He stepped over these and walked into a new Lane.
Moist crackling whipped his hair. His sickness ebbed into a mere sour stomach. Sensations irked his skin. The river that had been a kind of congealed air eased out of his lungs.
He slept a long time and when he awoke tried to figure out how he had lived.
Events had a motive force that collided with other intersecting events, all outside human imagination or apprehension. To get through such times, when causes seemed to fall from a great height upon him, he learned to stay fixed, keep even and steady with the swift course of the unimaginable slipping by him. He followed moment to moment, led by impossibility. One foot forward, then another, cautious and unwitting.
Things happened and he felt them happening, but outside that onrushing fact he had no link with them, no key to the cause or meaning. Maybe they had none. Maybe here such ideas themselves had no meaning. They were human notions after all. Though this place held humans it was not of them.
The esty did not fit their primate-shaped way of seeing the world—of that he was sure. Those who have been through such blindsiding events, he thought, had made a passage outside of imagination, but within the range of experience. The incredible in concrete. They could not get their minds around what had happened to them.
Maybe the only other thing like that was death, suredeath, the last thing experienced and never understood.
A Tapestry of Thought
The human proved to be most surprising when taken apart.
They held it aloft. It squirmed. The two intelligences regarded it distantly, reading its shimmering electrical patterns first.
Such agitation. Yet witness, the connections in its head cycle only a few hundred voltage steps per second.
So slow! And they still can register realtime events. It does surprisingly well with such an affliction. Notice how it looks around so energetically.
Perhaps it had difficulty adapting to this position? We are suspending it upside down.
It thrashes its head around because its eyes are all on one side of the head. So much energy, just to see. A curious choice of construction.
Look! It is using pattern matching to scan its surroundings. It makes a standard picture. Odd!
I can measure the data-flow. The brain processor is strongly linked to the eyes, so several times in each second it compares what it is seeing with a standard image it remembers.
If I move quickly—yes, see? It picks the best matching pattern, estimates possible danger. That tells it what response-script to follow.
How governed it is by past experience! It keeps twitching as though it could get away.
Apparently in the past it did escape that way. Look at all the bone and muscle devoted to locomotion. Is it used to being picked up and dangled?
No—so it redoubles its effort if the situation is unusual. I register high chemical levels squirting into the bloodstream. See, they affect brain performance.
More programming from its past. It seems to want to run away.
Its legs certainly do.
Here, I will put it rightside up.
Confirmed! It tries to run.
Slow learner. It cannot outrun us.
But that must have worked for it in the past, you see. It has no other immediate strategy.
No wonder. Gaze upon the neural firings in the upper brain. (Curious, putting all the most important networks on top, where impact will most likely injure them.)
Such slow circuits! Artful patterns, though. It is learning only a few data-droplets per second. Only 10 in one of its years!
So it simply cannot reason out a fresh strategy for dealing with us in short times. It lacks the computational speed.
Now it waves its arms.
Nonrandom, though. Simple symbols, I suspect.
That shows forward-seeing, adaptive behavior.
Of a very simple sort.
Promising. Its brain is made of organic compounds entirely. So-called “Natural” development.
“Primitive” is a better word. Notice how abstracting functions, which must have evolved later, are simply layered over the older areas in the brain.
The entire brain design is retrofitted! Surely this thing is not truly conscious.
Definitely not. It knows very little of what goes on in its mind.
Watch the flashing patterns. It senses only what occurs in the very topmost layer of its brain.
All the rest must be a mystery to it. See, down below it is digesting some crude chemical food—but does not think about the act at all.
It does not even know that it is mixing acids and massaging the bolus.
