Furious Gulf Read Free

gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines
     blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.
    It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.
    It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are
     racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.
    Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless
     as the rain of protons.
    Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that
     flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.
    Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding
     mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.
    Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient
     supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing
     luminescent ideas.
    From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly
     revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and
     scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.
    Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic
     needles through prey light-minutes away.
    For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to
     think long. Within them, data dances.
    The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here)
     and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.
    Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but
     they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.
    It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.
    Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.
    They must. They are an unresolved issue.
    You term them “primates”?
    Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.
    I/You consider them irrelevant.
    The underlying issues still vex.
    They are nothing! Debris, motes.
    They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.
    We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in
     history, demand completion of this ancient task.
    This policy is e>/~*~\< old. We/You should reinspect it.
    They are nearly extinct. Press on.
    Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests we\you reconsider our\my assumptions.
    They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!
    Some would say that evolution works as equally upon you\us as upon them.
    Nonsense. We\You direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.
    They were once able to alter their own imprintings. To write changes in their carbon kind.
    They lost it as we\you diminished them. Now they are the same as the unthinking forms, the animals—shaped by random forces.
    They were once important players here. We\You should understand their threat to us before expunging them.
    Possibly they harbor information harmful to us\you—so say our most stable records.
    Those