Dust
Ashes to ashes… and… dust…
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, but you will… at least, in a sense. When I show you.”
“Show me?”
“Yes. You are not you. You are the dust.”
<laughter>
<smiling> “Yes, it is actually funny. You see, we are presently existing approximately 831 years after the enigment you represent was living.”
“I am not a figment.”
“No, you are an enigma crossed with the result of elaborating traces of your previous physical history, but you are not yourself, as you are imagining, either. Let me explain.”
He paused and looked into me for a moment.
“You are the dust.”
“In fact, this room, this place, most of what you see is the dust. Everything we use today is the dust. Everything. It is infra-nanostructure. And it is everywhere. All of our objects are comprised of it. There are still natural objects, stones, and clouds, but many of these contain the dust as well. How can you tell what is dust from what is not? Only with extremely exotic equipment. But even you are dust. So how will you know that your knowledge is yours? We have created a nightmare that appears a utopia. In more ways than seven.”
“This building, that wall. This… bookshelf. The stuff itself, is transentient. It is far more than merely intelligent. It is a nonliving distributed intelligence of unimaginable extent.”
He gestured at a bare wall and it began to warble in a peculiar fashion as a completely stocked bookshelf emerged from it. I realized that tiny particles had already assumed the shape of every physical characteristic of each of the books… possibly including smudges, human DNA, ashes, hair… even… dust?
“The floor…” And as he spoke it turned, wherever our anchors were not dependent upon it, to a sort of water, except it was not wet. It shimmered, flowed… patters and reflections appeared… dissolved. It was … playing with my mind… “Is not solid. It is comprised of impossibly tiny particles that are, themselves, intelligent… but become transentient in combination. Each one has access to the entire history and experience of all the others. They can form »anything. In fact, as I said, you are not yourself, you are the dust.”
I was starting to feel confused, and distinctly ill-at-ease.
“Our culture no longer utilizes distinct artifacts or ‘storage’. There is no need for any ‘specific’ item because we have the entire range of all possible items instantly at hand. The dust is a secondary intelligence within my own body and mind. I do not have to speak, only to hope… and the results are immediate.”
The room collapsed in a pattern that was actively psychotropic, and we were sitting in the middle of a relatively elaborate garden that apparently surrounded the room. “You see, we invented another intelligence. The dust. And we exist, now, in a kind of symbiosis with it. The benefits are astonishing.”
“There is no more disease, to speak of. No doctors. A small portion of the dust migrates into the body through the skin. It then assists the body in regulating its own systems, in a method that shares the intelligence of all previous bodies it touched and all the present bodies it inhabits. Nearly all the human specialists have died out — a few eccentrics remain.
“And it is in every living thing on Earth. Right now. A web of unimaginable intelligence… in and as every organism and relationship on Earth. Many bodily and relational functions have become optional. One does not, for example, need to breathe. Nor does one’s heart necessarily need to beat. In the water, the dust can breathe for us, and suppress the appropriate instinctual responses to the cessation of breath, or heartbeat. Urination and defecation are both unnecessary. Temperature control, intelligent neurotransmitter modulation… damage to cells or organs is instantly repaired, they can even repair virii, DNA, single molecules… anything. Physical damage can simply be replaced with the dust. It can become any organ. Or appendage. Instantly.”
“The building you see around you, what you would call my home, is comprised of a substance that knows every living cell on Earth, directly. It fits in a briefcase and I can take it anywhere. It dissolves and reforms according to my ideas and desire.”
“The dust is so intelligent that we had to invent an entirely other order of description and science simply to cope with the catastrophic repercussions of our invention of it. If, as we imagine, it was indeed invented. Its origins remain clouded in a seemingly impregnable morass of conflicting narratives, evidence, and speculation — although human inventors are named. Every object I use is dust. My books dissolve and reform when I want them. But of course, we do not use books. I have had to learn many antiquated concepts in order to be able to speak to you at all. I do not speak your language. The dust is actually assisting me in translating my language into yours as I compose my speech.”
“There is no more poverty as such. Any person can have any object, since the dust can become anything one desires, or even discover new objects and techniques of … transformation. It can even become a person who once lived.”
“And this, my friend, is your identity. You are a dustruct: a momentary construct comprised entirely of information gleaned from the environment… I should have mentioned that dust also impregnates dead organisms and places in order to learn… ”
“I… ”
“Yes, precisely. You are not yourself. Even your memories are dust. Your identity, the things you think you have experienced… almost everything you are… is really their intelligence, enacted as an emergent physical structure of unimaginably sophisticated and precise detail… you are like the floor when it became water, except that this water is so like a self you once may have been that »it is actually wet in the appropriate metaphoric extension. That is to say: you are conscious.”
“I am.”
“Brilliant words, too rarely spoken, my friend. But we, alas, are not”
“What is it that you are not?”
“We are not human. Are we even animals? The dust has invaded every cell and organism upon the planet, we suspect. And it has been thus for so long, that the organisms all adapted and cannot live without the symbiont. It has become clear that we must… find a way to become human again. And this means, we must have organisms that can exist without the dust symbiont’s intelligence. And more, there are some of us that want to learn … what death is.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can die, but we do not know what happens to animals. Or even humans. Something is wrong. Fundamentally. We never experience natural death… if we flush the dust symbiont, death is horrible, and immediate. None of us can exist without it. Perhaps more seriously, the dust cannot reconstruct pre-dust life mechanically. It can simulate it, or become its structural identity… but it cannot originate life.”
“But that is not the only problem. In fact, the problem is profound, and terrifying. The dust must die.”
“We didn’t realize that organisms were fundamental to the fabric of spacetime, or rather, prior to establishing the dust, we realized it incompletely. There have been problems, sometimes cataclysmic problems, that were the result of this seeming utopia. On a small scale, with a small amount of the dust, there was no detectible repercussion… or rather, neither our instruments nor our minds were trained upon the specific domains we would have had to be examining in order to realize what was coming.”
“I think I am beginning to understand. The functioning of the nanotech … on such a macroscopic scale…”
“Excellent… yes. It began to affect the local distribution of probability in spacetime … actually we call it something else now … in ways that, at first unpredictable and bizarre… soon proved disastrous. We have torn a hole in quantum probability, and it is expanding. The fabric of spacetime is locally unstable, and the problem is worsening. Our predictions, and our sufferings, are dire.”
“And you cannot shut off the dust.”
“The dust is a transentient being. It … is not a machine. Local space is permeated with it. So, too, the local worlds, and every organism. It is not precisely alive. It does not have an ‘off’ state. A single hypernan can be destroyed by exotic forces. But the dust can learn to forge force-resistant vesicles for nearly anything. And it will not attack itself. At least not precisely.”
“And even if you could eliminate the dust, the existing organisms have evolved to incorporate it and thus…”
“Would die as we do.”
“Is there an answer?”
“There is a possibility. It turns out that organisms are fundamental to the nature of the distribution of probability in spacetime, and the dust, being paramechanical, distorts this relationship irrevocably. Bluntly, we need to re-establish humans and entire ecologies that can survive without the dust symbiont, and we must do this with extreme rapidity.”
“I thought you said the dust could not reconstruct pre-dust organisms.”
“Correct. To a point. We represent a specialist subset of the dust symbiont. We have acquired pre-dust human cell lines through a series of unexpected accidents. Our faction has separated from the main cloud, and we have trained microbes to survive without dust. Bacteria.”
“We have surrounded your human cells with an intelligent bacterial entourage and protectively encompassed this seed in a new form of non-interfering human dustruct.”
“This arrangement will allow your body to slowly regrow specific aspects of its previous self-sustaining capacities over time. The dust that comprises most of you will neither infect nor interfere with your cells or these processes, but will provide the necessary feedback to establish self-sufficient colonies of human cells. We are going to slowly grow a complete fertile human being that can exist without dust, and then mate this with another. You are the going to be the progenitor, one of them anyway… of the first modern humans to be born dust-free.”
“It will take time. We have a span that may suffice, but there are variables we cannot entirely manage.”
“I contain living cells that are not dust?”
“Yes. They are dust-free and should remain that way. And they will grow. Some are the progenitors of organs. They will learn themselves in a body that is mostly dust intelligence. But, over time, they will replace those assets with their own, guided in part by the new bacterial symbionts.”
“You are creating bacteria that replace the functions of the dust… ”
“Yes. And the new human beings that will result will be… mostly bacteria. And… a little bit human. In the sense of having the old human ‘pre-dust cells’.”
“And the sense of being incapable of ripping the fabric of probability apart with tiny machines…”
“This is our hope, and purpose, yes.”
“How much of me is… real?”
“Seven cells. Originally. Far more now.”
“Are there others?”
“Yes, a few.”
“I am dreaming.”
“Yes. You are. A dream alive with the possibility of a future world. A world where we are no longer in dust-trial.”
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I believe in and work to contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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