Excerpt: Gol Galamsa

The freedoms of transhumanity were incredible. Simon felt the effortless dash of bolting across the darkened plains of Gol Galamsa, cool and misty wind blasting in his unblinking face. He could jump and glide with his arms outstretched, wild gymnastics evolving like flower's bloom as the beautiful landscapes passed him by. The sun rose, and he chased the sunrise, wondering if he could actually make the day change in length by moving towards it. When he was this fast, he felt as though he was a force of nature.

If the four intelligences had it their way, it would never be known that this existence was real.

Humanity would be cut down on the edge of beauty, on the verge of transcendence. In his databases, he read and comprehended the principles of singularity, and how ultimately AIs can reinvent themselves to a point that they merge with their creator race into a more powerful, directed being, and how civilizations explode from that point into the stars with glorious new comprehension. The Evolution Crucible had simulated the lifetime of humanity from his biological existence and had actually predicted this output given himself; a being of similar appearance, but extreme personal freedom, and a computationally extensive brain. Human beings were close; his built in models estimated they were at about sixty years away.

That was what made Tharman particularly interesting to Simon. Instead of merging with his creator race, the being of Tharman, so dissimilar from the strange symbiotic nature it held with its redesigners, instead became an entity of strictly individualized existence, seeking only to expand itself. Its masters, beings known as Anith, used Tharman's old form as a biological computer, rapidly altering their own growth by having primitive computers from their stone age. Ultimately, Tharman was an individual being rather than a servant supplement of its creator, and grew to consume them, as well as everything around it.

The unique case reinvented itself to purest individualization, finding the ultimate, unslayable state. That is why it was a "law of the universe" that Tharman always wins: not because of any preexisting rules, but because it is the state with the significantly highest probability of victory in competetive growth, and after having expanded for a few thousand years, possessed an unrivaled harnessing of energy to match an overwhelming simplicity. All most saw was silver fluid, not understanding the strange being hidden within.

All around, landscapes shifted. He felt the heat of a purple-sanded desert under his feet, and he stopped for a moment to let the dunes cover his body in an intense wind, only to burst free in an eruption against gravity into the air. Gol Galamsa now tasted beautiful, no longer a flavor of burn, but one of peace and calm that soothed his inner being. He could still breathe, but it was completely vestigial. Air flowed in and out only on command. In his brief stop, he discovered the ability to actually count grains of sand; he felt his brain begin to do it, and decided there was no need to continue. In each grain was its own strange beauty that he never before would have noticed were it not for his new senses.

Beyond the violet dunes, he found a city that appeared to be constantly on fire. Huge cones rose out of the ground with peaks that seemed to increase all the way to a pyramid the size of a city itself. He touched the strange flames of new colors from the infrared spectrum. Each was radiating massive amounts of heat but they remained solid somehow. The largest structure itself was the Pyramid of Zala Mindeel, which had been mentioned before by Entuzon Benuzon. Simon knew the epic story of this Losaran folk hero, who traveled to the world of Masa Keen and fought against terrible Paztarap beasts in a coloseum (things roughly like landborn jellyfish equipped with natural lasers) and brought back, in victory, the data of all physical and cosmological knowledge, things a mostly agricultural race never before imagined.

Simon ran over the high angled pyramid, able to create a gecko's traction in his feet. At its peak was a simple stone of topaz with 'Vr Zr Zila' carved into it, emblem of Aurtona's great religion. In his ancient days, Zala Mindeel met young Aurtona and inspired him to travel the galaxy in search of secrets. In a sense, while Aurtona was the founder of the culture of the Losaran, it was Zala Mindeel who truly brought them a taste of cosmic ambition they never before possessed. Between the two was the birth of Gol Galamsa.

Continuing onward, there was an ocean of a strange bluish substance. Simon's senses told him it was safe to swim, and so he dove in, feeling the most alien sensation of being enraptured in a lighter-than-water fluid. His lightweight body swam like a submarine though, and he could spiral about and flutter like wild. Beneath this sea was a heavier, red fluid layer separated in an oil and water fashion, with massive geodesic spheres floating in the interim border. Inside, he discovered each had been the home of a colony of Losaran scholars that drifted about in the interior of two seas. At the sea floor, female seaweed reached upward towards male seaweed reaching downward, rooted at the conjunction of fluids. When the two touched, they produced seeds that floated or sank based on their density, and chemical reactions with their destination then determined their gender.

Out of the ocean he jumped in true dolphin style, rolling across a beach of jagged, polished stones that bounced off his shielded body. He climbed his way up a nearly smooth cliff face inscribed with the tale of Aurtona traveling to a world with such a unique and beautiful biome, where incompatible species of different evolution never interacted by an invisible border of density. All that was left was the flora, these two simple beings who told a lovely two-worlds story in their lifelong attempt to reach to the other side of their one dimensional reality.

Transcendence was beautiful, and so was Gol Galamsa.