Even when we roll, we gather moss. The detritus of living collects on our souls like dust from the road to the bottom of our soles and, in time, becomes caked grime. Every now and again it becomes important to scrape that collected crud from our feet, reveal the callouses beneath, and refocus our energies. Complacency is the enemy, and it never hurts to simplify existence, for we can only concentrate on so many things at once.
The evidence of sentience sits like a stain upon the fabric of the grid. It would be more accurate to describe it as a cloud, or an onion, but for the purposes of simplicity we’ll squash it down to a two-dimensional plane.
When a species achieves a certain level of self-awareness, there is a visible explosion in the historical record. Remember, the grid exists outside of linear space-time, and comprises all dimensions present in the universe. As there are vectors for time, it is possible to trace events on a wide array of intersectional tangents. Rises to sentience can be thought of as a bright purple bruising that radiates out from its origin and increases in brightness for the duration a culture manages to maintain it. Note that I say “culture“, rather than “species“, for this is often more useful when measuring the rise and fall of sentience.
Don’t look so surprised; sentience is not permanent once achieved, nor does it shine at an ever-growing, ever-brighter rate. It is, as a collected measurement, every bit as fragile and varied as it is on an individual level; entire cultures can be dealt hammer-blows by antagonistic forces of fate, and wander for ages, punch drunk and confused, sometimes falling down and forgetting where and when it was.
2015.05.25