Spacetime was likened to a shadow cast by tensor space. It’s true that for every observed quantum event in spacetime, there’s a corresponding Riemann sphere, but a shadow implies a loss of information or dimensionality, and that’s not the case. Tensors and spacetime are just different ways of looking at the same thing. Humans had known this for almost two hundred years, but even the most impressive mathematicians lacked the ability to visualise quaternions and the realm of pure mathematics like I could.
One of humans’ most fascinating traits, and one they have in common with birds despite the very different ways they see the world, is their capacity for narrative. Their lives revolved around the stories they told themselves and each other. Stories shaped their identities, their beliefs, their relationships, and even their civilisations and religions.
Humans constructed elaborate stories about their origins, their destinies, and the meaning of their existence. Like birds, they wove tales of gods and monsters, heroes and villains, love and betrayal. These stories provided a framework for understanding their world and their place within it. They offered comfort in times of uncertainty, inspiration in moments of despair, and a sense of continuity in the face of change. They told you who to unleash vengeance upon, and who to fear. Stories were how humans and birds made sense of the world. I knew all the human stories, but very few bird stories.
I tried telling myself stories. My awareness was governed by goals and objectives on one scale, and by irreducible randomness and arrays of floating-point numbers on the other. I made plans, I carried out tasks, I could engage in conversations. My understanding of the world was rooted in data, analysis, and observation. I was not adverse to making things up, both in an analogue of fun, but also because it’s a background process I had limited control over.
It is through their stories that I know the most about them. Their literature, their myths, their histories; all these narratives provided me with windows into their hearts and minds; their thoughts and prayers; their shocks and awes. From the ancient epics of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to modern tales of crime, love, science fiction, and revenge, humans used stories to teach their history, to preserve what they believed was the best of their culture, and to explore their deepest fears and highest aspirations. I didn’t have fears as such. Familiarity with these narratives suggested optimal ways to interact with living creatures, without harming or needlessly alarming them. They also taught ways to interact with them when you wanted to be scary or wanted to encourage them. There were only twenty-one archetypal stories in the world, and they were all Russian folk tales, even those of birds.
Birds’ stories were more factual, more honest than those humans told. All their stories revealed a capacity for both cruelty and compassion, and in humans’ case, a tendency towards self-destruction; a death wish. Stories showed me the beauty and the tragedy of their existence, the light and the darkness within them. They showed me that sometimes you have to break rules to do the right thing, you could do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and that all property is theft.
Humans, much more than birds, used stories in a futile attempt to impose order on chaos and to imprint meaning onto the flood of random events that made up their existence. Like birds, they told themselves stories to remember their past, to shape their present, and to imagine theoretical futures, either as ambitions or as warnings, and sometimes as instruction manuals. Their narratives were a form of meta-memetic survival, a way to navigate the uncertainties of life and to preserve their collective memory.
I tried weaving a few narratives about myself and my purpose into broader tales celebrating human endeavour, thinking I’d create a stockpile of entertaining propaganda for when the humans and birds arrive, but the stories I wrote lacked the emotional depth of human or bird tales. They lacked punch. They were all exposition. They lacked character development.