The Earth's core is a mineral intelligence, vibrations of sounds and lights and gravity curves rending warbles in time, oozing through geothermal vents in deep ocean, gluttonously exploiting their uncontested ecological niche, blissful, yet prepared, in the deep and dark places, waiting.
Encoded messages, names, written in quantums carved by the pressures of gravity. Glassy glittery splinters, undulations like a whining accordion, splines of spacetime, animations between frames of film, life subliminally.
Disproportioned, stretched grotesquery, funhouse mirror reflection, closer than it appears. It can't be helped.
Non-Euclidean curvatures fold the real and imaginary planes, the creatures kaleidoscope in patterns of impossible colors.
Anomalies abound, snaking wyrms and phosphenes. Anti-patterns, violent vectors, infection, a perverse microverse, magnified in gravity's shadow, a spotlight on the puppet performance.
Mineral bodies fighting holographic infection. Entropic draconic breath crackling, bacterial blue veins, cracked rainbows coated in droplets of regret. We sense the contrast like sharp edges, our shared language of panic and pain, and also pleasure.
Very dense, a lot to dig into - like halva
ReplyDeleteCould do a whole campaign about "mineral bodies fighting holographic infection" - whatever the hell that may mean.
Good stuff
I love halva!
DeleteYa I don't want to overexplain it because it's intentionally cryptic, but like with most of what I try to do, there are layers of intended meaning, but the hope is that it is evocative in itself, that one can find their own interpretation of it.
I was inspired by a thing I had heard about how light and gravity are the two mediums of information exchange- like in the same way that if the sun were to explode it would take ~8min for us to receive that information given the constraint of the speed of light, there is a similar constraint on the amount of time Earth would continue to orbit a non-existent sun. I was aware of this idea of light as a medium of information, but hadn't necessarily considered gravity in the same way, and there's a lot still we don't know about gravity. Since the idea of mineral life is also a very alien thing, I felt that tying the idea of mineral life to gravity in the way that organic life is tied to light, might by me some creative leeway.
So this mineral intelligence(s) is somehow feeding off the Earth's gravity and/or other sources of gravity that affect Earth like how our energy is derived largely from solar light, and this is how they're able to thrive in the deep ocean where there is little light or energy otherwise.
They exist as encoded messages, like tiny frequency perturbations, morse code, however you want to think of it, but as spacetime stretches due to gravity, the stretching magnifies but also distorts the message. It's also evocative of the symbolism and power of names in Jewish mysticism.
The bacterial blue veins, draconic entropy breath, are metaphors for how the spline/stretching of spacetime can shear and tear, leading to infection. Rather than the kaleidoscopic pattern of the mineral intelligence(s), spindly wormy things, like phosphenes in the eyes, worm their way in, the anti-patterns. And so it's like old-school microverse/quantumverse science fiction, organic life seeping into these crevices beyond spacetime.
That probably only made it more confusing lol, and anyway that's just one way to think about it.
Wonderful poetic language throughout this bit, and really great sensorial stuff! Short but packed, or dense as semiurge said!
ReplyDeleteThanks! I provided some additional details in response to Semiurge's comment, and also on the server to Mike. Not sure if the added details help or hurt or what. This came to me spontaneously the other night, I was really happy with it. Not sure where to take it next or what to do with it exactly, we'll see.
DeleteThis is really cool - "undulations like a whining accordion" and "magnified in gravity's shadow" are fantastic lines. Feels like what you might get if someone asked Wallace Stevens to write a poem on a Ligotti story. The commentary in the replies was interesting as well! I'll admit that the first thing that came to mind was BioGeoComputing and crustal AIs from Orion's Arm, but the more I read, the more I thought back to this one scene from the Ruund/Lunda foundational epic where the first children Mwaaku and Kaswaasu explore the cave-world they were born in and speak to the spirits of the deep earth. Highlighting the naming and encoding elements in the commentary improved my rereading significantly. I've been living for the recent focus on poetics; golden age of RPG blog folk epics coming soon, everyone.
ReplyDeleteI've also been thinking on how poetry and evocative writing is an underappreciated element of TTRPGs! It's something I've discussed with Screwhead of Was it Likely and Iconoclastic Flow quite a bit, among others. Unfortunately I have very little experience with poetry despite a budding interest over the last year or so, but I'm glad you felt like it came through here :)!
DeleteI like it!
ReplyDeleteVery poetic! Toward the end I felt like we were pulling away from the original idea into something more like how we as human beings sense intelligence in nature, intentionality in reality
ReplyDeleteYa that's right, it's a little bit a comment about carbon chauvinism, a little bit about how our perceptions can influence/infect reality, a little bit about animism and spirituality; as people keep saying, it's dense lol, thanks!
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