sentience n. 2

Secondly, the true schizophrenic paranoid cannot rail against a mechanistic fate. He must find some sentience to fight, some evil mind to combat. For the paranoid feels that he can win in the end, which of course would be impossible against a case of mechanistic doom. Therefore Carroll needed some sentient manifestation of this doom, something that he could strike at, fight against. Therefore he has accused an ‘alien culture’ of tampering with the records to prevent us from knowing the truth.

Already it had shrunk in his vision to a ball, swirled blue and white: a body as big and fair as Earth ever was, four or five billion years in the making, uncounted swarms of unknown life-forms, sentiences and civilizations, histories and mysteries, become a marble in a game…or a set of entries in a set of data banks, for profit or loss, in a few cities a hundred or more light-years remote.

‘Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?’ ‘First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.’

Imagine: a stable necrosis, where the only sentience in the High Beyond is the Blight.

PanLife, that amorphous, multi-faceted cosmic infection of human, trans-human, non-human, PanHuman sentiences, had filled the universe long before the continuum reached its elastic limit and began to contract under the weight of dark matter and heavy neutrinos.

The duty of the strong-minded person, she holds, is to strengthen dreams, to focus them—not with a view to practical results or new inventions, but as a means of understanding the world through a myriad of experiences and sentiences (not only human).