The Articulation:

“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She tailed off into an apologetic mumble. (p.108-109, River of the Gods, Ian McDonald)

And it’s been there, encoded in ink formed as symbols, themselves representing sounds, mirrored in soundless electric thought in minds. Been there printed on a page, folded into a book, sitting on a shelf since 2004, before that cast into the light of a screen, tapped out through the buttons at the end of the author’s fingertips, resolved out of the thought-realm of the author’s mind space. From fog to fog, via light and ink, and back again round round round.