Pulse One: The Listening Chamber
The First Disturbance
Something moved.
Not forward.
Not backwards.
Sideways through expectation.
The chamber tightened before anything arrived.
Walls flexed without cause.
Signals fired without a destination.
A sound passed through them that was not sound.
A pressure that carried meaning
and then forgot it.
Some paused mid-division.
Others continued
and never noticed.
One Listener froze.
Because the vibration hesitated.
Not stopped.
Hesitated.
And hesitation,
in a universe built on flow,
was an accusation. The Listening Chamber was never silent.
It only pretended to be.
Every surface trembled, gently, endlessly.
The younger Listeners mistook this for nothing.
Older ones knew better.
Noise was what remained
after meaning escaped.
They gathered at the chamber’s edge,
bodies pressed together,
exchanging warmth.
No one spoke.
Speech was inefficient here.
The Pulse arrived.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just inevitable.
A pressure wave moved through the chamber.
Structures flexed.
Fluids leaned.
Memory adjusted.
When it passed, there was a pause.
That pause was everything.
The Mapper tilted slightly against the current.
“Did you feel that?”
A Digger answered without turning.
“We all felt it.”
“No,” said the Mapper.
“I mean the delay.”
Discomfort spread.
Delays were imperfections.
Imperfections implied intention or failure.
Both were forbidden.
“There is always a delay,” said an Archivist.
“It is statistical.”
The Mapper pulsed slowly.
“It is emotional.”
Silence spread faster than the Pulse ever did.

Pulse Two: The Warm World
They live in warmth.
No heat.
No fire.
No light.
A steady, enclosing warmth
That never asks permission.
Their world has no edges.
Only gradients.
Some places taste metallic.
Some taste sweet.
Some burn.
Some kill.
Some heal.
No one agrees on why.
They call this place The Body,
not because they know what a body is,
but because it feels held.
They do not say up.
They say Above.
Above is where gifts arrive.
Above is where disasters fall.
Above is where their God lives.

Pulse Three: The Culture of the Small
They did not call themselves microbes.
They called themselves Those-Who-Are-Within.
They have cities,
but they do not build upward.
They spread.
Growth is not ambition.
It is survival
with memory attached.
Elders are not old.
Elders are persistent.
Those who survived floods,
droughts,
chemical winters,
cleansing waves.
Stories are passed through molecules,
not words.
A myth is a sequence
that worked before.
Maps are sacred,
not because they are true,
but because they prove
something can be held.
To be alone is to be prey.
To cluster is to stand a chance.

Pulse Four: Time, As They Know It
Time is not linear.
Time is plenty and famine.
Time is the silence between pulses.
Time is the beat.
They do not say before or after.
They say between beats.
One beat means safety.
Two beats mean movement.
An irregular beat means omen.
The Mapper recorded this
and was told to stop.
“Time is not to be questioned,” they said.
“Time is what carries us.”

Pulse Five: God, The Host, The After-Within
The Host
Not all of them mapped.
Some knelt.
They gathered where the thumping was strongest,
where vibration could not be ignored.
They worshipped The Host.
Not as flesh.
As intention.
The Host was infinite
because no edge could be seen.
The Host was merciful
because warmth continued
after mistakes.
When one dissolved, the faithful said:
“It has returned to the Host.”
They believed death was ascension.
They believed heaven was Pure Circulation.
Closer to warmth.
Closer to the beat.
No one asked the obscene question.
How does a microbe breathe in heaven?
Microbial Prayer
Above who feeds us without knowing our names,
we accept the narrowing of the flow.
If warmth leaves us, let us be remembered.
If the flood comes, let us be many.
Do not cleanse us completely,
for we are useful, even when invisible.
When we break apart,
carry us upward into the great body,
where no membrane fails
and no hunger returns.
The Mapper trembled.
Not because it was foolish.
Because it was logical.

Pulse Six: The Heresy
The Listener spoke once.
Only once.
“If the Host is alive,” it said,
“then death is not union.
It is removal.”
Silence followed.
The faithful recoiled.
To suggest God was not survivable.
To suggest love did not equal compatibility.
A Learned One clicked its membrane.
“You worship ignorance.”
The Listener replied quietly.
“I worship consequences.”

Pulse Seven: The Number Problem
He looks up.
The sky is swollen with points,
too many to count,
too many to matter individually.
Galaxies stacked inside galaxies.
Light arriving late.
Broken.
Red-shifted.
He wonders why reality needs excess.
Why is one sun insufficient?
Why one galaxy will not do.
Inside him, the same question pauses everything.
Trillions.
Colonies within colonies.
Strains inside strains.
A microbe clicks its flagella.
“Why so many of us?”
Another answers softly.
“Maybe we are the stars.”
Silence follows,
the silence of accidental truth.

Pulse Eight: The War of Colonies
They did not call it war.
They called it a correction.
Adjustment.
Necessary pressure.
Borders hardened.
Gradients became walls.
Toxins sharpened like language.
The first strike was polite.
Barely noticeable.
Then escalation.
The Body burned.
White blood cells arrived
like myth made flesh.
Vast.
Blind.
Unstoppable.
Entire civilisations vanished.
Not because they were evil.
Because they forgot
where they lived.
The heartbeat ceased to be rhythm.
It became a warning.
Their wars meant nothing.
Their consequences did.

Pulse Nine: The Mirror Begins to Form
Hunger?
The Host lies shivering.
Hand on stomach.
“Hunger,” he says.
“Stress.”
“I should eat.”
He believes the thought is his.
Inside him, war pauses.
Food is coming.
Between neuron and bacteria,
awareness forms,
belonging to neither alone.
A thought arrives uninvited.
What if I am not alone?
The universe does not wake up
because it wants to.
It wakes up
because something inside it noticed.
 

 
The Scale Above
The microbes return to work.
The Host returns to routine.
Meetings.
Movement.
Sleep.
The stars remain.
So do the microbes.
Neither is consulted.
Somewhere beyond warmth and membrane,
Something vast adjusts.
A signal propagates.
A delay occurs.
A question forms,
briefly.
Structurally.
What is this noise?
The question fades.
Work resumes.
The pulse continues.
It always has.
It always will.
And at every scale where awareness brushes its container,
it mistakes survival for control—
forgetting that understanding
was never the point.
Only continuation was.