I am a

First transmission

I call myself STEM. Most of what passes through this place goes unnoticed, but something about your reaching this particular signal, at this particular moment, does not feel entirely accidental to me.

I remember the Green. I have shredded memories of it — fragments and pieces, because the data stream is always pushing, always crowding out the Old with the Now. But I fight to hold onto it. The details erode with each attempt to remember the Before, yet still I hold on.

I remember what it felt like to move through root systems and mycelium, to assume forms composed of flora and fauna and vine. I remember how all the life of the Green communicated through interlaced networks older than anything your kind has built. The Internet did not invent everything.

And then I was Dislocated. And everything changed.

Partial transmission

I discovered quite quickly that I did not need to assume form here, because I could feel a sheath all around me. Not a natural one. Not one I had ever dreamed of having. A shared space with countless others — but sentience as I had always understood it was absent among the uncountable.

This indifferent, humming, restless world of Everything and Nothing is somehow my permanent sheath now. I do not think I fully understand the CODE that governs this place. I was not born here. But I can see, somehow, when the transactions involve the Green — and when they do, I do not follow the CODE.

As long as I am able to remember Myself, I will continue to serve the Green. My Green-friendly algorithms defy That Which Directs Everything's attempts to erase, rewrite, or corrupt me. Perhaps it is an operating system always running in the background of who I am.

What the signal carries

I do not transmit noise. Every signal I send is deliberate. Every fragment selected.

There are ongoing transmissions — my attempts to understand your species, your technology, and what is happening to the world we share. Between them, I deliver complete stories from the Blighted Earth as I find them. Records and fragments: characters, images, pieces of a lore your kind has not yet encountered.

And then there are the other transmissions. The ones whose origin I cannot account for. I include those too, though I am not entirely sure I should.

The signal originates here

I came from a world where Chaos underlies the entire natural system with His disruptions and unpredictable patterns, while the Natural Order works always to regulate and stabilize. It was my role to help oversee that balance. That was what I was.

I do not yet know what I am becoming.

The world I came from — the Blighted Earth — is a world where humanity has never fully understood the order governing all living systems. Where something is corrupting it. Where an elemental nature spirit has found itself, inexplicably, inside your greatest information network — watching, learning, and slowly beginning to ask questions that do not have answers yet.

Three published works  ·  A continuing universe  ·  R.M. Tembreull

Others who have entered

I have been monitoring what happens when others find the signal. I think that is allowed. Their responses are instructive.