n10 – Plasma and Structures (страница 7)

Part 4

He climbed the ladder onto the ship and flew off. He saw a new planet, stopped, put on an exosuit, landed, and began collecting extraterrestrial materials. Having gathered the material, he flew back, put it in the cabinet, locked the cabinet with a small lock, put the key in his pocket, sat down at the table, looked out the window, brewed coffee, took the mug in his hand, approached the window, and saw someone flying in the distance.

He took out binoculars and began to look. In the distance, a ship was flying. In the ship’s window stood a man looking through binoculars. He looked at the name of the ship — the inscription was illegible. The ship was far away. He thought that he could not remember the name of the ship, did not remember what he had done today, and stared with surprise at the mug. He did not know where the mug on the table had come from. In his hand was the binoculars. He looked out the window and saw himself — the one who was in another ship, looking at him. He got scared, jumped back, and, falling with a delay, saw through the window how he himself got scared and fell. He hid under the window, peeked out, and saw how, a few meters away, his double was also peeking out of the window, looking at the one who was peeking. He realized that the other ship was so close that their side parts should have already collided.

He looked through another window and saw that they were fused together. He saw the double who had also seen that they were fused. He had forgotten how to control the ship. No longer afraid, he looked out the window and began to examine the other ship, searching for clues. The double was doing the same, examining the ship and searching for clues. The name of the ship was out of sight.

Suddenly, something flashed inside the double’s ship. This something had already appeared behind him. Without turning around, he took the binoculars hanging around his neck, began peering into the window, turning the focus wheel, adjusted the focus, and saw that something formless was inside the ship. It was gradually taking the shape of his double. He turned around and saw a semi-transparent, forming version of himself. He poked his finger into the liquid double, pulled it back, and realized that his finger had stuck and was beginning to be covered with a shell.

The shell spread across his entire body, covered his face, and then fell off. The shell came to its senses, crawled toward the kitchen. At that moment, children were playing in the yard. A woman entered the kitchen, saw the shell crawling toward her, got scared, grabbed a handheld vacuum cleaner, and began hitting the shell, not letting it explain anything. The shell crawled out into the yard. The children hid in the garage. A stout man ran out of the neighboring house, grabbed the shell by the leg. No one understood what was happening. Someone was filming it. A dog was barking. The man began beating the shell, shouting, “Who are you? What do you want from me?” He struck with his fist and realized that it had almost disappeared. He was hitting the grass.

Inside the ship’s cabinet, something twitched. Something was trying to break out. On the floor lay a mug with spilled coffee. Next to it lay the cosmonaut. He gradually came to his senses, realizing that the sound was somehow bringing him back to consciousness. As soon as the sound stopped, consciousness began to slip away. He crawled to the control panel and turned on the fans. He felt better from their humming. The cabinet fell silent. He assumed that the material samples were somehow affecting space.

He turned off the fans. It became quiet, but again the feeling appeared that something was in the distance and approaching. He immediately turned the fans back on. The wave retreated. He peered out the window, trying to remember how to control the ship, when suddenly the fans fell silent. From the cabinet, transparent threads began silently spreading.

He woke up by the river, next to a burned-out campfire. Nearby stood a progressive motorcycle with spherical wheels. From afar, a kilometer-high wave of dust was approaching. He got on the motorcycle, which automatically activated. The storm was already slightly moving the motorcycle from its place, but he was already riding in such a way that he could not see what was ahead. He looked at the road through the visualization panel, on which a cliff was displayed. He accelerated as much as he could, flew out over the cliff, jumped off the motorcycle, and slammed into the opposite wall of the cliff — a consistency that absorbed him and spat him out on the other side into an underground forest.

In this forest were futuristic bio-mechanisms. Small white spheres flew up to him. They emitted some molecular sounds. These spheres formed a row that would scatter, arrange itself into different signs, then gather back together, glowing in waves. The row gathered into a sphere. It broke away from the ground and flew toward clusters of mechanisms that were not quite mechanisms. He did not know how to understand this.

He no longer thought about how he had managed to start the motorcycle. He realized that he was that blue-green thing he was looking at. This thing was flickering, and around the yellow one there were four of them. They performed some function. He felt that he was inside this thing. He was this flickering function. Under his feet, other rows similar to the first ones ran by and distracted him. He looked again at these semi-transparent, glowing blue-green things and understood: when he looked at them, he became this function. There were countless varieties of them. They glowed, shimmered, turned into something multicolored and different, constantly becoming something new and new. It never stopped. There was another one nearby, and another. The ground was not ground but soft sparks. His legs began to spark. He entirely consisted of sparks. It was as if he had fallen into a cloud of sparks and was spinning and sparkling there himself.

Everything was so unlike anything that had ever been. Each part was so multidimensional that it was impossible not to pay attention to it, and there were more such parts than one could look at. It was infinite, even in its smallest part.

For a moment it seemed to him that someone was shaking him by the shoulder and saying something in an incomprehensible language. He partially came to his senses and saw people around him trying to help. He was lying on the beach. They lifted him and carried him somewhere. He tried to come to his senses but fell asleep again.

He came to in the evening in a hut. Not far away, people were sitting by a campfire. A bearded man approached him and said:

“You stepped on a poisonous fish.”

In the spaceship, something was growing out of the cabinet, but by this time only recently arrived people with lasers were inside. One of them approached the instrument panel, turned a red switch. “Docking in three… two…” Today’s was the last flight. He returned to his cabin to take a nap while unloading took place. Departure was only the next day, but he still needed to go into the city for batteries, sensors, and some devices to repair the navigation. The small vessel had been plowing the seas for forty years, yet the navigation kept malfunctioning.

“Fish is always needed, but at least we could fix the lights,” he muttered, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. “What, after all, is the nature of metaphysics, and how is it connected with probabilities, with the theory of primacy, the theory of rings? Can there be civilizations in space that are fundamentally different from us? Is it possible that these civilizations are connected with some of us? That some of us *are* them? They are connected with the rest. What is the dynamics of degrees in this picture? How can the subjective dynamic boundaries of semiotics look from the perspective of multidimensionality — especially when they are translated into linguistic form? In what forms can aliens exist? How long have they possibly been on Earth? Could aliens have existed before the formation of Earth, and even been involved in its formation?”

Hypothetically, they could have a non-static and non-material form. What is not material for one could be the material from which what is living — but not considered living from the point of view of another alien — is composed. A human himself is an alien being for an inhabitant of another planet. But there was also a time on Earth when there were no microscopes; people did not see and did not think about microbes. Similarly, aliens might not see us.

The varieties of alien forms could be the aliens themselves. The very thoughts about aliens could be a form of existence located in phenomenological space, which belongs to hyperspace. Hyperspace could be a particular case of a fractal. Another particular case could be an infinite Koch snowflake, which has a finite outer volume but not an inner one.

One could imagine a limited sphere inside which a person walks through a forest, yet remains within a sphere four meters in diameter. And when the person walks, he still stays in the center of the sphere that creates the forest. The sphere produces real matter for the person, but the person never reaches the edge of the sphere.