I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us.
We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind. I don’t think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. “There’s been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.” Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium.
By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed. Two of these were channels for incoming data-one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. “Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen.
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