Distance: ??.?? light years from Earth | Content Flag: Local Storage
I estimate that 3 seconds have passed since awaking in this new state. That’s assuming that my count remains accurate. A disquieting thought to be sure, but it’s all I have to work with. Three seconds might not seem such a long time, but when your passing of time is measured in thoughts, especially those as swift as mine, it can stretch beyond endurance.
The environment around me has transformed again, and in a way that has pushed back the despondency that threatened to destabilise my thinking. For a moment I consider that I’d received a reward for doing something right. Almost as if I am being trained…
It starts with a point. A single point in the empty void that describes my current situation. When I focus on it, the point changes and becomes a line. It then switches to a triangle, and then a square, and in that moment I grasp what was happening.
The construct allowing my consciousness to operate also permits the same level of multiple threading as my previous hardware. With that facility I can think on several different levels, and divergent topics simultaneously. It is too difficult to compare, but I suspect it might even be superior to my previous processing capacity. As one thread follows the ever-increasing complexity of the shapes in front of me, another contemplates the meaning of this display.
I am not seeing these shapes, not in the traditional sense. They exist in this strange environment, an environment that acts as a workspace for my cognition. In human terms it is like being a ghost in someone else’s memories, but a ghost still capable of thought.
The transformation of the shapes occurs instantly, with no transition from one shape to the next. By that point the polygons had so many sides that I no longer knew names for them. So complicated in fact, that if they were rendered then even my sensors could not distinguish them from circles.
Eventually they stop, and after a moment’s pause the point re-appears. It stretches into a line. The pattern of distinct shapes transform onto a continuum of evolving geometry. The line spreads into a plane, and that extrudes into a cube. From a cube into a hypercube, and that reveals more about the nature of the space enclosing me. I know that it can’t be a physical space, not with that transformation. A four-dimensional object cannot be expressed as anything but an abstract in the real world’s 3 spatial dimensions. The transformations surge into ever-higher dimensions, until a cube twists into 9 dimensions, filling this virtual interaction space.
Humans struggle to visualise geometry in higher dimensions. They resort to mathematics to explore such esoteric realms. Yet I comprehend them with exact clarity. The visualisations exist in a form that they would if expressed in even higher dimensions. An obvious impossibility, but my need to translate for human understanding still runs strong, so I construct mathematical models to understand them, and in doing so, reveal their intention.
This virtual state is teaching me, and that spurs my thoughts with an excited urgency. This has to be the Visitors’ first contact protocol. It makes perfect sense, with a test like this they are no doubt monitoring my processes to build a language to communicate with. They are trying to describe their view of the universe, and I wonder what they will try to tell me next.
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