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1.11

Post-Encounter Deposition

Harv Leonel, PhD

Department of Electrical Engineering,

University of Colorado at Boulder


I’m never sure if my reputation precedes me; to some people I’m famous, to some, infamous. A scammer, lunatic, idiot, or daring visionary? Some days I’m not so sure myself. But despite all the ink and bits expended on the subject, most people don’t actually remember my name, so I’ll say, I’m that guy who maybe invented an irreproducible time machine, and pulled ancestral experiences back (once, maybe) from the Antediluvian past into my present-day brain. My twelve-years-ago brain, actually. Remember that tabloid controversy that gripped the world for a week and a half? That was me.

The weight of evidence is on my side; things I saw back there in the Pleistocene have been archaeologically, linguistically, and genetically verified, that no one could possibly have known without firsthand knowledge. But the weight of public opinion is fickle, and mostly against me. The incident ruined my career, and the relationship I was in at the time, and my sleep cycles and short-term memory. I also dragged two promising postdocs down with me, which I deeply regret, so I actually do wish the whole thing had never happened. But it did, and apparently enough people believe in it that Igbal Renz invited me on his mission to meet the Beings.

(To be fair, we already knew each other, because my early quantum computing papers were crucial to his early successes in artificial intelligence. We’d been in the same room together maybe ten times, and he knew me by name and by sight. But yep, life can take strange turns. “You’re not afraid to risk it all on quantum mechanics,” he said, “and something tells me you’d risk it all again, for a chance to be right.” Say what you like about the man, he’s an excellent judge of character, and he was right on the money with that.)

A lot has been said about the Beings already, but my encounter was so different from anyone else’s that I can’t swear it wasn’t a dream. Which is the story of my life, right? I’m going to talk about this experience like it had a beginning, middle, and end. Just know, it actually didn’t—it was more like a Heironymous Bosch painting than a movie or even a comic book. You know, like that painting of Hell where the closer you look, the more crazy things you see. But when you pull back and look at the whole thing, that’s crazy, too. So much detail, everywhere you look. That’s what the experience was actually like, but it’s hard to talk about it that way. We like stories, so I’m going to tell one.

Beginning: I observed a galaxy cluster, with great curiosity. I don’t know what sort of body I had, or if I had one; I wasn’t paying attention to that. I only had eyes for this glob of something that was neither the vacuum nor myself. Neither the vacuum nor myself! If I think about it now, the galaxy cluster was actually inside me. I don’t think I had a way of looking outward, or even a concept of it. But I had perceived a vast volume, and this thing inside of it, and I took notice.

It wasn’t light or heat or gas that caught my attention. It wasn’t even gravity, per se, although I could feel the tug of it, moving atoms past me in a gentle breeze. What drew me in was motion. Each galaxy whirled about its axis, and the whole swarm of them revolved around each other, or around a common center of mass, in a complicated n-body dance. It was like I’d never seen such a thing before, and maybe I hadn’t. I watched it, utterly transfixed.

I say I don’t know about my body, but I was definitely not three-dimensional, and I was definitely not looking at a moving three-dimensional structure. The cluster was a lot more than that. Not just multidimensional, but also, it seemed to me, responsive in some way, like the surface of a pond that ripples when you brush it with your fingers.

That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But in a big-square-peg/small-round-hole kind of way, a human brain can’t really remember or process that kind of experience. Trying leads to headaches. Actually, more than headaches: a kind of creeping, bone-deep nausea that’s almost a phobia. There’s something vaguely gross about it, at least for me, the me that I am now, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. But at the time, as one of them, I felt nothing but innocent amazement.

Again, I’ll say it was like a really complicated painting, with lots of stuff going on, and I could attend to one little scene, or another, or pull back for another look at the whole design. But it wasn’t really static, either; the whole thing fizzed with uncertainty that let portions of the painting change as I watched them, because I watched them. That’s the best I can describe it, and it’s not very accurate.

I think I used to be much larger. I had shrunk to look at this wondrous thing. To investigate it in further detail, I shrank and grew, attending to as much of it as I could, and when that didn’t satisfy, I broke apart into a million little self-aware fragments and swarmed the place, crawling through its intricate whirlpools like mice through a deserted kitchen. Mice that were all me, and also inside of me. I called and sang and squeaked to myself across the void, sharing information and excitement.

I’m going to say, I did that (or we did that) for a long time. That’s not how it worked, but that’s what I’m going to say. It was a research project, and a big one, with detailed reporting. Hypotheses were proposed and tested, discarded and modified at whim. It was all great fun.

Middle: I was smaller than a single galaxy, and overlapping with one, when something even more amazing happened: as I sang to myself (or we sang to ourselves), I (or we) became aware of tiny voices mumbling back! It was inexplicable, impossible, unthinkable.

It was irresistible.

There were others, who were not me. There were others.

We shrank, we spiraled, we surrounded and permeated this amazing phenomenon. I sang to these little voices. I whispered and I beckoned. They were in a noisy little place; I could barely pick them out against the background, and it seemed they could hear even less of me. Or they didn’t listen, or didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know what I was. I’d never had a reason to think about it! I didn’t know what they were, either, and it was hard, so hard to see them or hear them or understand them. I called them out into quieter space, but for a long time, nothing happened. That was okay. I was patient. I was transfixed.

End: I made contact. We made contact. These little creatures—the others—came out to the quiet (with great difficulty, it seemed) to speak with us. I squeezed down tight to meet them at their own size, or a tiny part of me did. I was the tiny part. I was the closest thing we could make to an other. I and countless more like me, crawling through the narrow pancake dimensions the others occupied.

Amazing! The others’ sensory perceptions were flatter still, their minds not only small but constrained to smallness by a kludgey, haywire arrangement of interconnected, self-replicating blobs. Matter! Precise at some scales and topologies, and stable within certain absurdly narrow conditions. Blind, numb, as fragile as spiderwebs in a hurricane, they met us with stunning bravado, almost as equals. Absolutely amazing.

It was love at first sight. I know that sounds strange, and actually creepy as fuck, but I don’t know how else to describe it. We touched the others, as intimately as our differences allowed. We murmured sweet nothings. We studied their true forms, the way a painter studies nudes. We exchanged information, and did our best to share ourselves with them. It wasn’t easy! What could they understand, these flat, solid specks? But they were cunning, speaking in images and metaphors. And vibrations! These little people could sing!

I’m going to pause here and say that I, Harv Leonel of Boulder, Colorado, am one of the very few passengers onboard Intercession who had a “bad trip” from the drug cocktail they gave us. Although I felt the Beings’ own enthusiasm, I felt no pleasure of my own. Seasoned time traveler or no, I found the experience unnerving, and also confusing, because not only was I watching myself through the eyes of the Beings, but it felt as if I was looking nostalgically back on it. Like a fading memory of events that hadn’t happened yet.

It also seemed to me that there was something a bit horrible about the pleasure these Beings took in their investigations. By analogy, in my past life regressions I saw a city—an Ice Age city, inhabited and prosperous, whose people thought it was the whole world, or the only part of the world that mattered. They were drowned in the ocean, all of them, except the ones who happened to be on boats when the comet struck and the water rose half a kilometer, washing away everything they’d ever known. And I, a professor of electrical engineering, watched their doomed lives with that same kind of morbid fascination. Knowing it didn’t matter, knowing they were all long dead anyway.

The Beings were like that. I don’t know what it means.


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