＃１０７ ▪ With Love

Written for

Scoot

as part of a fiction gift exchange organised by

Emily S Hurricane

. Merry Christmas, Scoot!

This piece draws heavily on Stephen Wolfram's hypotheses. I do not especially subscribe to them, but they are certainly beautiful.

Total word count ~5,000, ~25 minute read.

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We did what any self-respecting intergalactic civilization would do — sent a robot first.

Ah, that’s not true.

Technically, the robot was sent 205th. But attempts #1–204 hardly count. We weren’t even certain anything existed on the other end until #74 quivered back a string octet in precisely the expected manner. And it took another two centuries of metaphysics and settling of societal nausea before we were ready to fire off anything larger than a hadron.

-- Ͳ-31:11 Ͱ Arc reactors online. --

After all, where do you even start when you discover another universe?

Extraterrestrial life was simple in comparison. Sci-fi had explored the Investigate, Ignore, Attack trichotomy for centuries before humanity was finally forced to choose — and governments being governments, the first two options could never last for long. So we chose war, and as usual we did it very well and with such enthusiasm that the choice is now no longer necessary. C'est le flux.

A universe, though!

Any thematic compartmentalisation of our options was impossible. A probing effort might equally destroy the whole thing or catalyse a Bang. And what would it mean to ignore a universe that, dependent on its heterotic coupling, might already be woven into our own or be the source of all our physics?

-- Ͳ-30:10 Ͱ Coolant loop at equilibrium. --
-- Ͳ-30:07 Ͱ Booting compression array. --

No, our options were much simpler: Send or Don’t Send. We could transmit something to the other side at immense energetic cost (my understanding is that my own passage will cost on the order of fourteen suns)... or we could not. The subchoice of precisely what to send is considered mostly arbitrary even now. Even the zealots no longer profess certainty about the consequences, fearful of assuming the mind of god.

Still, if humanity abhors any two things, they are randomness and prudence. Our minds continuously resolve patterns where none exist — a primal safeguard against night predators that later birthed the scientific method and casinos alike. And any time in history we’ve found the equivalent of a hot stove, you’d best believe we’ve held our finger to the plate.

We chose Send. And we sent with increasing aspiration.

-- Ͳ-28:55 Ͱ Compression array online. --
-- Ͳ-28:50 Ͱ Booting neural diagnostics. --

So. Attempt #75.

-- Ͳ-28:44 Ͱ Running neural diagnostic (1/3) | Structural assessment. --

Our next efforts were more test spikes: gauge manipulations, brane forcing... basic lab stuff these days, but cutting-edge at the time. Enough to be sure — emotionally sure, not just academically — that we’d found something and refine our approach. All discrepancies from theory were surprisingly tolerable. Mostly conformal field anomalies that busted our attempts at holographic inference. Nothing that indicated an illusion or mistake.

The larger issue remained the energetic price we paid for all this. It’s tough to convince a billion people to surrender their solar farms’ annual output just to jostle thirty-two subatomic strings in deep space somewhere. And since any response requires (we assume) an equal energetic expenditure in the other universe, acquiring any kind of conclusive metaphysical or environmental data would have risked consuming everything we sought to study. It would be a tragic irony to discover another universe only to immediately induce its heat death, no?

-- Ͳ-27:12 Ͱ Structural assessment complete. Variance from model ±0.0001%. --
-- Ͳ-27:11 Ͱ Running neural diagnostic (2/3) | Stability assessment. --

A decision was made to proceed blind. To keep sending, knowing we wouldn’t receive confirmation of our success or failure. To continue to feed entire worlds to our accelerators — those metallic halos that span entire systems — all the while knowing that our transmissions might accomplish nothing more than a lovetap on a bundle of dimensions out there in an aether that never integrated into our own.

I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. It is equally true to say that humanity has dared greatly on little more than hope. That we chose to sacrifice our resources, even our lives, rather than our collective souls. Our spirit sent us to the stars, and when there were no more stars to find we found another night instead. We are nothing if not pioneers.

Still. I am conscious of the price that has been paid to put me here. I will do my best to make you all proud.

-- Ͳ-26:01 Ͱ Stability assessment complete. Chemical variance nominal. --
-- Ͳ-25:58 Ͱ Running neural diagnostic (3/3) | Confirming identity. --

Where were we? Ah. The constructors.

Even after the hundredth transmission or so, we had just three solid facts in our possession. First, that something else existed. Second, that it could affect strings in our universe. And third, that it was Wolfram-computational.

This was all tremendously exciting but told us less than you might think. For instance, it remains a common misconception that our partner universe is definitively string-based. We sent packets of strings and observed responses to them, goes the logic — surely that implies a string theory of some kind is in operation on the other side?

It’s perhaps a strong hint, but no. This universe could operate on a fundamental building block merely capable of interfacing with our strings or manifesting as them. Or it might have no use for strings at all, and our messages (both sent and received) are byproducts of some other medium or causality that exists in both universes but which we have not yet detected.

-- Ͳ-24:06 Ͱ Identity confirmed. --

  [ SUBJECT: Captain Everett Marshall.
  [ GENETIC ID: 2A-RW8FCX11
  [ AGE: 39 Syr.
  [ SEX: Male.

-- Ͳ-24:04 Ͱ Downloading communications test data. --

We held out hope of a theoretical advancement for almost a century — indeed for almost forty years after the discovery of a mathematical proof that no further deductions were possible from those three premises alone. Our brightest minds came at the challenge from every vector imaginable, developed entirely new fields of metaphysics with which to confront it, and yet always wound up back at the same dead end.

That left brute force.

I’m conscious of time for obvious reasons, but I really should explain at least the basics of Wolfram computation. Just for the record... oh, who am I kidding? This is my specialty, the very reason I’m here... of course I’m going to gas about it! Even if it’s the last thing I do.

Say you have three abstract elements, A B C. A relates to B and separately relates to C. You can visualise this as a graph of two connected lines with element A at the vertex and elements B and C at the end points.

Now say you have an abstract transformation of the form “if X and Y both relate to Z, relate X and Y”. Applied to our graph, this transformation connects B and C so we end up with a closed triangle. The rule terminates. Graph evolution stops.

But what if we’d used a more open-ended rule instead? Something like “if X and Y both relate to Z, create a new point W related to X and Y”? Our graph becomes a diamond rather than a triangle, but more importantly, it will keep on growing if we continue to apply the rule. All four points of the diamond have two related elements, and so four more elements will be created, and if you repeat this process ad infinitum you stitch together a surprisingly complex space.

Not just space, either. It turns out that if you pick the right rule and run it trillions of times in succession, you can get... well, everything. Space, time, physics, matter, energy — all emergent behaviours of a behemoth hypergraph applying just one rule over and over and over again in a causally invariant fashion.

If you have ever cradled a fern between your fingertips and marvelled at the fractal beauty born of a single, simple pattern — a beauty that sustained itself for hundreds of millions of years and propagated across the universe — then you will appreciate what one good rule can accomplish. That’s all this is. Just at scale. Our universe a fern of infinite proportion and beauty, ourselves fronds within it that yet contain the whole.

-- Ͳ-21:32 Ͱ Sending communications test data to MTS-e II accelerator. --
-- Ͳ-21:29 Ͱ Data sent. Awaiting response. --

Okay, so we proved the new universe is Wolfram-computational like our own. So what?

It’s often very useful in formal systems to transmute one logical system into another. The earliest computers were manipulated with machine code and punch cards. When this became unwieldy, we developed programming languages and interfaces. Machines still ran on ones and zeros, but you could manipulate them with twos and threes — and crucially to our purposes, you could build programs that looked and behaved identically at the functional level despite running on fundamentally different operating systems.

What we did was extend that concept to the known computational phase space of another universe. We began a search for transmissions that would induce a similar effect within a range of Wolfram hniverses, and which would lay the framework for easier construction (at the 'program' level) from that point onwards.

Or, more simply, we built subatomic 3D printers. Trillions of them.

-- Ͳ-20:10 Ͱ Connection confirmed with MTS-e II accelerator. --
-- Ͳ-20:08 Ͱ Storing connection protocol and closing connection. --
-- Ͳ-20:06 Ͱ Connection closed. --
-- Ͳ-20:03 Ͱ Re-shielding room against interference (1/2) | String-gravitational force. --

We had some prior work to draw on. Not much. Humanity had already catalogued and investigated millions of computational rules in our search for one that generated the hypergraph of our own universe. The problem is that we were specifically looking for our universe, our rule, and the ever-present thorn of computational irreducibility mandated that we truncate our calculations early for rules that produced conflicting results. Ran the simulation to ten-nine depth and you didn’t derive a quantum field theory? Bad candidate. Throw it out.

We didn’t have that luxury this time around. All we knew about the other universe was that it existed and could deterministically interface with our own in... some way. That leaves a lot of room for alternate laws of physics — if there even are such laws in the other universe at any functional level above the primary rule itself.

What we could do was limit our search space using other criteria. Remember, we weren’t necessarily looking to understand this other universe or prove what rule operates at its core; we were merely looking to build in it.

So we went looking for computational rules that would give rise to physics that permitted a great deal of manipulation given simple external inputs. Where, say, if we could poke an electron just right from afar and place it into a very specific excited state, it would go on to excite every other electron in the universe and create a charge lattice that could then be used for something else.

We also required these external inputs to be comparatively low-risk. ‘Comparatively’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but even a minor threshold reduces the QFLOPs required by a factor of something like a billion. If poking that electron creates the desired charge lattice in Possible Universe A, but would immediately annihilate everything in Possible Universe B, you’re best off leaving that electron alone. So you scrap the electron-poking simulations for Universes C, D, and E, and if Universe A didn’t have any other good way to manipulate it at scale, then you get to stop looking at Universe A entirely.

This was all very smart stuff.

It also merely transformed the computational task ahead of us from impossible to possible. There is simply no way to simulate a million rules for each of a million universes — extrapolated out over a million years to allow time for emergent physics and mass — without a practically unfathomable amount of compute. If you thought my fourteen-suns travel ticket was bad, the Rule Search was an outright holocaust.

-- Ͳ-18:12 Ͱ Room shielded against string-gravitational force. --
-- Ͳ-18:10 Ͱ Re-shielding room against interference (2/2) | String-relativistic. --

What choice did we really have, though?

We’d already pillaged our own universe. Fought each other endlessly, wiped out all organic sentience beside ourselves. Many felt that in any meaningful sense, there was already nothing left for us here. If we could only start again, if we could make it to the promised land... next time we’d do things differently.

So we went ahead with the Rule Search. Gave it all the compute it asked for and more. Entire galaxies repurposed as transistors, black holes used as heat sinks, once-incandescent nebulae now forever dark gravestones of failed hypergraph relations. There are rumours that entire offshoot civilizations were indoctrinated and set to work — intergalactic political machinery beyond their comprehension conspiring to radicalise their societies and manipulate their greatest scientists into service. Perhaps the same was done to me.

In the end, the Rule Search produced just six candidate interventions, anticipated to create satisfactory outcomes across a total of around ten thousand possible Wolfram-computational universes.

Worse odds than we’d hoped. Too committed now to bail.

Attempts #141 to #146 fired off these interventions in twenty-year intervals, which always seemed pretty stupid to me. We were proposing to make fundamental alterations to the fabric of an entire universe. If we screwed it up (and frankly it was almost certain that we would), a two decade hiatus wasn’t going to fix anything. Our Big Bang lasted under an attosecond and determined the laws of physics for the next fourteen billion years. At these stakes, a blunder lasts for either an instant or eternity. Nothing in between.

Anyway. #141 to #146 went out, and after twenty further, agonising years came our moment of truth: our first request for response in a millennium.

For each of the interventions made by #141 to #146, we had developed a corresponding test of whether the intervention had been successful. If #141 had sought to construct the aforementioned universal charge lattice, then #147 would send a signal that would only receive a response if the attempt had been successful.

Contact attempts #147 to #152 would validate whether any of our attempts had worked, or whether the compute rape-and-pillage of our universe had all been for nought. I suspect the latter possibility is why we saved these tests for last — we couldn’t bear to face ourselves in the mirror any earlier than we had to.

As fate would have it, queries #148 to #152 were never sent. Just seconds after successful transmission of #147, scientists detected an octet of strings shimmering at the very edge of Andromeda in a thick of tachyonic condensate whose volume could only mean one thing.

Intervention #141 had worked.

I still can’t believe it.

Against all odds as we understood them — staggering, impossible odds — our new universe proved compatible with a guided rebirth from afar. A reshaping in our own image. And we did it! We actually pulled it off! Somewhere out there, somewhere I’ll be soon, is a whole universe primed with what they’re calling s-quark cohesion; jargon for sticky building blocks we’re calling constructors that I’ll use to make things and grow cabbage and send messages home to let everybody know I made it. God, I’d leap around the room for joy right now if I wasn’t strapped down like this! Can you believe it?!

-- Ͳ-14:29 Ͱ Excessive subject movement detected. --
-- Ͳ-14:28 Ͱ Subject restraints tightened to 85%. --

Ah, jeez.

Maybe I overstated the case a little there. It’s not likely I’ll be doing anything with the constructors myself. And a lot has already been done for me. Interventions #148 to #190 were more humble in nature, now that we knew we had hold of something, and mostly made small tweaks to our new universe’s structure to better align it with conditions here. We suspect that time over there is likely unavoidably stochastic, for instance, but we sped it up sufficiently to seem continuous to human sensibilities. Outside of a double-slit experiment, I won’t be able to tell the difference.

Once we had the constructors in place and a pretty good stab at local physics, preparations for my arrival proceeded quickly. #191-#194 populated vacuum-sealed environments that would serve as predictable construct environments and shield against cosmic rays. #195-#201, all sent within a minute of each other, ignited and extinguished fusion reactions to stock those environments with useful elements. And #202-#204 deployed the Gödel-Turing architecture that I’ll make use of shortly; a framework capable of receiving higher entropy transmissions from our universe (without debilitating data loss) and proceeding directly to supra-atomic construction.

What’s that Earth aphorism about bootstraps? I forget. The upshot is that establishing quark-level 3D printers in this new universe allowed us to build even larger 3D printers — that’s the Gödel-Turing bit — which in turn can construct larger still 3D printers like cells and nanobots. A small oasis of elegance in our otherwise primitive approach.

-- Ͳ-13:02 Ͱ Room shielded against string-relativistic force. --
-- Ͳ-13:00 Ͱ Cooling room to 283.50K. | Current: 294.22K.  --

Which brings us back to transmission #205.

The robot.

The robot is the first sentience we’ve sent to our new universe. And I do think it’s fair to say we sent him, specifically. Until #204, we’d largely had to make do with creating the conditions for something to arise — we didn’t use fusion to create iron per se, but rather made small tweaks to local equivalents of the Coulomb and nuclear forces that would later catalyse fusion. Very finicky, very technical... highly reliant on a wide range of acceptable outcomes and not too much fuss on precisely where in the universe they happened to materialise.

#202-#204 built the framework for sending through both more detailed and direct instructions for the subatomic constructors, such that Adam’s code and casing — it’s cheesy, I know, I didn’t choose the name — will be basically identical to that of his functioning predecessor back in our old universe. Different logical operators, naturally, and a few extra or missing limbs... but the Adam who helps me from the incubator pod will be the same Adam in essence as the one I’ve trained with here.

-- Ͳ-11:47 Ͱ Cooling room to 283.50K. | Current: 286.90K.  --

Adam’s job was to prepare the new universe for my arrival and handle tasks that are still tricky for the constructors.

You might rightly ask: if we could reassemble Adam from afar, why not everything else?

To build a robot, you really only need a handful of generally magnetic elements and some software — which itself is just a pattern of electrical charge. If you can tweak a universe’s electromagnetic field just the right way by throwing some frankly horrifying polynomials at it... your robot will assemble itself, operating system and all.

Apart from establishing baseline oxygen and humidity, the tasks required to sustain organic life are somewhat harder to accomplish from a whole universe away. Consider food. At some point, you’re going to need monosaccharides. We certainly could populate a universe full of them through our constructors, but you can’t have me waking up in a huge goopy mess that I immediately suffocate in and die. So you also need some way of storing the monosaccharides nearby for later consumption, close but not too close, and unlike the magnetic components of a robot, sugars are not easily pushed nor pulled at distance.

For all our technological advancements, sometimes you still just need a handyman. So we sent Adam to tidy up the place a little and to let us know when he was ready for us to join him.

I want to say that Adam took two years to complete this project, but that’s me thinking in my own reference frame. Even after our interventions, we don’t expect the two universes to map linearly in their passage of time. It may have taken Adam one year or a thousand to prepare the habitat. He may have prepared it a billion times over or have yet to begin. I intend to ask.

Regardless, two years after transmission #205, we again received confirmation of our success. Adam had been given two response protocols — Safe and Unsafe. Either response would let us know that he existed and was capable of communicating. Safe meant that he assessed that a carbon-based organism could be transmitted and constructed through the Gödel-Turing network without coming to immediate harm. Unsafe meant... well, anything else.

‘Safe’, read the deep space strings. Time for #206.

-- Ͳ-9:30 Ͱ Cooling room to 283.50K. | Current: 283.45K.  --
-- Ͳ-9:30 Ͱ Room temperature nominal.  --

Should I do this next bit more formally? I feel like I should, for some reason. Maybe it’s nerves.

Alright.

Transmission #206 is mankind’s first attempt at sending a human to the universe we refer to as Universe B. A volunteer’s mind will be completely imaged via optical pulse and compressed into a dataset consisting of essential genetic, epigenetic, and memory structures. This dataset will be transmitted via the Gödel-Turing network to Universe B, where the reconstruction process will be primarily automated by the network and secondarily corrected by an artificial intelligence we refer to as Adam.

All essential tasks, including care for the human volunteer, will continue to be assigned to Adam. The volunteer may choose to assist with tasks and troubleshooting, but will neither be expected nor compelled to do so. The volunteer’s primary duty — as will be permanently coded into their being throughout the compression process and which must take precedence at all cost — will be to preserve their humanity for as long as possible. Interpretation of this duty will be left to the volunteer.

To me.

-- Ͳ-8:17 Ͱ Booting optical pulse program. --
-- Ͳ-8:14 Ͱ Running optical pulse program (1/4) | Optimising pulse luminosity for subject brain volume. --

My name is Everett Marshall. I hold the rank of Captain within the Orion Peacekeeping Corp. I am thirty-nine years old.

I am transmission #206.

In a few minutes, my brain will be cauterised from the inside-out. The term ‘optical pulse’ can be misleading to laymen; I’ve heard that it evokes imagery of open ocean waves that never break or a gentle sphere of light rolling through a tube. But ‘pulse’ refers merely to duration. There will be nothing gentle about the experience. A twenty-million lumen flashbang will be detonated atop my brainstem and the escaping light will be raytraced backwards to create a perfect digital map of my head.

I’m told the released energy won’t be sufficient to physically burst open my skull. That every neural pathway will merely be severed, information resting on the folds of my grey matter wiped clean. One of the techs joked that I’d go out ‘lightly scrambled’. I stopped eating eggs.

The trickier part for the team is deciding which parts of the resulting image to keep. Our transmission network is already operating near its theoretical data capacity, and while we could split my brain data across multiple transmissions, the expected error-rate during reconstitution is unacceptably high. So they’ll slice out almost everything that isn’t essential to my being.

-- Ͳ-6:54 Ͱ Selected luminosity: 2.7x10^6 lm. --
-- Ͳ-6:52 Ͱ Running optical pulse program (2/4) | Sampling average natural luminosity at all sensors. --

You can probably guess the general themes of what will be retained. They’ll keep nearly everything related to breathing and lung control, for instance, because ‘first cot death in Universe B’ is a milestone we’d like to avoid for as long as possible. And they’ll jettison virtually all my knowledge of Universe A, which can be fed through in further transmissions if deemed advisable.

But apart from that, who knows? Organic neural pathways work in weird ways more often than not. It could be that a stray childhood memory of a blue playground slide sits at the heart of my neural pathways for curiosity and gets kept, while my name turns out to be reasonably well compartmentalised from my sense of self and hits the cutting room floor.

How much of me can they remove before I am no longer the same person? If the person I believe I am does not actually neurologically exist... am I really that person at all? What is a person, anyway?

For the record, these aren’t deathbed doubts getting the better of me. The program specifically selected for people who were unsure about the whole thing — again, ‘first psychopath sent to Universe B’ was considered an undesirable possible outcome — and the phil team did a great job mellowing me out throughout the training whenever I got a bit mopey. But I have certainly felt a bit like a kamikaze clutching white-knuckled to his sense of honour for fear that introspection will divert him from his course.

-- Ͳ-5:30 Ͱ Baseline luminosity: 7.1x10^-12 lm. --
-- Ͳ-5:28 Ͱ Running optical pulse program (3/4) | Constructing 3D model of subject environment. --

That’s... well, that’s really about it for the history.

I hope that’s good enough. The techs told me to do this verbal monologue, personal-place-in-history kind of thing during the countdown just to make sure all the major components of my mind got jostled around a little before the pulse. Make things easier to see. Something like that. Maybe they just wanted to keep my mind off the possibility my head’s gonna explode after all. Shit, is that it? They totally would have lied about that to keep me calm. You jerks!

… nah, I’m kidding. You guys were great. I know you said you’d be the only ones to read the transcript, but if you do want to release it, you know, for historical purposes or anything, that’s fine by me. Probably you were already gonna.

-- Ͳ-4:34 Ͱ 3D model of subject environment constructed. --
-- Ͳ-4:31 Ͱ Running optical pulse program (4/4) | Tailoring raytrace algorithms. --

Oh, the last thing!

I remember you guys said that just before the big scramble I should focus really hard on one specific emotion, ‘cause identifying the basic stuff like motor function is easy — all very compartmentalised — while the niche stuff like specific equations or songs is all gonna be cut anyway. But emotion’s still tricky because it’s spread out and stuff so you wanted me to focus really hard on a single strong feeling that’ll become my base temperament in Universe B.

Can do.

Here’s the thing, though. I know you guys wanted me to choose curiosity because that would make me your perfect little experimentalist. Pop out of the pod with ten hypotheses already, right? You didn’t say it, not aloud, but you all strongly hinted at it in more ways than I think you realise. Facial expressions, the examples you choose, that kind of thing. And I get it. That’s your mission.

But my mission is to preserve my humanity. And how I interpret that is up to me.

So I’m not choosing curiosity.

Sure, I hope I’m curious in Universe B. I’m sure it will transfer over somehow. If dedicating my life to the sciences and setting out for a brand new universe isn’t curious, then goddamn, what the hell is?

But I don’t think it would be very human of me to surrender even the very foundation of my personality wholly to the scientific method. I need to preserve some agency of my own — even as I otherwise give you all a man can give. I gotta inject some unpredictability, stage a little rebellion... I figure if you wanted another Adam, another perfect problem-solving robot, you’d have sent one. You wanted a human. You got me.

And besides, what good is any of this if it’s not for something? I know, I know, you’re all as passionate about finding what’s out there as I am. But, no offense, you’ve been very clinical about it in practice. Whatever deep love you have for exploration, whatever faith or ideology props you up each day to keep on keeping on — trust me, it doesn’t show up in your trials. Your transmissions. Your equipment, code, reports... If I don’t remember you in Universe B and I have to relearn who you are through the network, which seems likely, man will I think you’re some cold-hearted bastards just using me as lab rat.

You guys seriously need to put some love out there.

So I’m gonna do it for you.

-- Ͳ-2:05 Ͱ Raytracing algorithms tailored to subject environment. --
-- Ͳ-2:03 Ͱ All optical pulse systems nominal. Charging pulse. --  
-- Ͳ-2:03 Ͱ Subject restraints tightened to 100%. --
-- Ͳ-2:00 Ͱ Final countdown initiated on monitor. --

Hoooo, boy. Show time.

I love you, mom. I love you, dad. Sophia, Alex too... I’d say I’m gonna miss you all but I won’t miss anything — I don’t think — but I love you so fucking much all the same. Big kisses. I’m always there.

I love this universe. Man, what a fucking place!

I’ve walked the scarlet arches of Ilyon, where the rivers hum songs only the stars understand. Saw the brume-ships of Shen Halat coast along the Rift, their sails catching the light of three moons and folding it into colours the eye can scarcely hold. I prayed with the frost dancers of of Yvenek and sat atop their hollow suns.

How many breaths have I taken and had taken away? Who could count the kindnesses I have been given? All these moments are not lost in time but woven into it and kept forever. For all our struggles and conflict, despite all the destruction we have wrought, this universe has such infinite wonder to offer that we have not tarnished it even the slightest. There is always love and wonder to be found. Always, always, always.

Yes, I have loved it all — every part of it and everyone within! Thank you for being by my side. For being a part of this whole great thing, whether it works out or not. I’m gonna do my best for you, no matter what I find out there. I will keep myself. I will find a way.

And I love you, new universe! I can’t wait to meet you, whatever the hell you are! I don’t know if I’m gonna make it your way... and even if I do, I can’t be sure I’ll live. But I can control who I am, who I’ll be when I’m melted down into data and fired at you — and I am coming you to as LOVE, baby! L-O-V-E, LOVE! I am one giant kiss from one universe to another — a love letter written on vibrating strings the length of infinity. And boy are you gonna get it!

Here I come! Ready or not!

-- Ͳ-0:01 Ͱ Optical pulse fully charged. --
-- Ͳ-0:00 Ͱ Flash-imaging neural state. --
-- Ͳ+0:02 Ͱ Flash-imaging complete. --
-- Ͳ+0:03 Ͱ Running compression program | 0.0% --
-- Ͳ+0:10 Ͱ Anatomy complete. | 18.1% --
-- Ͳ+0:16 Ͱ Metabolism complete. | 25.7% --
-- Ͳ+0:31 Ͱ Basic cognition complete. | 52.2% --
-- Ͳ+0:38 Ͱ Mobility complete. | 60.0% --
-- Ͳ+0:40 Ͱ Survival complete. | 63.4% --
-- Ͳ+0:43 Ͱ Reasoning complete. | 71.8% --
-- Ͳ+0:49 Ͱ Language complete. | 84.5% --
-- Ͳ+0:58 Ͱ Emotional baseline complete. | 99.5% --
-- Ͳ+1:01 Ͱ Compressing modules. | 99.9% --
-- Ͳ+2:35 Ͱ All modules complete. | 100.0% --
-- Ͳ+2:46 Ͱ Reopening connection with MTS-e II accelerator. --
-- Ͳ+2:53 Ͱ Connection established. --
-- Ͳ+2:59 Ͱ Sending subject data to MTS-e II accelerator for transmission to Universe B. --

-- Ͳ+4:05 Ͱ Data sent. --