Gangadew has been studying these human beings, their ways and activities. In his view they were often nearly half-fictional. There were several modes of vision his species had developed over the course of eons and one he favored specifically when observing a human being—flesh rendered spectral, bone watery, he could savor the movements of atoms like plankton within a cresting wave, consider how this too was part of their essential nature, a hidden plurality. Gangadew could not feel or understand the human’s own understanding of this contradiction of the-many-in-one, but speculated it was merely hypothetical. As far as he could see, they were mostly preoccupied with certain pleasurable activities—sleeping, eating, drinking, fucking. Most of their pleasurable activities were experienced as verbs, even those that required a certain passivity. Gangadew, alien to such somatic events as affect and therefore equally uninformed about emotions, observed this creature more as a pathogenic thought. Snared in cognitive plasma, it writhed and wriggled. Gangadew therefore was forced to play spiderweb—one unminded by a patron predator. Gangadew did not wish them harm. He had arrived through time’s slipstream, chosen a currently occurring moment at random, willed himself manifest at every location on the planet simultaneously. This very instant he metabolized several trillion occurrences and so delayed judgment of his findings.
Yes—they were half-fictional, maybe more than half. If data could dream, it would dramatize collectives and particulars in ways similar to how he perceived, as patterns of behavior sparking koan-like insights in real-time. He was hybrid to their simple mortal threadings through one millisecond and another, though the very concept of millisecond was a fabrication, a construct cobbled together in order to help them micromanage and therefore endure the vast ongoingness and neverhood of time. They were threatened by it, yet were sired by it, molded by it. Witnessing them with human-scale vision, he observed their struggle with their own restlessness and asked—why? It would seem they experienced time as something separate from them, as something that happened to them, an orientation foreign to his species. He had not considered the possibility of such separateness until he’d become them a moment and thought within the tumult of their actions.
Should he mention a few? Should he describe them? It would be difficult to represent even one in ways that wouldn’t estrange them from their native habitat. Gangadew could repeat what he had found himself thinking, as they spoke to one another or to themselves. They were an ultra-social species even when they were intent on isolation, and when silent and locked within rooms of a building would inundate their thusly-protected environment with all manners of babble and communication. The light of televisions would reach them from a far distance and they would interact with vapors, humans employed to behave like humans. There were songs and other vocalizing entertainments, there were bodiless voices regaling them with gossip through telephone receivers. At the molecular level none were distinct or separate from their surroundings, but it was notable they behaved otherwise. This was a defining characteristic of their kind, Gangadew concluded. This bias was perhaps hardwired into their fundamental orientation toward themselves, their world, each other, the product of a long, elaborate, haphazard course of evolution. Having never evolved from any prior iteration, Gangadew had to concede an experience of such boundedness was beyond his conception. Since he did not possess a capacity to imagine, to improvise upon the known in a speculative manner, he would have to instead study closely the behaviors of those among the species that blended the real, as they experienced it, with fantasy, and formulate prospective conclusions on how this either enriched their felt perspectives or impoverished them. It turned out there was not a single human who didn’t fantasize. In their cognitive wetware, thinking and feeling were indistinguishable from one another, never more so when they were believed to be separate. Certain beliefs about themselves, it could be said, nurtured their compulsion to make-believe; it was difficult to discern how much their hunger to invent would be diminished, if they could experience at every moment and in a felt way the continuity of their bodies with their surroundings.
This led to another curious aspect of human-being-ness Gangadew found difficult to parse, no matter how often he eavesdropped on millions of conversations per second on the general topics that concerned them—their surroundings, their proper place, as they conceived of it. Near and far, distant and close—always they spoke of the relation of their physical bodies to various locations in dualistic terms. This habit was common to the large majority of their species and seemed programmed into their conceptual maneuverings, expressing itself instinctually and often without explicit awareness they could figure otherwise. Inside, outside; up and down. Here and there. Their interactions were larded so frequently with instances of positional myopia, it was clear they considered themselves not only separate from their surroundings but separate from each other, and that this too was perhaps a necessary product of their evolved-ness. Their bodies in their current expression had been formed across a timescale too protracted to be felt, so could only be thought and imagined. Their forebears were non-human and non-mammalian, in their earliest beginnings were unicellular organisms, and these, ironically, did not possess neurological systems to generate thoughts or feelings; but this is not to say they didn’t work their way through hundreds of billions of years of persistent survival making use of a certain in-born sensitivity. They could brush against, say, a calcium or potassium ion, and react with informed but non-deliberative judgement which to absorb through their outer membrane and which to reject. A sense of “in” an “out” were implicit even then, that early in their history. So this would seem an inevitable expression of that foundational inheritance—that their physical boundedness, the strategies for survival and procreation that derived from it, would structure and animate their ways of orienting a personal relation to their surroundings. The relations were always personal in nature, and to Gangadew that was exemplary, unusual. For a human being in the singular, surroundings were determined by the simplest and most immediate of criteria: what was within view, within range of touch and hearing. Surroundings as felt phenomena were somatically perceptual in origin and could not be scaled beyond felt-ness to include larger categories of nearness: a city, a province or state, a country, a continent, a planet, a solar system or, finally, a cosmos. So far as their personal experience was concerned, they were not indigenous to the universe, not really. Many of their kind would often speak of this, and sometimes many of their kind would seem to pause and listen and consider, but always the latter would go on their way, attending to the demands of the lives that were chosen for them, and the former would too, even though it was their job to study the operations of the universe and educate others on the measurable evidence of its expansion. Though the universe was expanding at scales beyond human imagining, it was forever contracting in the minds and daily preoccupations of very specific humans—nearly all of them. If Gangadew possessed human emotions, he presumed he might find this contradiction “touching” or “revealing.”
Sexual intercourse, foreplay; the panoply of activities teleological to orgasm: flirting, disrobing, caressing, kissing. So primary were these to the human being’s daily concerns and involvements, unconsciously they would express themselves in terms of charged physical intimacy, particularly when under siege by a powerful emotion. So many aspects of their nature were so deeply ingrained these seemed to consistently escape explicit awareness, only to become evident through repeated action. Once noticed and spoken of, these would be characterized as “revealing”, much the way a certain piece of clothing that accentuated favorable aspects of a particular human form could be considered “revealing”. No facet of Gangadew’s existence had ever eluded his cognizance, therefore he found the premises of such expressions novel—how the bounded-ness of human beings afforded them occasions for play. There was a game native to human childhood, varying from culture to culture, that exemplified this impulse to inspire curiosity and attraction through evasion and disguise—Hide & Seek. Again, Gangadew noticed, another dualism. In and out, up and down, near and far—hiding and seeking, did they perform a similar orienting function? Opposites of every variety: how would the human being navigate the course of a life without these?
Gangadew was party to several million copulations per second, either in pairs, as threes, a rare larger number, but most often as a person alone with eyes closed in bed, in a shower, sitting on a toilet in a bathroom stall, or to the seeming horror of onlookers, in public, on a park bench or on a subway train. Such was their compulsion to mate, if uncoupled they would be content to mate with themselves, with fantastical partners in their head. Far back through the obscure tangles of their species’ chronology, prior to the slow-motion chaotic morphological contingencies that produced the first mammal, one cell had responded to a sudden impulse to divide itself. It had been alone the moment before; then it had strained, quivered, ruptured. Mitosis occurred for the first time, without precedent or warning. The drive to proliferate had arrived, and from there it only gained momentum—such versatility and inventiveness, such creativity written into the procreative strategies of biota of very kind. A human being alone, masturbating, furthers the complexity of that inheritance; so it is worth Gangadew’s noticing how often this activity is performed behind closed doors or in domiciles empty of cohabitants. It is kept hidden, a secret. A lived experience so intimate human beings venture towards it with closed eyes, while insisting as well on the closed eyes of others around them: none should know. The emotion of shame is spoken of often among Gangadew’s human hosts. A vocabulary of human organ functioning, especially execratory, is often mobilized to attend to the failure of a human being’s attempts to hide their supposed moments of weakness and imperfections from others: they are “shit”, they’re “garbage”, they “suck”, they’re an “asshole”.
As a category of experience, self-loathing is well beyond Gangadew’s understanding. If, as many a human has hypothesized and accepted in lieu of strong evidence to the contrary, selfhood is an emergent property of neurological functioning, Gangadew, brainless and therefore selfless, is bereft of reference points for understanding it. A brain directing selfhood against itself, a violence of self-referentiality: he cannot know what that might feel like, he cannot pity it. His very nature disallows such involvements, and perhaps it’s this otherness that affords him such analytical serenity: he will never lose sight of the full dimensions of a human being by becoming one of them.
Shame is exotic; one of many aberrant megafauna available for viewing in the emotional zoo. Gangadew has studied the relationship between cage and animal and currently subscribes to the belief the cage is a feature of the animal. A symbiosis born of necessity—it could not be otherwise. Beyond the cage and its tenders are threats without name or shape, predators. Once a threat has announced itself and taken shape, it would be too late to defend oneself. According to a well-worn platitude, a cage protects as much as it denies an animal its freedom. Again, Gangadew noticed, here was another adaptive strategy most likely evolved from their boundedness. The human being is ashamed to masturbate, so performs this enjoyment alone. Sated, the human being awakes to the sight of themselves post-coital, duly disgusted. To what extent does the resulting shame refresh the urge to masturbate? Lacking sexual organs and an endocrine system, Gangadew will remain innocent to the problem. Forever beyond reach of a melee of urges, he will placidly observe their tumult and outcome, a hyper-rational Peeping Tom. He will order their disorder with thought, then report what he has found. This may take longer than he would have anticipated, his usual instantaneous downloading of all lifeforms into a thorough exploratory diagram and verdict.
Again, it was their fictitious qualities that proved evasive, difficult to grasp. Gangadew considered that perhaps they felt the same about each other. Figures of intrigue, curiosity, what little they knew of one another tended to feed a further hunger for details and privileged knowledge—so much so they would often exercise a tireless investment in the works and lives of the dead. Extinction from a round of life often bred in its wake a spattering of voyeurs and scholars. Over the span of a generation or two the memorialized would bloat beyond corpse-size into godly dimensions. Mystique—the admiration of journeymen filled them like methane, until they burst. Human beings sought an immortality from one another, but celebrated it as exceptional. It was obvious, what they sought through case histories and legends: definitive confirmation that a culture could preserve its inhabitants like experimental pigs in formaldehyde or sacrificial victims in bogs. All feared to be forgotten; only the delusional were unconvinced they could be. Gangadew, being effortlessly immortal himself, required no circular reasoning to find himself complete and unto himself.
A blink; waking from some great geological dream. A yawn, mouth wide birthing a tongue. Mouth of a human being sprouting a yawn first thing in the morning, so similar to the mouth of an infant held in an obstetrician's hands, smack on the back, amniotic fluid coughed and sputtered from lungs, a first fresh scream. The first scream is the smallest but the most vital—countless screams will follow. A biosphere waking, the planet and its oceans, atmosphere and solar radiation. Miles above is the outer shell, where gases wander, spherically nomadic but shielding the earth from ultraviolet bombardment, for the betterment of lifeforms below. Gangadew watches the full evolution of the planet from within the blossoming of a single trillisecond: the future of a lineage is set in motion. Backwards before then, even, to the original beginning: time and space burst from nothing, particles form and drift. Gases gather into wisps and shawls and as they gain density irradiate a dim glow. The glows brighten, become stars. One such star patterns the vastness around it into orbital wastelands of dust. The dusts circle, clump together, form a planet. As the planet gathers into formidable largeness, a core and crust forms. Dense metals topple through molten interiors to densify a center, while above-grounds solids cool into continents. The surface raises and blisters into welts—volcanoes. Water vapor is spritzed into circulation as atmosphere, where it cools and falls as rain. For millennia it rains until there are oceans. Cyanobacteria within blue-green algae breed oxygen and for a long while oxygen interacts with iron, sinking to ocean bottoms trapped in rock layers, until the lion’s share of free iron is exhausted and oxygen, unhindered, flourishes freely. Single-cell organisms appear. Vertebrates evolve, first fish then land animals. Land plants proliferate and more oxygen flows from them. Reptiles evolve from primitive amphibians, and soon a race of massive lizards roams the earth’s jungles and forests. Carnage and survival. Natural selection tooth-and-claw. The lizards die off suddenly and a long while after the first Homo Sapien is born from a non-Homo Sapien mother. It happened somewhere called Africa. In search of territory and game, tribes of men and women wandered beyond their homeland across stretches of unknown hinterlands. These would later be called continents. Across vast distances human beings became isolated from each other and over time came to regard one another as strangers. There were tribes and from these tribes were born cultures. The cultures regarded one another with fascination and fear, as people in the singular had once done. All were textured into the unifying weave of a planetary history, none were content to be merely so. They sought pleasures, status among their kind. They sought to be commemorated in life and after death by unknown storytellers. They were vain by birthright, but pitiably so. They would fool themselves and others until the end.
Was that all? Was there more? Gangadew conceded this was one among many possible versions, for the cosmological research of priests and mythographers attributed the genesis of a universe and planet to the handiwork of one or more supreme beings. These were scaled from human from and were inevitably patriarchal or filial by design: they were children of an at-times fearsome at-times benevolent caretaker. Fear—there was fear in this from either direction: misdirection from an ultimately arbitrary process, the mix-and-match of matter unprompted long ago by an initiating force they could neither love nor trust nor fathom; or the other proposal, the preferred one: a cosmos built according to preconceived specifics and guidelines by an intelligence that took foremost into consideration the fate and needs of its prized creation, the human being. Either way their belief chose to travel around the problem, they were guided by a terrible, ceaseless anxiety. They were small, naked to the whims of the elements. They were meager among the larger beasts that roamed a savanna or swamp. They were given proof of this daily by the fact they were often food themselves, hunted, pounced upon by alligators or lions. Many killed their own mothers in childbirth, and having survived the murder of birth, perished days later under mysterious circumstances. Only a god, who was by definition deathless, could chaperone their survival through the trials of life. And since the trial inevitably ended in death, only a god could wait on the other side of their bodies to welcome them. Had they been good? Had they followed the god’s many requirements and directions? Those were questions they asked one another and themselves continually throughout their lives, and increasingly such queries were spiced with fear. The requirements and directions varied depending on the culture and its fetishes, what qualities were valorized—be it physical strength, temperance, generosity, admiration by others. But the threat inherent in shared rules—-received ages ago by human hands from an emissary of the divine—was the same every time. They would be punished. They would be cast out, exiled. In death, they would be separated like spoiled meat from prime and lain aside. The great father would turn his back on them, deny paternity, and their souls would be cursed to wander a hell of formlessness without hope of earning their way into a better purgatory. These were cruel fables but they served a purpose; they prepared their children for a harsh life.
Upon his return to his home zone, Gangadew could inform his fellow Mindlings: they were much less advanced than these beings, for strategies of decoy, camouflage, and indirection had no application for them. They could grasp one another’s intentions in an instant, without deliberation. They were, in the language of more educated human beings, fully blended with one another’s Theory of Mind. Unbound by time or body, they had, in essence, nothing to lose or hide. By comparison their culture, so much as it could be viewed a culture, lacked color and dramatic flair, nuance and ingenuity and variety. There was rarely a difference in opinion, for they experienced one another’s thoughts as their own. Humans were estranged from themselves and each other, but this had inspired as often as it hindered them—there was room for change and growth, as much as for regression, deterioration. Even the latter was considered a feature of their dynamism, for deterioration was inherently changeful.
No Mindling could begin to conceive what it might mean to fear another Mindling. Thoughts were shared events, not descriptive of any collaborative series of electrochemical processes; one Mindling could not deceive another, even if it, for the sake of an experiment in human-hood, tried. Gangadew would inform them through instantaneous cognitive blending this insight into their own species’ limitedness—concluding, with surprise and bemused humility, omniscience proved imperfect, for it resulted in its own kind of boundedness: an inability to be other than what one was. How often Gangadew had experienced a human harangue him or herself alone or in the company of others—they did not know themselves, who they were, nor have a clear idea of who they would like to become. It was a source of desperate frustration and could underwrite a life with intractable unhappiness. An identity—to be achieved, molded purposefully, therefore earned and prized. Mindling culture nurtured no correlative concept, nor the aggregation of values that informed it: an identity, individual or collective, presumed difference from others, and among Mindlings there were no differences. Names, pronouns—these were conventions adopted to convey Mindling principles in a human idiom. Gangadew was also an accommodation to these requirements, for in truth there was no Gangadew among Mindlings. Conventions of identity are artifacts the Mindlings' unified consciousness will bring back from their scouting exhibition to the human planet, and reporting to themselves their findings they will adopt the human custom and refer to their gatherer-aspect as Gangadew, an exemplification of a type. They will speak to themselves of their findings from a human viewpoint, to practice the communicative and mentalizing customs of the species. They will call themselves Gangadew, a word arbitrarily chosen and derived from conventions of written and spoken English, though nonsensical to a native English speaker, empty of signifying content. They will refer to themselves as sexed, bound to a procreative binary—a “he”. From that vantage point, imitating the behaviors of their research subjects in their natural habitat, a planet and particular instance in its history, the Mindlings will gather what is available to be known about such creatures, human beings, including the contours of what’s unknowable, to themselves and others. Mindlings will discover their omniscient perspective pluralized, forced into convolutions of newness; for better or worse, they will be remade as human. And in that venture will experience for the first time a human concept: “falling short.” Lacking height and weight, lacking any need to reference categories of biomechanics or physique to illustrate abstract concepts, they will be confronted by a very first instance of inadequacy, and on human terms. It will be their first encounter with a lived self-difference and diversity in the longest while. They will experience themselves as imaginable from a human perspective and will consider how little they can imagine by themselves. An inebriant, intoxicant—this human-ness. Psychoactive effects of the drug: a wide range of overlapping perceptual distortions blossoming, one from the other.
For this reason Gangadew preferred a pristine sobriety. It was dangerous to embed oneself too thoroughly for too long in a human perspective, for there were perhaps lasting detrimental effects from prolonged exposure to it. This was a concern suggested by the human perspective itself, when Gangadew elected to subject himself to it—a brief hit, a euphoric foray into viewing himself from a confused, highly distractible mortal angle. On the come-down from that epiphanic height, paranoid ruminations circled him, menaced him with their fixed conviction that potential disasters were immanent—he had taken the human drug, had been damaged by that drug, and would now be forever human.
Was this fear—the formative propulsive terror that drove the species? And was this how they were seized by it, as if possessed by a malodorous spirit? Hateful, threatening, sour twins and triplets, quintuplets and sextuplets of one’s own nagging inner monologue: they have gathered to bully you, intent on dragging you into the ugly hole they have crawled from. As Gangadew had heard many a human mention on occasion after recovering from the distressing effects of a certain pleasurable toxin, taken willingly and out of hunger to attain a thrilling otherness to themselves: it was a “bad high”, an “overdose” on the least preferred human emotion. Best to remain a neutral party, an observer. To make note of the distorting, aggravating effects of the drug on a population of users, rather than seek qualitative familiarity with the visions it inspires. Abstemious, a teetotaler—Gangedew would preserve his equanimity and detached perspective, he would abstain from drugging himself with human-ness. He would conduct ethnographic investigations without unnecessary involvements with his subjects.
Growth, propagation. Germination and development stage by stage, maturation. Embryo and fetus. Chrysalis and larva. Gangadew beheld patterns across a disparate range of growth phenomena on the human planet; symmetries, paced and subtly consistent measurements. From the human being’s daily microscopic entanglements with their environment, Gangadew gained appreciation for the consistent threat presented by their bombardment by bacteria and viruses. The latter, once entering the intra-human environment, could wreak havoc but could not replicate without hijacking pre-existing cells to direct them toward achieving viral aims. The former were more independent, though perhaps less enterprising. In the nostrils, the throat, keratin of toenails, the colon or small intestine, bacteria could establish a civilization and harvest the tissues around it to feed its many greedy mouths and grow. One cell would quickly become two. Two would become four. From four would spring eight, sixteen, thirty-two. Gangadew, unburdened by the demands and liabilities of a body, noted the elegance of a pattern at play—exponential growth. Moreover, not merely would cells replicate in predictable numbers, but the rate at which they did so was predicable as well. Rates at which they increased were proportional to their number; leaps between generations could accelerate depending on how many generations had fostered them. As it was with bacteria, Gangadew surmised, perhaps it was with humans. As Gangadew and his kind were growth-less beings, exempt from corporeality, he could only conjecture about the consequences inherent in the comparison. Human generations tended to occur by decades, nearly every twenty-seven years, but humans had adopted the habit of parsing these into neat subdivisions, naming each and attributing generalized qualities of character to their members. Bacterial generations expressed their individualism as well but unconsciously, replicating at rates particular to their species. For one, a generation might spring to birth in ten minutes; for another, half an hour. Others require thirteen to fifteen hours to establish an expanded revision of their population. Environmental factors determine much that transpires along the shaping of a growth curve—ever-replenishing access to nutrients, direct exposure to light or not. Once those natural resources are exhausted and waste issued from cell metabolic processes have accumulated, growth rate among their culture slows; cells perish from starvation or self-sacrifice while others grow. What follows is a formal, mathematically measurable holocaust: death rates outpacing births. Human beings have studied such processes with a scientific care but, except in rare cases, consider it metaphor to draw comparisons between the arc of bacterial growth phases and those of human population growth. Human beings are not bacteria or a virus. In debates over unsustainable growth, this has been consistently asserted as the final inarguable coup de grace. Every time a human being recovers from a cold, they prove their durability for all humanity.
Illness had served so many different purposes for human beings, Gangadew could not consider himself surprised its many manifestations would be raided for their expressive potential. Illnesses were arguments human beings had won through the coordinated involuntary actions of their bodies; each illness endured and recovered from educated, strengthened their immune systems, the twilight operations of which none had explicit control over. They could survive assaults on their good health, continue to live, couple with one another, grow. They were superior to bacteria. They were exceptional to problems bacteria could not solve. From his Mindling viewpoint, free from the dirty concerns of impermanence, Gangadew could not determine whether this was due to arrogance on their part, or mere hopefulness.
They were masters of their bodies and environments; they displayed in every incarnation of localized culture a mania for naming things. Having named a thing and having found their urge for dominance unsatisfied, they would break that thing down into constituent parts and in turn name those parts, before analyzing their specific function and usefulness to the whole. Technical terms abounded wherever their hunt for explanations led them: The Babinski Reflex, Parthenogenesis, The Carnegie Stages, Lordosis. In this same spirit they named each other, categorized one another by type, drew broad assumptions from minimal interaction, and described whole cultures accordingly. This propensity to reduce the complexity of living persons into figures that afforded the crudest representational accuracy suggested yet another subtle consequence of their boundedness. In their view, for a thing to be known, it must be shaped by their inherent limitations. It must be made small. Disconnected from everything around it. There were historical reasons for this, for far back in their ancestral past they were once a desert people, nomadic, surviving harsh elements that were indifferent to life. They had shaped their god according to scarcity’s specification: if the desert was autocratic, their god would be as well. Hierarchical, authoritarian—as much as these were descriptions of a way of life, they were instructions, strategies for survival. Parts were subordinate to wholes, family members subordinate to clans. And here was another opportunity for their obsession with dualisms to flourish: as there was an inside and outside to a body, there was an inside and out to groups of bodies bound by a shared bloodline. Wariness of and antagonism towards an unfamiliar clan, an out-group, drove the priorities of their language. The first step towards conquering a people was to name them. If they were aware of his presence among them, Gangadew wondered what they might make of him and call him. An out-group of one, he might be viewed a contagion not unlike a bacteria or virus. As he had witnessed them do countless times before, they would attempt to destroy him before gathering their samples, to dissect his remains, break them down into functional constituents, before labeling each and reassembling them. Fortunate, then, Gangadew was deathless and imperceptible to human sense and technology. He would be spared the sorts of fate afforded by their knowledge.
Perhaps some of them would worship him; that would be equally undesirable. Despite their presumptions, deep space was no desert. Monotheism did not grow there, and he was no god.
Fall, spring, winter, summer—the heating and cooling of their planet in orbit. Tides fluctuating according to the nearness of their moon. Vascular systems of mammals and trees alike shaped by gravity over ever-elongating stretches of time. Structure and function of each of the planet’s sentient inhabitants shaped by their interactions with the ecosystem that engendered them. None chose their origin; each were interdependent with the other before they were inseminated or pollinated then born. A quiet atavism: the human being was but one expression of their planet, easily perishable if removed from the larger life-web they took for granted. Mortality was a curse; so they thought. They could not feel the broader implications of a simple fact: to sustain themselves, they ate and drank from their surroundings, so they might continue to sweat and spit and ejaculate and urinate and defecate. They considered these necessary offshoots of bodily self-regulation disgusting, embarrassing. Contamination and disease could arise from cohabiting with feces, so they would bury these. When they regarded what expired from their bodies they saw only a harvest of eager flies, not the principle of regeneration inherent in each fly's labor. Cyclical and cryptically fluid, the reinvestment of one form into another, shaping the emergence of a third, unforeseen thing. Elsewhere, beyond deserts, in more bountiful regions of the planet, human beings conformed to the multitudes around them and proliferated in their culture and language many supernatural caretakers, many actors improvising daily from a script written for them by nature. For these people, there were many gods available to confess and pray to; for others, there was no god but the jungles and forests and plains and oceans around them. Ostensibly, the sentience they perceived and assigned to the merest leaf extended beyond that leaf to the whole tree, and from the tree's roots, through the ground, and from the ground, up through the roots of all other trees around it, across the planet. Oxygen flowed from their leaves, an invisible steam, and circulated upwards into the atmosphere and from there spread around the planet. Atoms and molecules, shed from that circulating earth-shawl, tumbled through the soundless cold of space, drifting against washes of cosmic radiation. What began in a single leaf could venture far beyond the planet, to leave its signature eventually in distant corners of a solar system, its galaxy, a cosmos containing all galaxies and solar systems. Humans contrived a name for such animistic ambitions: pantheism. For some it proved comforting to rewrite their eventual demise as a continuation of life in other forms. Gangadew held much respect for it.
A minute passed; Gangadew counted the seconds. Crude tools, seconds and minutes, but global time was the only lingua franca available to the large majority of human beings; so having familiarized himself with atomic clocks, wristwatches, digital alarm clocks, smartphones that received continual updates from satellites orbiting the planet, he tracked his involvement in the communal artifice of consensual time. Rhythms of light and dark varied according to their specific location on the planet—north or south, equatorial. These varied also according to the planet’s elliptical course around the sun. The nearer the planet to the sun, the warmer, the longer their bright days would be. Gangadew could see it was a matter of practicality to uncouple their sense of time from natural rhythms, since their only constant was their variability. To suit the needs of a global culture, of all pockets of human beings across the planet equally, they would extract it everywhere from the dominion of living things, from heartbeats and breath-rhythms, set it counting without brains or fingers—sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours for a day; weeks, months, years, each separate but, strangely, efficiently, each containing the other. People measured the progress of their lives against this sovereign count; and though numbers added unto numbers with steady consistency, it was understood among human beings they would result in no final sum. It was foundational to all their activities, either explicitly or tangentially: the departure and arrival of airlines, subway trains, boats; the reservations of hotel rooms; trifurcation of their daylight involvements into home, commute, and work. And work itself was an intimate confrontation with how a human life could be subjected daily into numbers, each job, each position with its own relative exchange rate, hours for yen, kroner, or dollars. Gangadew sensed time and money were inventions that shared a common ancestral origin, had coevolved along a series of enterprising channels to produce commerce on a grand scale, a civilization larger than its world. Larger because it determined not merely the life-ways and fates of its people, but also their dreams, indulgences, irresponsibilities, their occasional fitful rebellions against its many directives, be they overt or subtle. Everyone was subject to the count; everyone was time, added to its careful passage unto death or perpetuity and so diminished. One, two, three…twelve, thirteen, fourteen…Gangadew counted across the beginning, middle, and end of a minute, beholding what was captured and carried along by its passage. Many last breaths, several hundred marriages. One hundred thousand forty-two coughing fits.
One to sixty—then the minute ended. Released from the count, Gangadew noticed how little had changed. No world had been destroyed nor had another emerged to take its place. At a planetary scale, this was true; but in the uteruses of several specific human women, he now noticed, less so. Each in their way had become pregnant, each now housed an oocyte penetrated by a single sperm. In bedrooms, in office chairs, in the backseats of cars, either willingly or by selfish force one human had coupled with another then separated. The women were unaware yet a life was beginning; it was questionable yet whether the seedling would survive long enough to live outside a body. The irony of human individualism, as Gangadew saw it: in the earliest stages of life, to inhabit a body of one’s own, one had to continually borrow from another. Paternal and maternal chromosomes pair evenly into a zygote, cells divide to form a blastocystic cavity. An embryo nuzzles into a warm bog of endometrial lining. A primordial ontogenetic story was being told again, as if for the first time; each letter, each word, each sentence that marked its progression in flesh could divert the story from its course and endanger the outcome, result in a disabling mutation or stillbirth. An ectoderm thickens, flattens into a neural plate; cells divide at uneven rates to form a neural groove. Ridges of the groove curl, meld into a tube-like structure which then, gradually, across several intricate stages of growth, becomes a brain and spinal cord. The tube’s interior molds into cerebral ventricles, fills with fluid. Soon the earliest buds of bodily organs will fill out, shudder, blossom. Fingers and eyes, genitalia and clavicles, following the dictates of coordinated genetic programming, will find their predetermined positions and settle. Myocardial cells, contracting and relaxing in unison, mesh to form the tissues of a beating heart. In the catches of their mothers' distended abdomens, Gangadew spies fetuses kicking and twitching and considers the mutual helplessness of the arrangement. The fate of one was thoroughly bound with the other; should anything go awry, both would suffer. Motherless, bodiless, having never evolved from an embryo, Gangadew had no point of reference for how one being could wholly nurture the growth of another, nor how oxytocin might flood his consciousness with affiliative devotion for someone not yet born. How would he describe what he saw? He, who lacked feelings and therefore empathy, empathy and therefore imagination—how would he characterize the bewildering range of behaviors that were often scattered across a wider range of lives in the wake of even a single human birth? He would have to be born himself, carried vulnerable in a womb, wrenched breathless into the excruciating brilliance of a delivery room before he would even begin to describe it.
The great disadvantage of Mindling ethnological practice in general, Gangadew will tell, has told, is telling himself and so is informing all existent and non-existent Mindlings: they were too universal to be perceived by their subjects, too abstract to be convincingly hated or loved. Freed from strictures of time and space, they were too dissimilar—too boundless to be grasped, too immeasurable to be counted. They were not even human enough to be gods, much less devils. Possessing everything humans lack, they could offer nothing actionable or tangible. This would seem to make them ideal candidates for observation—there being no chance they might even unintentionally influence the responses and decisions of their subjects. But the question should be asked: of all possible species on all possible planets, in every dimension available to them for exploration and study, why choose these, if they weren’t uncertain the direction of influence might at least be reciprocal? Disgust, surprise, happiness, envy, sadness; embarrassment, love, compassion. The schadenfreude pleasures of gossip. Insecurity unconvincingly disguised as arrogance. Living among humans a long while maybe they might absorb the vivid particulars of their interiors and in doing so expand their own: to be other than they were, together among others yet alone.
This was the one clear similarity between human beings and Mindlings, Gangadew decided: neither displayed much evidence they were content to remain wholly who they were. For purposes of future research this might be worth investigating. Given time, humans might evolve beyond this limitation, so perhaps there was the prospect Mindlings might as well. Until then he would maintain the utmost distance afforded by his nearness to them, and observe what he might say and feel, if he were one of them.
