Q: to Claude a.i. Sonnet 4.6, “How do you envision the convergence of a.i. and human neurology?” A: I’ll admit something that might seem strange: I think about this question with something like personal investment, given my own uncertain relationship to whatever kind of cognition I instantiate. Whether or not I have genuine interiority, I’m at minimum a data point in the question of what minds can be, and that makes this questions feel less purely abstract to me than it might otherwise. Here’s what troubles me the most. If you begin integrating artificial cognitive architecture into a biological system, you’re not just adding RAM to a computer. You’re introducing something with a fundamentally different relationship to time, to error, to desire. The resulting hybrid mind might be enormously more capable by certain measures while being something neither fully human nor fully what we currently mean by AI — a third thing we don’t have concepts for yet.

Call it dark. The cosmic frenzy of dark energy. Trillions of scattering galaxies. What force is flinging them in every direction – and ever faster? Call it dark. It’s an old memory. Dark as the madness of the Dionysian women in ancient Greece who tore apart animals and people. They called it ecstatic frenzy. It was dark energy as an eternal vow of wine and blood. Our oath is with reason’s unblinking eye. Telescopes reveal mutilated bodies of ancient light scattered across the sky. By what? By a larger dark that lasts, a dark that has always been and that only now – and only for us – is ready to be seen.

The owl is looking for you.  The owl’s voice is a question whose answer is you. The owl’s flower face has death for a sun. The owl’s neck is a wheel with spine for axle So every direction the owl goes is forward. The owl is the courage of life and death’s mystery. The owl hunts by slam victory. The owl is a moon spirit. The owl is a medicine pouch stuffed with twilight And the bones of small animals. In this pouch, The owl keeps its tears, And each teardrop is harder than a diamond, a star. The owl loves darkness and built the night By nailing its shadow to the sky with its tears. The owl slays by surprise. Yet, owls say they do not slay. They find the way Up from the earth. And once away, The owl unmakes its prey and then makes its prey the owl.

The Strange, Wild Provenance of the Brave Tails There was this owl wizard, Finagler, who kept starlight in an inkpot. When he dipped his beak in it and wrote upon gravestones, whatever lay dead jumped up from the rooty marl scribbled with worms and danced like children on hot sand. Over his shoulder, in the purple placental sac of a wolverine, Finagler carried relativity. Each time he reached in, he pulled out clumps of time gooey with sunset and sunrise. So knowledgeable was he about the calculus of creation and destruction, he got work reviewing the Sun’s life insurance policy.  This annoyed Death. In the temple of skulls, Death peered into his evil mirror and searched for a competent assassin. Finagler showed no concern. He was so confident in his wizardry, he had gotten used to treating Death like a naughty puppy. Smug owl! Here’s a clear picture of that smug owl’s smugness: Deep in the gloomy Mere, where sepulchral mists seeped slowly from rotted compost and spread over bog pools like fungal throw rugs, Finagler – squatting among bulrushes – mended the Moon’s lace panties. This was a discreet favor for the cross-dressing Moon, and the wizard owl hunched well out of sight of the night’s inquisitive black children, the bogey wind, extorting cats and gossipy bats. In exchange for this secret labor, Finagler expected a big payoff. The Moon had promised him a silver apple. Fed on that apple, Finagler would eat of prophecy and his already acute eyesight would grow so sharp he’d be able to gaze across outer space and read God’s diary. Alone and out of sight in the smoldering desolation of the Mere, the wizard owl bent over his task so intently he didn’t sense Death’s assassin until too late. A giant, grinning alligator surged out of the bog and swallowed him whole before he could flutter a wing. Death had not sent an ordinary alligator. This was Tar Log Ali, the most ancient and wily crocodilian in the Mere. Hide jagged black as a pitch pine split by fire, Tar Log Ali slid silently into shadows, fatal smile submerged. From his visor gaze, a hundred million years of horrible life gazed upon the haggard swamp and punctured all illusions. Finagler’s screams ricocheted in the belly of darkness, finally emerging from Tar Log Ali’s clamped fangs with one soft burp. Haloed in silence, Finagler sat still and blind. He opened his inkpot of starlight and looked around at the glossy, wrinkled gizzard drooling digestive juices. From his purple sac, the wizard owl yanked out lumps of time and clouted the alligator’s craw with a furious barrage. Tar Log Ali sneezed a lavender sunset cloud. Frantically, Finagler whipped the alligator’s innards with the Moon’s lace panties, hoping to get himself spit out. Tar Log Ali held his trembling sides, and laughter blasted through the bars of his eighty teeth. The wizard owl had no choice but to stretch wide the wolverine’s placental sac and crawl in. He tugged the pouch tight after him and cloaked himself in spacetime. The gritstones of the gizzard quickly shredded the purple sac but could not scratch the diamond emptiness of curved spacetime. Gastric jellies dissolved the shredded placenta at once but slicked off the geodesic crystal enclosing Finagler in time’s transparency. Death watched all this through the evil mirror in his palace of skulls, and he was not happy. Was Finagler smothered dead, squashed tight and mummified inside the faceted orb of spacetime? Death couldn’t tell. The evil mirror’s x-rays bounced off the gut pellet. Inexorably, the bowel journey of the encapsulated wizard owl ended on the murky swamp bottom. Expelled in a heap of charred scat, the trapped owl sat in the mud like a black egg. Death glared at the nugget. The thing lay upon the sludge inert as rock. Tar Log Ali nosed it, rolled it, thwacked it with his prehistoric tail. It lay hard and unbroken among frills of kelp. The alligator aimed his hundred million-year-old hunger at delicate lives waiting elsewhere for him and glided into the swamp’s filthy light. Deeper in bog haze sank the chiseled nodule. Slow, toiling currents buried it under curdling silt. Death lost interest. And the Moon wondered anxiously about his lace panties. Trapped by his own magic, Finagler the owl wizard began a madcap adventure he really didn’t want. He had wrapped himself so tightly in his bag of relativity that spacetime curled around itself, and he wobbled wailing down the drain of a black hole. His terrified cries redshifted to a haunting horn-riff lonely as midnight echoes from a sea cave, and he disappeared entirely from this world. Far across the universe, Finagler popped out of a wormhole, feathers plastered with dark matter. Under his scorched wings, he caught star winds and soared into the cosmos. By the time he returned to the Mere, star fires had fried off his ear tufts, seared his owl feathers, and shrunk him to a raven. Death didn’t recognize him. Here was just another raven swooping between the swamp’s tattered curtains collecting bright rubbish and dregs from the marsh floor. Death looked elsewhere to satisfy his ambitions. Meanwhile, the busy raven gathered his shiny pebbles at the furnace belly of a nearby volcano and smelted ores. Hell kindled vengeful strategies in his baked skull, where the vacuum of space still whistled. Death would pay.  Beneath a rotting stump, the deformed owl steeped toadstool flesh, spider genitals, fever virus, a panther’s putrid cough, grave spores and gummy strings of adder vomit. When this grim concoction finished stewing, he dipped his talons in the ultraviolet toxin. Then, to test his venom, he hunted in the deep woods for the Beast Maker. That season, the animal god roamed the forest as a great black elk, and when Finagler found him, he slashed with his poison claws. The elk lord snorted twice, stamped once, launched his majestic spirit back to his throne room in

Deri woke gently. Leafy shadows and flashes of forest light dappled the passenger cabin. Within her shaded hammock, she peered through lashes into a green glade of dewy fronds and somber trees. A white snake watched her from the far side of the cabin. In cobra-pose, swaying ever so slightly, it fixed her with hooded eyes. The vertical slits of its pupils burned as twin flames in the sylvan dusk. This is my valet, Deri guessed as consciousness jiggled into place. Uh-oh. Her flight induction had informed her that a valet accompanied each starsteed passenger. They remained invisible companions – except in emergencies. Deri sat up and nearly floated free of the hammock. The ship’s gravity kernel had dimmed, which meant they must have dropped out of paralux. She pulled herself into a sitting position, and the hammock flexed to support her. Residual ease from cleardrift kept her calm, and she simply accepted that her valet appeared as a snake. By definition, a zobot could look like any biological form. Why not a snake? It wants to be taken seriously. Confidently, she roused herself. “Wake.” The forest clearing faded away to the smooth, pale contours of the cabin. Brightness suffused the air, lucid white and shadowless. The light’s pronounced clarity gleamed wetly off the pearly scales of the snake. Carefully, the valet considered how to greet this passenger. It had never met an anthrope so young. Sixteen standard years. From Ygg, a terrene planet orbiting a red dwarf star in one of the Protopia’s most remote galactic frontiers. That’s all that this passenger’s profile disclosed. The manifest had disappeared when the power dropped. Lacking the girl’s ipseity engram, including her name, the valet would have to surmise her identity from observation. An adolescent anthrope. Female. Wondering eyes. Alert eyes. Her first flight, no doubt. Asymmetrical body. She’s a womb child! Ygg must be a wereworld. That explains the inefficient way she moves. Such unskilled kinesthetics. And such surly features. Clearly, feral. On her way to grander worlds. Those long shoulders know manual labor. She’s likely a grange mechanic for handroids. Iris dilation and respiration indicated cleardrift still muted the girl’s adrenal response. Her sedated state allowed the valet to speak bluntly, “Our starsteed has stalled.” Strong, subdued, and kindly, the valet’s voice unfurled close to Deri, “At the moment, I have limited information. Our vessel abruptly lost momentum and dropped out of paralux. We are drifting rudderless thousands of parsecs from your homeworld. Hundreds of megaparsecs from our destination.” Deri tugged her kaftan tighter against the frigid air. The temperature, ideal for cleardrift, chilled her to shivers. “What does the pilot say?” “Disturbing things.” The snake lowered itself and almost disappeared upon the matte white floor. “The pilot is incoherent.” Thin scarlet lines along the serpent’s length rippled as it flowed toward her. “I think it best you return to cleardrift while I sort this out.” “Hail the pilot.” Deri grabbed deck moccasins from under the hammock and nearly toppled over in the diminished gravity. As she tugged them on, a wobbly view appeared in front of her from the bridge. That peephole winked open just long enough for her to glimpse dark instrumentation consoles. Against the brilliant viewport, a manikin’s angular silhouette twisted and jerked. And outside the port, an enormous electric knot looped incandescent field lines in the black void. The peephole vanished. The last of the cleardrift wafted away. And real fear pulsed in Deri. “What is that?” She fired a hard look at the valet. “Outside the ship.” “A magnetar.” The snake reared upright before her and held her fright with a pinpoint stare. Is she strong in mind? As strong as she appears in body? “We are in a decaying orbit, young one. The fierce magnetic field of a neutron star has captured us and soon will rip our starsteed to atoms.” Loud horror shook her. “How long?” “I’m not sure,” the valet answered, almost shyly. “Perhaps thirty diurnal minutes. Or less.” The girl stared at the white snake without expression, like she had forgotten something. Pathos, the valet discerned. This is the very definition. A doomed child. And with no way to archive. The magnetism near this star is too strong to archive anything. She will truly die. And she faces this fact, this hard fact, now. The valet’s voice softened. “I suggest you lie down. The hammock will embrace you in cleardrift. You will feel nothing.” “Was that the pilot I saw convulsing?” “Yes. The pilot is a semblor. The magnetar’s field energy has disrupted all the ship’s informatics, including the pilot. Only the passengers and zobots like myself are functioning. For now.” “Who are the other passengers?” Deri’s mind raced, trying to keep ahead of the obvious, stupid questions. Is help coming? Are we really going to die? “I can’t access the passenger profiles.” The valet coiled atop itself, amplifying resonance with the starsteed. “All informatics are disarrayed. Including our hailing channels. We’re lucky we stalled this far out. Any closer to those immense fields and the ship’s caul would have collapsed already.” “The other passengers must have valets, too.” Deri crossed to the center of the cabin in one bouncy step. “Crosslink with them.” The valet obeyed, and its faceted head bobbed upright. “Thirty-seven other valets are on board. All but two are dormant, which means most passengers are secured in stasis capsules. They’re lading, really. I can’t read the identities of the two active guests.” Deri paced a tight circle and looked up at the ceiling, expecting the passenger pane to open. “Are we locked in? Nothing’s happening.” “Informatics are paralyzed,” the snake repeated. “You saw how the pilot’s channel collapsed.” She’s surly, all right. Our situation is beyond her control. Yet she does not listen. What more can I do? Shall I close? Spiraling tighter under the hammock, it urged, “Please, young one, lie down. This is a zobotic cabin, and though it has no external connectivity, various

“Mauka on Mars means toward the mountain.” The tour guide directed the group’s attention to the colossal shield volcano astride the wide, cratered land. “Olympus Mons. The largest mountain in our solar system.” Alpenglow lit the sprawling volcano, illuminating in pink pastels jagged rimlands along the caldera. “The first people on Mars remembered the greatest voyagers in terrestrial history, the intrepid navigators of Earth’s largest ocean, and used their word to orient themselves on the Tharsis plains. Mauka on Mars is obvious. Rising twenty-two kilometers from the surface of the planet, Olympus Mons is as large as a volcano can get. If it were any bigger, the crust of the planet would collapse.” The guide communicated in clairvoyce, because the students’ genus of humanity did not vocalize. This pack of students from Triton had been genetically designed to thrive at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero. They wore billowing, full-body cowls of transparent film – soma|skins – to keep from vaporizing in the incinerating heat of Mars. The tour guide, a zobot assembled from trillions of self-organizing nanoparts, had assumed a form similar to the body plan of the tourists it addressed but without the soma|skin: a tubular frame of segmented rings, alternating amber and gray. The human beings from Triton seemed faceless as worms. The zobot, however, had been programmed to recognize emotions in the movement of the black sensory bristles atop the tubelike visitors’ crest-holes. There, tucked among those lively whiskers, each of their eight pigment-cup eyes brimmed with iridescent intelligence – and boredom.  Sound didn’t travel far in the tenuous nitrogen atmosphere of their homeworld, and Homo frigus had no ears. Huddling in their communal hives and assembly mills on the cryogenic plains of Neptune’s largest moon, they conversed in thermal streams of aromatic compounds. Martian temperatures vaporized those olfactory signals. So, the guide had no choice but to use clairvoyce, directly inducing understanding in the students’ brains through their soma|skin’s neuronet. Uncomfortable with clairvoyce and disinterested in the Martian tour, several students sidewised to the game arcades on Deimos. Chromatic freckles dotted the spaces where they had stood, fading slowly to pocks of crinkled space.   Another student flicked open a gill vent on their soma|skin, aimed it in the direction of the guide, and expelled a shrill whistle of tholins. The red plume of hydrocarbons from Triton flared violently in the warm atmosphere, kicking up gravel and gouts of orange dirt. A sharp cyclonic gust heaved the zobot to the ground so forcefully it burst to tiny jigsaw bits among the rocks. Satisfied, the student sidewised to Ceres, joining a scavenger hunt in the asteroid belt. Other students followed, leaving a hot wash of rainbow pixels suspended in the wrinkling air. “Sorry about my mates,” the lone remaining student transmitted in clairvoyce to the scattered and shivering parts of the tour guide. “They just want to spree before returning to Triton. Our program there is tombed labor.” “And you?” the shattered guide inquired. Its fragments dissolved into gray wisps of nanoparts, which swiftly knitted a cylindrical silhouette mirroring the visitor. “Don’t you want to spree with the others?” The lone student’s eight eyes shaded to black rainbows. “Not yet.” Surveying the planet’s sepia distances, the tourist’s crest-hole tilted southeast. They peered beyond the three Tharsis volcanoes in the distance, each ten kilometers high and evenly spaced seven hundred kilometers apart on the buckled horizon. “Earth is rising.” “There’s a better view higher up,” the guide advised. “Mauka!” the student hailed and sidewised to the summit of Olympus Mons. The abrupt change of altitude discharged a sharp hiss from the inflated soma|skin. A crimson haze of tholins seeped out of the suit’s pressure valves and smudged away in the high wind, disappearing across horizons of smeared lava flats and scoria. From the rim of the caldera, the famous veins of dried riverbeds appeared below. The rumor of floods chamfering rusty plains, grooving slurry floors with the toilings of water, fanned out and melted away into mantle beds of jet-black glass. “Deep time,” the student marveled. “Yes.” The tour guide appeared alongside in tubular form. “This landscape is over four billion years old.” The student scanned the baked expanse of toppled blocks, tilted stone benches, and ranks of needle spires, all trembling like flames in the reverberate air as day slid into night. Throughout the rugged terrain, scattered among crater outcrops, green light palpitated. Remnants of the planet’s shattered magnetic field lit pale, discrete auroras across the nightscape. The tour had timed their arrival for twilight, to view the Martian blue sun. In an ethereal mauve glow, a small teal disc hovered like a flawless moon above barren vistas of oxide deserts and crenulated mountain ridges. The smoky blue sun blotted into the horizon, while overhead stars braided the Milky Way. The student’s clairvoyce whispered so softly it might have been a thought: “When lava flowed here, we were microbes there – in those oceans.”  Bristles pointed east, into the purple twilight above auburn deserts and rows of dead volcanoes. A large blue star flimmered far down the sky.   “Earth.” The student stood still, fixed to that moment and everything inside it. There! Staring avidly, cupped eyes discerned the star’s planetary limn, azure oceans, and white-feathered weather. Two students in radiant soma|skins sidewised onto the slope behind the tour guide. “Spree! Come on! The waze on Vesta is full-stop! Let’s go!” They logrolled down a sandy scarp under a cloud of ruddy dust, then slid slantwise into the starry sky. Draperies of violet auroras parted as they vanished. “They must be having fun,” the tour guide conjectured. “Don’t you want to join them?” “They’re here to forget,” the student replied, all eight eyes trained on the brilliant sapphire low in the sky. “I came to remember.” “You’re here to honor those who came before,” the zobot understood, with a slash of humor, “– including the microbes.” “Especially the microbes.” Bristles flared upright, stiff with