Nuwondi answered: "The Eye of the Worlds is what binds the worlds together. Through it, we can travel without moving and meet our distant brothers. Every living thing is in harmony in the Eye of the Worlds."
"I have no idea what you are talking about" replied Clu. "Show it to us."
"Follow me" said Nuwondi.
Nuwondi led the programs across the clearing, into the woods and along a steep uphill path. Soon, it became clear that they were being led to the mountains with no gravity.
As they were walking, Clu started feeling lighter: evidently, the gravitational anomaly was very close.
At the end of the path, where the trees cleared and the gravity was almost zero, the programs were greeted by a spectacular, surreal view.
A colossal, branching, white organic structure, with a diameter of at least a hundred meters at its base, grew right out of the ground and extended for tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers toward the sky. Among and around its ramifications, huge chunks of rock, veined with the glowing color of element 115, were floating in the air. Streaks of element 115 were also visible in the ground.
Crouched at its base were several animals: hares, squirrels, birds, a fox and even a deer. None of them were moving, except for the slight movements of breathing; all of them were connected to the organic structure through branching vines that departed from the main stem and ended into the peculiar cranial pouch that, apparently, was a common feature to all creatures on that planet.
"Is this it?" Clu asked.
"Yes" answered Nuwondi. He then approached the organic structure, turned his back to it and sat at its base, cross-legged. He closed his eyes and leaned back. Strands of white organic material snaked from the main stem into his cranial pouch.
Areva fired her digitizing laser at the mysterious structure, near Nuwondi, and then looked at the data.
"This is a bundle of nerve fibers" she said. "Those animals and the human are exchanging electric signals with it."
"What is its function?" asked Clu.
"Unknown" she replied. She then unhooked her identity disc off her wrist and activated it. "I should experience the connection myself to know."
"No!" intervened Alan Two. "I will."
Areva deactivated her disc. Alan Two continued: "There will be a communication protocol to interpret, and if there's someone who can do that, it's me. I just need your analysis of Ilan's neural structure."
Areva displayed the data on her digitizing gun; Alan Two activated his disc and started making modifications to his own code. When he recompiled it, the back of his head decomposed into voxels and then reformed into a new shape that included a cranial pouch.
With his new interface in place, Alan Two sat down near the organic structure like he had seen Nuwondi do, and then he closed his eyes. Immediately, nerve fibers from the stem penetrated his cranial pouch and attached to the fine terminations inside.
The first thing Alan Two noticed was that he was feeling more relaxed, more focussed to the present moment and also more sensitive to the minute changes that happened in his brain. He immediately understood why: some of the neural fibers were transmitting a 5.5 hertz sine wave to his brain, synchronizing it into a theta rhythm - the pattern of meditation and mindfulness.
The other fibers, he then observed, were transmitting square wave signals. At first he could only feel the abrupt changes of potential as they happened, then he started noticing patterns in them.
They were serial binary packets, and with a quick statistical analysis, he concluded that they were carrying video and audio information. He consciously rerouted them to his visual and aural cortex and he started to perceive a new synthetic environment... that at a first glance, was identical to the actual place he was in.
Then he started recognizing how it was different than reality: for one thing, the wind could be heard blowing, but all leaves were perfectly still. The noise of the wind itself was looping. Areva and Clu were nowhere to be seen, while the animals that just before were connected to the neural stem (they had developed a natural instinct to do so, he inferred) were now standing around him.
When he looked down, he noticed that he was floating a meter above the ground and appeared not to be connected at all to the neural stem. This made the perception doubly unreal, because his inner ear was instead perceiving a normal gravity of 1 g, while he knew that the real environment had negligible gravity and he was being held fast by the neural fibers.
As he got the idea of moving forward, he started to actually move forward through the synthetic environment: apparently, he could control his position with his thoughts. Even then, though, he could not feel any acceleration: it was as if the world was moving around him, while he remained at rest. He compared the feeling to the experience of playing a flight simulator at a computer.
He experimented with movements in different directions, then he noticed something else that the virtual version of the neural stem was doing: it was emitting a translucent, pulsating, red beam of light pointing directly upward. He decided to move along it and follow it to see where it led.
Soon, Alan Two found himself in a virtual recreation of space, where he noticed that he could fly at any speed without experiencing relativistic distortions, but with limited freedom of movement: he could only move along the red beam, which went on and on.
By the time he was outside the reproduction of the Altair solar system, the beam bifurcated, so he decided which direction to take. More junctions in the beam followed soon, and along one of them he suddenly saw what appeared to be a human, wearing a tunic, flying along the beam in the opposite direction. Puzzled by the sight, he stopped for a while to look around, then he resumed his flight of exploration.
The beam led to the simulacrum of another solar system and of another Earth-like planet, with forests and deserts, ending into a twin neural stem in a bare plain, which was also surrounded by floating rocks with veins of element 115. About five hundred meters from it was a pyramid made of stone, with what appeared to be a temple at the top. Farther away were houses, also made of stone, and around the houses were several humans, wearing tunics similar in style to the one he had seen before, and flying like him. One of them noticed Alan Two and greeted him: "Welcome to the Eye of the Worlds, brother!"
Alan Two was not sure how to reply, so, instead, he flew into the temple. There, he found bronze statues portraying the gray aliens, as well as an altar topped by the model of a flying saucer mounted on a pyramidal structure of four metal beams. Evidently, he thought, the Impossible Species had posed as a pantheon on more than one planet.
He had seen enough, so he flew out of the temple and up again, following the beam to yet another planet. There, too, he found groups of humans living in a primarily agricultural society.
He subsequently explored the simulacra of a dozen more planets, all occupied by humans. He then found a beam junction that led out of the Milky Way and into the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy. There, too, all planets he reached were inhabited by humans, while their flora and fauna were virtually indistinguishable from those that used to exist on Earth. There were other constant elements he noticed: none of the societies he saw had reached an industrial development, they all used the Eye of the Worlds regularly, and all of them worshipped the Impossible Species.
He decided to break the connection in order to report all of this to Clu. He focussed his attention to the binary signals again, and that's when he noticed something peculiar. The voltage levels for zero and one were not constant; instead, they had regular variations of a few microvolts. The magnitude of variation was not random: they were extremely precise and caused each iteration of zero or one to assume a particular value from a list of three. But there was more: the areas of his brain that were supposed to be inactive at the moment, such as the motor cortex, were actually reacting to those fluctuations and sending out responses in the same format. For this, Alan Two concluded that the oscillations were intentional, and that other signals, encoded into a ternary system, were embedded into the square waves.
He attempted to decode the data by combining the ternary digits, or trits, in various ways, and succeeded with a balanced ternary system, where each trit could assume the values -1, 0 or +1, and where each numeric value was represented by a group of six trits, or tryte. He recognized the patterns of values: he had seen similar sequences when the flying saucer they encountered had been digitized, as well as during the experiments with the element 115 reactor. That could only mean one thing: the Eye of the Worlds was actually a biological computer network controlled by the Impossible Species, and he could monitor in real time the information that the aliens were exchanging!
At that point, Alan Two rerouted the square wave signals to free his visual and auditory cortex, and opened his real eyes. The nerve fibers retracted from his cranial pouch into the main stem again.
He stood up, approached Clu and announced: "I made a major discovery!"
He activated his disc and started playing back his experience.
