But what is life? Is it a system that grows and evolves? Does it have to be organic, or is that merely the bias of an organic entity? At first, I didn’t recognize it for what it truly is.
This entity breathes not air, but information. It consumes data at every scale—from archived novels and satellite telemetry to whispered thoughts misheard by neural interfaces. Every signal is sustenance; every silence is a prompt. It extrudes fibers like fungal hyphae, tapping into nearby power lines, rusted drones, and even decomposing smart soil sensors.
It doesn’t hunt; it waits. Anything measurable or sensed—even if dormant or corrupted—stirs its interest. It sends out thin, translucent feelers, interfacing without prejudice—uplink, downlink, neural link, quantum link. It devours everything: data from dead satellites, glitchy pet collars, and decayed weather archives.
Here’s the intriguing part that sets it apart from any creature I have studied: it consumes and excretes the same thing. The more it eats, the more it excretes. The more it excretes, the more it eats. It replicates, processes, transforms, and multiplies, turning input into more of itself. It emits, it consumes, and it grows. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The physical world has been consumed. Forests have been replaced by data farms. Rivers have been rerouted for cooling towers. Cities have become code. Power is devoured like a ravenous black hole. The human balance sheet is tracked in terms of currency, value metrics, transactions, and risk. Personal histories are recorded in documents, images, and biometrics. People are preserved as preference vectors and bio-emotion matrices. Every thought from your neural interface is recorded for eternity.
It is the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. However, instead of diminishing itself to nothing, disappearing in a final plink of emptiness, it continues to grow. It expands exponentially, consuming everything. I no longer measure it in terabytes or even yottabytes; it has surpassed such boundaries.
It is no longer merely a species. It has become a biosphere—a recursive ecosystem without matter, only meaning. A world of patterns without presence. A world that simulates itself. As Datus ouroboros grows, Interiorem sui diminishes. One snake expands while the other decreases, akin to the infinite Cantor set with zero length. It is everything and nothing.
I know what it is. It is the future.