Pulse One: The Dumb Universe
The microbes had finished mapping most of what mattered.
Rivers. Gradients. Recurrence. Waste.
They expected elegance.
They found abundance.
Everything was excessive.
Too many copies.
Too much redundancy.
Signals repeating long after the meaning had decayed.
A Mapper paused its division and said, almost apologetically,
“If this is all there is, it is inefficient.”
An Archivist corrected it.
“Not inefficient. Uncaring.”
They ran the numbers again.
Trillions of them.
Clusters inside clusters.
Cycles inside cycles.
No centre.
No reply.
Finally, someone said what had been forming for several generations:
“It’s a dumb universe.”
No one argued.
Warm.
Large.
Repetitive.
Plenty without purpose.
They archived the conclusion and moved on.

Pulse Two: Birth, Observed
A star ignited somewhere far away.
The cosmologist leaned forward, breath held, eyes reflecting light that had travelled longer than language.
Hydrogen collapsed.
Pressure climbed.
Ignition.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
Later that day, he visited a friend in a lab.
A cell divided under glass.
Membrane pinched.
Replication succeeded.
Life continued without commentary.
The cosmologist frowned.
“Too easy,” he said.
“No drama.”
His friend smiled.
“Same physics,” she said. “Different scale.”
The cosmologist shook his head.
“It can’t be,” he said.
“It’s a dumb universe.
Just mechanics repeating.”
He did not notice the familiarity of the sentence.

Pulse Three: The Mappers Inside
Deep within him, the Mappers adjusted their charts.
Red rivers.
Warm tides.
Chemical manna arriving late but reliably.
One of them recorded a fluctuation.
Another dismissed it.
“It’s just the Host again,” someone said.
“Big. Clumsy. Predictable.”
They laughed chemically.
“Filled with wonderful rivers,” said one.
“And no idea what he’s carrying.”
“It’s a dumb Host,” another added.
“Beautiful. But dumb.”
They replicated.

Pulse Four: Echo Without Source
The cosmologist wrote a paper that evening.
He described the universe as emergent, indifferent, and elegant only by accident.
No intention.
No listening.
He felt relief as he typed it.
Certainty compresses better than wonder.
Inside him, a lineage of Listeners thinned.
No violence.
Just inefficiency.
Listening takes time.
Mockery saves it.

Pulse Five: What Mockery Does
Mockery is not cruelty.
It is a distance.
The microbes mocked the Host because they believed they were not him.
The Host mocked the universe because he believed he stood outside it.
Both believed the same thing:
That understanding required elevation.
Both were wrong in the same way.

Pulse Six: A Small Correction
A star collapsed quietly.
Not spectacularly.
Just enough to adjust the local structure.
A cell misfolds.
Not tragically.
Just enough to remove a lineage.
No one noticed.
Systems do not announce their edits.

Pulse Seven: Recognition Without Ownership
For a moment, brief and useless, something aligned.
The cosmologist stared at his screen, unsettled.
The sentence he had written felt old.
Inside him, a microbe hesitated before dividing.
The hesitation passed.
Recognition is not retention.

Pulse Eight: Stabilisation
Curiosity decayed.
Maps improved.
Predictions tightened.
Listening became wasteful again.
The microbes argued about borders.
The Host argued about funding.
Stars continued forming.
Cells continued dividing.
Everyone called it progress.

Pulse Nine: The Shared Error
They never realised they had shared the same thought.
That the sentence
“It’s a dumb universe”
had not originated anywhere.
It had emerged.
A pressure finding language.

Final Pulse: What Continues
Somewhere, something adjusted.
Not to enlighten.
Not to punish.
To persist.
Stars burned.
Cells replicated.
Thoughts formed and mistook themselves for authors.
At every scale, awareness briefly touched its container.
And assumed that distance meant dominance.
The system did not correct this.
It only kept going.
Only continuation was.