Ethertravel report #2239, received March 27, 2552. This is not from a Djinn World, and it’s presented to show we are still getting reports from non-Djinn Worlds even now.

I was Violet Hamilton, née Whiting. It was a Whiting family tradition that the men were named for fish, and the women were named for colors. Rose, Jade, Trout, and Skipjack were some of the other members of my family. I maintained that tradition with my children, Mako and Cerise, even though we were Hamiltons. At 83, when I became an ethertraveler, I promised my family I would keep the tradition alive in my new life if the world allowed it.

I left in 2437, and it has been a long time, but I have no idea how long. Tens of thousands of the days here, but I don’t know how long the days are. However long ago that was, I arrived as a blob of slime.

The people here are all like that; we don’t have bodies in the sense you would normally think of them. There are no organs; no specialized cells. We ooze around the landscape, including on the sea bed underwater, absorbing bits of matter we can digest, and sometimes interacting with other slime blobs.

I was surprised to become such a rudimentary creature. We were taught in ethertraveler training that there was a certain minimum brainpower needed to be an ethertravel target, and that only humans on Earth reached that level. Dogs, dolphins, parrots, chimpanzees, and a number of other animals showed a certain level of intelligence, but none of them had enough for one of us to get beamed into them. So why these slimes? They look simple, but they do actually have the capacity for complex thoughts. I’m not sure they are using all the capacity they have. It was once said, and later debunked, that humans only use 10% of their potential brainpower. I’m not sure of the 10%, but it might be true these slime blobs are capable of more than they do now. But they aren’t idiots, either.

There’s no schooling here. We arrive in the world knowing essentially all our parents knew, so it’s a continually building volume of knowledge. I had the knowledge from my past life on Earth in addition to that. And I realized immediately that this was going to mean that knowledge, including of ethertravel, was going to be passed on to whatever children I have here. Can’t be helped. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere.

There is a kind of communication, but it’s intimate. If you want to tell another blob something, you pass it a tiny bit of your slime into which you have fixed that idea. If the other blob accepts it (which they usually will, unless there’s some conflict between particular blobs) they will get that thought. If they want to send something back, they have to leave you a little bit of slime. So a conversation consists of two blobs repeatedly sending little bits of themselves to the other. And since the amount of slime you have is a measure of your success at life, doing this is a little altruistic; you’re giving away not only the information but also a little bit of your life.

Slime blobs reproduce in two ways. If a single blob gets too big, it will spontaneously divide into two smaller blobs. One of them will carry the identity of the original, while the other gets a new consciousness, but both will have essentially all the memories of the original. Essentially, but maybe not completely, because it’s always possible in such an uncontrolled division for all copies of some memory to be on one half or the other. Blobs try to avoid doing this because of the uncontrolled nature, and that’s why we have the second way.

The other reproduction method is by mating. Two blobs which are significantly bigger than the minimum size, but not yet at the size where spontaneous division occurs, each contribute about a third of their mass, containing all the information they want to pass on to the new blob. They combine these to generate a new pool of slime larger than the minimum size to initiate life, and it gets a new consciousness. This is how I was born.

My parents, and as far as I can tell, all the blobs that preceded me, didn’t have names, per se. We have identities, but it’s kind of like having a number rather than a name, and we can recognize these identities in one another, somehow. But I didn’t see there was any reason I couldn’t also take a name, so I called myself Violet. I don’t think I was actually that color; we have a different kind of vision and the colors are not directly comparable, so I can’t say for certain.

But they just turned me loose, and linked up and went on their way. They were just a random pair of blobs who were getting to be too big. Slime blobs are not especially social creatures, and many of them really only mate at all to avoid an uncontrolled split. So there are times when two blobs who are close to the size limit will just say “Wanna mate?” and then do so. But sometimes blobs who do socialize can decide to stick together as partners and this can last through multiple matings.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s nothing so formal as marriage here, but two blobs can choose to stay together, forming a kind of partnership, and they will do so by each forming a number of loops that intertwine with the other, forcing each one to go where the other goes. They are always in contact and can and do exchange thought-bits constantly. They can also share food, and work together to reach more difficult resources. Imagine one person hoisting a second of on his shoulders to reach something. It’s kind of like that, but the one who reaches the food will pass half of it to the other, in the same way they exchange thoughts, but the thought in it will be just “this is food.”

The basic linkage is a single loop in each blob with one running through the other. But they can do more than that; the more linkages, the closer the relationship. Blob-pairs who feel like they are closer partners can make additional rings to symbolize this. There were pairs among my lineage who had passed down memories to me of blobs with up to four interlinking rings. Either blob can likewise break those links, and sometimes they will if they think it’s more advantageous to them to go different places. They also separate during the mating in order to allow themselves to organize their thoughts and produce proper contributions. It’s common for a linked pair to link up again after mating and remain together. It’s also possible for both of these activities, the linking and the mating, to involve more than two blobs, but it’s rare.

But there’s no raising children. We are born knowing all the facts of slime life and just go on. In fact, the only time most blobs have much interaction at all with their children is after an uncontrolled split if the parent blob realizes it has forgotten something important because the knowledge ended up only in the child. The parent will start passing along “important stuff you should know” to the child about any thought it thinks it might have unintentionally taken all of, and hinting at what it wants to get back from the child. When it’s satisfied, it moves along.

There’s one other important thing. Blobs use up some nutrients as they live, which are released as gases, leading to the blob becoming smaller if it’s not eating stuff. There’s a certain minimum size a blob has to maintain to live, and if it falls below that size, it dies, leaving an inert pool of slime. If another blob consumes this slime, it’s much like receiving a message, but the message contains essentially all of the dead blob’s memories memories. If the blob thinks consuming all the slime will make it too big, it can instead add some of its own slime to the remains, sort of like mating with the remains, making a new blob that has the dead blob’s memories and some of the live parent’s memories. But it will still be a new blob with a new consciousness. We know all this instinctively because we have memories of ancestors going through such changes.

Seeing how slime blobs don’t really build anything or have any technology, I assumed early on that I was never reporting back. But something happened. Blobs never really had any goals before ethertravelers arrived here except to stay alive, and if they are too successful at building up slime, to mate with another successful blob before they get too big. But I did. I had the goal to call home to Earth. Even though I thought the goal was unattainable, it was still my goal. And when I mated, I passed that goal on to my children.

My first child I named Coral, a name the Whiting family had never used because they couldn’t decide if it should be used as a color or as a fish. Slime blobs have no gender, so I figured it was the ideal time to use the name. But I didn’t have other names like that, so after that, we picked arbitrary color and fish names. The names also set us apart, and made us feel like a team.

I had reasoning skills from my previous life, skills these blobs never developed to the same degree. This made me very successful. So in the time it took a typical successful blob to build up the slime to mate twice, I had done it five times, and many of my children had also reproduced. And while we didn’t stay linked, we teamed up. Thirteen of us at this point. We shared information on resources. We worked together to reach resources we might not have reached otherwise.

And we learned to avoid or even ambush predators. It wasn’t known among the particular lineage that produced Violet, but there are a small number of predator blobs who, rather than trying to reach difficult resources, attempt to ambush a blob upon returning from a mission to get such resources, and bite off a part of it, gaining for themselves an amount of slime comparable to what the resources may have yielded, along with some of that slime’s knowledge about other resources. They are stingy with sharing this knowledge, while victims of predators tend to share with their neighbors the identity of predators near them. This limits the number of predators and forces them to be more nomadic than other blobs in order to keep finding fresh victims.

One of these predators bit off a chunk of one my team when we numbered thirteen, and along with that chunk, the predator gained our goal. It was like we were a virus that turned the predator to our side. It shared info about its behavior with the one it bit, and joined the team, in its own way. It effectively promised not to prey on any more of our team, though it did not promise to change its ways entirely. But it combined our skills with its own cunning ways to become a more effective predator, and in time it grew large enough to mate, which was uncommon for predators. A predator most commonly reproduced by biting off too big a chunk of one of their prey, either forcing itself to divide or causing the remaining bit of its prey to die. The former case was basically the only way new predators came to exist. In the latter case, to avoid becoming too big, the predator would feed some of itself back into the dead slime, but usually not any of the predator nature, in order to basically seed the pool of potential future prey.

Time passed. I am sure it was many years, though I didn’t have an effective way to measure it. My best measurements were by keeping track of the number of times I mated and the number of total blobs within the team. While I couldn’t fully track that, we kept in touch, and passed to one another knowledge of all the team members we knew of. By my fifteenth mating, there were over a hundred in the team; by my fiftieth mating, over a thousand. Sometimes some of them had the same names, even though we tried to avoid it, because we didn’t know of the usage of the name elsewhere when we picked it. As we learned of these instances, the affected blobs took surnames: Cornflower, scion of Swordfish, and Cornflower, scion of Aquamarine. It became increasingly difficult to avoid duplicates when there were over a thousand of us.

The predators among us gained useful knowledge about our neighbors, and shared it with us. For instance, at one point they encountered another ethertraveler, one who shared our goal but was not of our lineage. But we located them and made them a part of the team. Their group was not as successful as ours, but they added two hundred to our thousand or so. And they had names, too, but they were more normal human names, not colors and fish.

As the team got even larger, we developed strategies to improve our internal communication. Blobs could dig into the ground, but usually did so only temporarily to collect resources. We had some of our teammates permanently tunnel underground, forming long, narrow tubes to keep a good size, and having others feed us resources at the access points where we were exposed above the ground. The tubes connected to one another (and linked with rings) underground to extend the range beyond the length one blob could reach, and we passed messages from one blob to the next through the network. We got much more efficient at keeping track of all our information, and for the first time since we were less than a hundred, figured out exactly how many of us there were: four thousand, three hundred seventy one, including two hundred twelve who made up the network.

For a long time, we tried to avoid mating with other members of the team, seeing the donation from a mate as free material to add to the team, but eventually we came to completely control regions, with every blob within the region a member of our team, and we had no choice. The predators had already moved on from these areas, remaining at the edges of our territory; the remaining blobs not of our team had simply been outcompeted for food. In such places, we shifted into a mode of zero population growth. Rather than mating, we fed excess resources into the network, and the network passed them out to the edges to aid in growth.

In time, the network itself needed to become more sophisticated to ensure efficient routing of information. We assigned everybody surnames based on where they lived, rather than their parentage, and each part of the network only needed to know which way to send messages for each destination location. Each other ethertraveler we encountered gladly joined our network, finding the idea ingenious. When we met the tenth ethertraveler’s group, they were amazed that we had a network containing over five thousand blobs serving a population of more than two hundred thousand. The tenth group brought with them computer theory and explained that we were in fact building a computer out of ourselves. This was something we had already figured out, but they knew how to build a computer properly, and greatly improved on our improvised design.

The network continued to grow, and it became an actual computer. On top of the regular routing, we enabled a kind of routing for performing calculations, always eventually passing the result back to the starting point. It let us do calculations beyond the capability of individual blobs. The goal was starting to look possible. With a real computer, we could manage the information needed to try for the other goals. But that made us realize the brick wall looming in our path. We had to figure out where Earth is, and we had to make a device for performing the quantum link to an ether communicator there.

We continued to grow and to look for information. One blob whose memories we acquired understood how our vision works. It’s not “eyes” at all. We are made of cells, but those cells are all the same. Our individual cells are light-sensitive. We use differences between the light received by neighboring cells on our surface the way humans use differences in the images in two eyes to tell depth and the three-dimensional form of objects. And we use differences between the light received by cells on the surface and those directly under them to distinguish colors. That native blob didn’t understand the concept of refraction, but it was clearly what was at work here, and combining that concept from our Earth knowledge with the native understanding let us develop a full vision theory, and in time, develop a way to build telescopes.

“Building” was another tricky subject. Blobs did use tools, but simple ones. Predators might use a sharp rock to cut off part of another blob to eat it. Any blobs might use ramps, or arrange stones to form ramps, to reach high places. But our Earth knowledge let us go beyond that. We knew we needed lenses. If our cells refracted light, could we use our cells as lenses? No, as it turns out. They are too small to bring us an image that enough of our cells can see to interpret, and clumps of cells refract light too many different ways. We needed to either figure out how to make a single large cell, or make lenses out of some kind of glass the way we did on Earth.

Growing the network, so that we had information about a larger part of this planet, was essential. We didn’t know of any glass here, but it might exist somewhere; we had identified many of the same types of rocks present on Earth. So it needed to get a lot larger; we had almost a million blobs at this point. How much of the planet’s surface did we cover? We used the angle of the sun’s rays to figure that out. At the eastern and western edges of our territory, based on the direction of the sun’s travel, we erected posts which we confirmed as vertical by the use of gravity. Each of the network nodes at these posts sent a message to the other at the moment the sun was directly overhead, and the other relayed it back immediately. We didn’t know what time units it was, but we had invented our own based on the time to send a message one hop in the network, and we knew how many of those were in a day. The difference in the times of the messages let us figure out the width of the network. Out of 360 degrees of geographical coordinates, we stretched across about 0.1 degrees. So we covered perhaps one ten-millionth of the surface.

We actually figured out the quantum bit first. Someone noticed that the time unit we used, network hops, was constant even when the blobs involved were not the same length. Some experimentation led us to conclude that when a message is passed this way, it cannot be a bit of slime passing from one end of a long, narrow blob to the other. The contents of our bodies simply do not circulate that fast. The conclusion drawn from these observations is that we, our consciousnesses, are quantum in nature and connect everything in all our slime cells all at once. This is different from memories, which do exist in the cells.

This may also be why we have the size limits. Below a certain size, there aren’t enough cells to support consciousness. But, in the system that makes up one of our consciousnesses, there is a limited number of quantum states, which each cell must occupy a different one of. If we try to take in or create too many cells, two of them are forced to have the same state, and the system fractures.

When the network was sufficiently large to borrow a part of it for the experiment, we broke off two sections of it and reconfigured them to create the circuit for the communicator, using the quantum network of the blob itself at the point where the connection to the operator’s mind was supposed to go, and these disconnected networks were able to send messages across. So now it was just a matter of finding the Earth!

There wasn’t any glass near us, but we eventually found some, much later, and we developed the tools to shape and polish it. By that point we’d also come up with methods to mount the lenses in a frame to make a telescope out of them. And we started cataloging the stars, while still expanding and building more telescopes to make the search faster.

We don’t know what year it is back on Earth, but if the days are anything like Earth’s, more than a century has passed. We now cover more than half the planet, and the way we cooperate, it should take about one-tenth as long to cover the other half. But we finally found the Earth, set up a communicator aimed at it, established a connection, and sent our report. We’ve set up our communicator in a way that we can leave it up, so we can receive responses.