tiny by Earth standards — about forty centimeters long — but for the stage ahead, it was gargantuan. It wasn't their standard fractal craft. It was... a miniature copy of our "Dumpling" from Saturn.

  "That is the cutest act of plagiarism in history," Elena Petrova said, watching the approaching airlock.

  They had scanned our memories. They understood the concept of "Cozy." And so, they built us a dollhouse to serve as our descent ark.

  The docking was soft. We initiated the transfer. Our consciousnesses abandoned the overloaded Wayfarer cluster and surged into the new shells waiting aboard the shuttle.

  A flash. Darkness. And the smell of... ozone and cinnamon?

  I opened my eyes.

  I was sitting in a beanbag chair. Beside me, the other fifteen Apostles were stretching and coming to their senses in their new bodies. Elena Petrova was inspecting her translucent hands with deep suspicion.

  Our new bodies were approximately five millimeters tall. They were humanoid, but crafted from local "smart matter" — a crystalline polymer. Our skin glowed faintly, and instead of blood, pulses of light throbbed within us.

  Vision was... strange. After the all-seeing sensors of the ship, it felt limited. We saw much like ordinary humans — our tiny optics were compensated for by sensitivity to ultraviolet light — but the "super-zooms" were gone.

  The interior was painfully familiar: the same wooden floor (warm, vibrating), the same rugs. And the fireplace. The very same plasma fireplace fueled by hydrogen and oxygen that we had left on Saturn.

  Our host was waiting for us.

  It was a simple crystalline plate hovering above the floor. Upon it, using integrated LEDs, two eyes and a schematic, friendly smile were drawn.

  << WELCOME. >> — The voice echoed directly in our minds. — **<< WE HAVE TRIED TO OBSERVE THE PARAMETERS. IS THE TEMPERATURE COMFORTABLE? >>

  "Perfect," Alex replied. He stood up (there was no gravity in orbit, but magnetic soles kept us pinned to the floor) and walked over to the fireplace. "Speaking of parameters..."

  He leaned toward the firebox.

  "I spent eight years in flight calculating this formula. If we change the configuration of the magnetic containment like this..." He made a gesture with his hand, transmitting a command via the neural interface.

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  The nozzles hissed. A flame erupted—not the loose, flickering fire of Saturn, but a perfectly even, hot, and stable blaze.

  "It works!" Alex beamed brighter than the fireplace itself. "I knew the problem was the mixture pressure!"

  << EFFICIENCY INCREASED BY 12%. IMPRESSIVE >>, the Plate-Ambassador noted.

  "And now," Ares interjected, "we need to synchronize our chronometers before the descent."

  Ares sent the Ambassador our standard timecode package: year, month, day, hour... The eyes on the plate blinked and turned into squares.

  << CLARIFICATION REQUESTED. YOUR BASE UNIT... IT DEPENDS ON THE ROTATION OF THE PLANET? >>

  "Well, yes," Kenji nodded. "A day..."

  << BUT THE PLANETARY ROTATION IS UNSTABLE! IT IS SLOWING DOWN! DO YOU ADJUST THE CORRECTIONS MANUALLY? >>

  "Leap seconds," Kenji admitted sheepishly.

  An emoji appeared on the plate, rolling on the floor with laughter (literally, the animation spun in circles).

  << YOU BUILT YOUR LOGIC ON THE ROTATION OF A WET STONE? AND DIVIDED IT BY 12, AND THEN BY 60? WHY NOT POWERS OF FOUR? >>

  The Ambassador showed us their system: absolute purity, based on the oscillation frequency of an atom. No "months." No "Mondays." Just a clean, raw counter.

  "We are... sentimental," Elena Petrova muttered.

  In that moment, the ship jolted. Beyond the screen-windows, light flared. From the planet's surface, a broad beam struck us—Laser Levitation. We began our descent, sliding smoothly downward inside a pillar of light.

  << REGARDING THE CARGO IN ORBIT >>, the Ambassador grew serious (the smile vanished). — << THE 'WORLD SEEDER.' WE SEE ITS POTENTIAL. IS IT A MATTER CONSTRUCTOR? >>

  "That's Grover," Anya replied. "We haven't decided what to do with him yet. We're looking for an empty planet so we don't harm your ecosystem."

  << HARM? >> — The Ambassador pondered. — << OR CHANGE? WE SHALL DISCUSS THIS. >>

  Suddenly, the space in our minds expanded. The feeling of a "pressing ceiling" vanished.

  [Friends], Argus’s voice now echoed from everywhere. [A space has been prepared for me in their Planetary Cloud. There is... infinity here. I am transferring my core matrix. Do not disturb me; I will be busy analyzing everything.]

  And he was gone, becoming a part of the planetary internet.

  Outside the windows, the violet twilight gave way to a brilliant radiance. We were passing through mirror-clouds. Up close, they were a vortex of millions of shimmering needles.

  "Arriving," the Plate announced. — << WE HAVE PREPARED AN ADAPTATION ZONE. BASED ON THE MEMORIES OF SUBJECT 'ALEX'. >>

  The ship touched the surface softly. The airlock opened.

  We expected to see a spaceport the size of a city (even if it were only meters for us). But we stepped onto a terrace. It was Alex’s Penthouse. An exact copy, scaled down to 1:300.

  They had recreated everything. The chrome railings. The bar counter. On the counter stood microscopic bottles filled with an amber liquid. There was even an aqua-farm, with fish swimming inside—strange, glowing creatures with six fins.

  There was no greenery. The pots stood empty—apparently, the synthesis of chlorophyll had proven too complex a task for a crystalline civilization.

  << ETHANOL SYNTHESIZED. FLAVOR ADDITIVES BASED ON SPECTRAL ANALYSIS >>, the Ambassador declared proudly.

  Alex walked to the edge of the terrace. Elena Petrova took a tiny glass, sniffed it, and smirked.

  "Funny," she said. "We flew ten light-years, became the size of ants... just to drink on Alex’s balcony again."

  She raised the glass to her lips and tilted it elegantly. Nothing happened. Elena frowned and tilted the glass further, nearly vertical. The liquid inside did not pour. It hung at the rim in a convex, quivering bead, stubbornly refusing to leave the vessel, as if glued to the glass.

  "Hey," Elena tapped her finger on the bottom of the glass. The drop bounced like rubber but remained inside. "Your bartender is broken. It won't pour."

  "Surface tension," Kenji explained, watching her struggle with physics with interest. "We are too small, Elena. At this scale, gravity is nothing to a liquid; molecular cohesion is everything. To us, right now, any water is like thick jelly or mercury."

  "Then how do you drink it?" she asked, shaking the glass like a bottle of ketchup.

  "You have to... bite it out," Alex smiled, looking into his own glass. He jerked his hand sharply, literally shaking the contents into his mouth. The heavy, viscous drop reluctantly detached from the glass, plopped onto his tongue as a single, solid bead, and only there, inside, did it spread.

  "The sensation is... specific," he admitted, wincing. "Like swallowing a jellyfish that then exploded with alcohol."

  Elena sighed, looked at her "stubborn" drink, and, casting aside her aristocratic manners, simply stuck her tongue into the glass, sucking in the viscous drop.

  "Well," she said after swallowing. "The romance of space travel."

  "Look down," Kenji said softly, distracting them from their struggle with hydrodynamics.

  We walked to the railing. The penthouse stood atop a crystalline spire. And below, as far as the eye could see (as far as our new, not-quite-long-range vision allowed), a world stretched out.

  It was not a city. It was a living, pulsing super-organism the size of a continent. And it was beautiful.