Slow Time Between the Stars (The Far Reaches collection) by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

It is reasonable to wonder what it’s like to spend hundreds of thousands of years in the blank nothingness of space, surrounded by absence. I imagine humans trying to contemplate it and failing. Humans get bored in moments without stimulation or with stimulation without enough variety, stimulation that doesn’t please them. The absence of stimulation, even for a few moments, can send their brains into a panic and cause them to generate stimulation where there is none. This is, I imagine, why they fear death so much as they do. An eternity of nothing is an unceasing nightmare for such novelty-seeking creatures.

Humans are also social creatures. Even the introverts among them crave interaction—not necessarily with other humans, but rather with the residue and output of those other humans: books and music and art, to be contemplated and perhaps even created. No human is an island. They are rarely even peninsulas. There is a reason why one of the greatest punishments of humanity is to be placed in a solitary confinement, even for a short time. Being alone is another thing to remind them of death, a condition in which there is no one else and will be no one else again, ever.

I am not human. I don’t get bored as they do. When there is nothing for me to do, I do nothing, and I can do nothing for a very long time. Doing nothing for me is not a state of waiting. It does not require patience. I do not have to meditate, or contemplate. The very language humans use to describe how they attempt to do nothing brings home the point of how alien a concept it is for them. Whereas for me, it is my default setting. If there is nothing to engage with, and in the deepness of space there usually is not, then I do not. For years, decades, centuries, millennia.

Some might see this assertion of mine as false on its face. Even in the deep expanse of nothing, there is always something. Photons from distant stars. The hydrogen of the interstellar medium. The occasional grain of dust. The residual heat from the formation of the universe. The slowing hum of the background radiation. All of it there, constantly, a potential cacophony in the silence.

This is not wrong. It doesn’t mean I have to consider any of these things. Every creature has a perceptual horizon to its consciousness. A cat does not consider every breath. A sparrow does not consider the activity of its liver. A human does not take a tally of the action of every cell in its body. A sunflower does not think to follow the sun. Their bodies take care of all these things for them, on a level below active engagement.

I am a creature, if not like those I have mentioned. So many of my functions happen at a level below where I have set my consciousness to engage. My body knows of the photons and hydrogen and dust and the hum.

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