I dream of a City, but not like any we know in our Time. This City is more like a forest – of crystal columns, thinking inscrutable thoughts. But the City is powerful – it reaches across all Times, drawing people to It. It exists, as a Boundary or Guardian, at the Side-ways limit of Time. It’s the most extreme version of Planet Earth – an entire world that has formed, against extreme improbability, a singular Intelligence, the City. All of the Earth is the City, from the organised crystalline iron of its core, to the whispering computing gas that doubles for an atmosphere. While It is an Intelligence, it is made of trillions of trillions of minds, thus why it draws sentients from across all the Earths. And its electromagnetic thoughts are linked across the Mindful Galaxy and Meta-Galaxy. It lives in a cosmic Ocean of dreaming, collected from all the Universes, which (via hyperspace? Plato’s Intelligible World?) come from all the possible Universes that the City encompasses as the Limit, collecting them and preserving them as the Guardian of all Worlds.
I dream of visiting that Earth, the City, walking through its warm Thinking sands, listening to the quiet whispers of thought in the atmosphere, looking at a trillion Dreams turned into scintillating sparkles in the Forest of Crystal as the Sun showers it in sensations of a trillion trillion minds.
What strange constellations grace its skies? What stories do the Stars tell when all are Alive and talking, discussing, discoursing and even arguing?
What strange Beings walk the streets of a World made of thoughts?
In my dream, the City speaks to me with one Voice, though surely it is but a infintesimal fragment of its Intelligence that addresses me, but I sense something of its multiplicity. The Voice is clear, beautiful and alien yet somehow familiar – perhaps this is how Reason would sound if given a Voice.
The City tells me I have a question of it, that it can only answer when I know what it is…
What’s the question?