FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #65

I carefully studied the physical map before me. It precisely represented both spaces—one 'nested' inside another: the Universe that gave us life, and that of soma, interconnected with everyone who had it and with the fabric of the Universe itself. Both were real, physical spaces, but their physics differed, though definitely had a common point in a set of laws to allow this interaction. My black body I saw in soma was me that lived in soma space, harboring my consciousness shared with my real body—thus I, too, was a being with two physical bodies. Upon a real death our consciousness was dissolved in soma space and only memories of a person remained as objects—but soma seemed to distinguish between types of death and how to handle them. Hence I didn't become just a set of memories expressed as a function of time and space, and my consciousness was kept intact until my brain and body were repaired. My mom was also kept alive in her Cold Sleep, so the full complexity of this mechanism probably went well beyond these two examples, and maybe a full mind upload and existence, detached from the Universe, was possible here.

The Alima Eni, the Lael, and the Baali spoke the language they called Hettha. Many of their concepts had no analogues in A Dan and soma did not substitute these words, so it helped me to see the memories and things corresponding to them to grasp the full ideas. These new words, especially regarding the Universe, were introduced by the Baali, because they were the ones who explored it, though the language itself originated from the Alima Eni. Separating from the maternal culture, the Baali carried it as their own despite cultural differences. Close interaction between the two species never ceased, adversaries or allies, and the language evolved, aggregating the best and worst of both worlds.

The word jainaa had two meanings. For the Alima Eni it meant something close to 'the garden of life' or 'the garden of the trees of life'. The meaning which was used by the Baali and the Lael was 'the cocoon'.

The regions of space my people had traveled to and explored, and everything that we knew about the world, was but an insignificantly tiny segment of the Universe. The world we lived in was truly beautiful and I caught myself thinking that I could contemplate it forever.

But this system was for doing, not for staring.

It was amazing that something so huge turned out to be so graceful and elegant.

Falaighnn followed my thought and switched between parts of the map, showing me what caught my eye up closer and providing some brief descriptive data. All of it was spelled in my own language. Soma's algorithms handled even that.

I started at the beginning, with the thing that was familiar to me—the Flow that was home to our 'Universe'. Falaighnn easily found the place, showing it to me. If my soma body was here and my real body was inside Dorgu's Enclave, and the two were connected, this was what I should have started with! The enemy group of Enclaves was somewhere there, and I asked Falaighnn to search for the objects. Meanwhile I continued with my examination of the rest of the structure.

These flows, 'radiated' by the core, started out with nine spatial directions and one of time, but only three dimensions were subject to inflation over time and six others got compressed to the tiniest size. The system favored only this particular configuration—and I suspected it had to do with the possibility for life to emerge. During the first moments of expansion and cooling of a newborn flow, the four fundamental forces were separating one after another, starting with gravity. This resource that the core represented, if harvested, could give quite a boost to any civilization. No wonder the Baali were looking into it.

The inhabitants of flows could not observe the entire Jainaa and this could easily point at the lack of bigger structures than filaments, as the 'Universe' appeared the same everywhere and in all directions on extremely large spatial scales. Visible and observable 'Universe' was much smaller than the Flow—just a tiny bubble. The areas of the Flow, separated by distances larger than the particle horizon, evolved independently of each other and this was where our local topology ended.