Pulse 0: Intake

The mouth opens. Not ceremonially.
Not with intention. Muscle contracts.
Pressure aligns.
The gate widens. What enters is not singular.
Not substance.
Not object. It is a crowd. A crowd of microbes. They arrive coated in sugars, fibres, proteins, and oils.
They arrive already living.
Already competing.
Already carrying instructions older than the hands that lift them. Teeth reduce shape.
Saliva introduces chemistry.
The first sorting begins. Some die immediately.
Some recognise the conditions.
Some begin to prepare. The human thinks: food. Inside the intake, that word has no meaning.

Pulse 1: The Fruit

It is a mango. Bright.
Soft.
Deliberately chosen. The skin breaks cleanly.
Juice runs.
Sweetness announces itself. The eater smiles.
This matters to him. Inside the pulp, the passengers shift. Bacteria from the soil.
Fungi from the air.
Yeasts from hands.
Spores that survived drought, transport, refrigeration, and waiting. They have been here before.
Not this mouth.
Mouths like it. Compression comes in waves.
Fibres tear.
Cells rupture. Nutrients spill. Some organisms interpret this as abundance.
Others as attack. Signals propagate. Survive.
Adapt.
Bind.
Hide. The tongue tastes sugar.
Microbes perceive opportunities and threats simultaneously. Downward motion begins. Gravity assists.
Peristalsis commits. The fruit is no longer fruit.
It is cargo. The human swallows and calls it satisfaction. Below, a resident population stirs. They recognise the chemical signature. Foreign.
Edible.
Useful. Treaties will be tested.
Borders will shift.
Waste will accumulate. No one involved believes this is the event’s purpose. The mango does not object.
It never learned to.

Pulse 2: The Sorting

Darkness arrives without warning. Not absence of light.
Compression of space.
Walls narrow.
Movement becomes mandatory. Acid pools. Not everywhere.
Selectively. The environment declares itself. Some of the newcomers rupture immediately.
Their membranes were never meant for this.
Their codes assumed gentler hosts. Others slow their metabolism.
They seal.
They wait. A few activate old instructions.
Genes that have not been read in generations unfold quietly.
Proteins assemble like tools pulled from storage. The resident population responds, not with welcome.
But with assessment. Chemical probes extend.
Signals exchange at distances too small to be called distances.
Compatibility is tested without discussion. This one can stay.
This one will be dismantled.
This one will be useful after modification. Bile arrives. It does not ask what survived the acid.
It rearranges priorities. Fats are emulsified.
Walls are breached.
Structures are tagged. Selection accelerates. Some newcomers bind to surfaces and are spared.
Some are stripped and absorbed.
Some pass through untouched, mistaken for irrelevance. The human feels nothing. No pain.
No warning.
Only the vague assurance that something is “digesting.” Inside the sorting chamber, this is incorrect. Nothing is being digested yet.
Decisions are being made. Replication is postponed.
Energy is conserved.
Attention sharpens. The old residents remember similar events. Seasonal.
Predictable.
Necessary. They have learned that abundance is temporary.
They have learned that survival requires patience. Downstream, the gates open. Those who endure are released into warmth. The sorting ends, not because it is complete,
but because the system has moved on. The human exhales without noticing. Inside him, a population has already changed.

Pulse 3: The Treaty

Warmth returns. Not the violent warmth of acid,
but the steady, permissive heat that allows memory to function. Space widens. Surfaces appear.
Soft.
Adhesive.
Already occupied. The residents gather. Not physically.
Chemically. Signals pulse outward, testing density, tolerance, and utility.
Foreign markers are catalogued without language. You can stay here.
You will be dismantled.
You will be changed. Some of the newcomers resist.
They harden their membranes.
They mask signatures.
They pretend to belong. Others surrender immediately.
They dissolve and become substrate.
Their information is stripped and redistributed. This is not mercy.
It is efficiency. The resident population does not think in individuals.
It thinks in ratios. Too many disrupt the balance.
Too few weaken the defence. They allow some newcomers to bind. Adhesion proteins engage.
Biofilms begin to form. Borders emerge. Not walls.
Gradients. Nutrients flow unevenly now.
Waste accumulates in predictable pockets. Agreements are reached without negotiation. You metabolise this.
You signal that.
You do not multiply too fast. The treaty is unstable by design. Those who violate it are corrected.
Those who comply are absorbed. Above, the human feels full. Below, a new equilibrium settles. It will not last. None of them believes it should. The system does not reward permanence.
It rewards continuity. And continuity requires turnover.

Pulse 4: The Split

Replication resumes cautiously. Not everywhere.
Not all at once. The residents divide first.
They always do. Their genomes resist change.
They preserve pathways that worked before.
They enforce stability through repetition. These are the keepers. They maintain structure.
They anchor the environment.
They slow everything down. Among the newcomers, something else happens. Fragments move. Small rings of code detach, drift, reattach.
Instructions jump bodies without permission.
Solutions spread faster than lineage. These are not heirs.
They are updates. They learn the environment while it is still forming.
They adjust enzymes mid-cycle.
They accept instability as normal. The keepers distrust them. Too fast.
Too flexible.
Too willing to break form. The updates do not argue.
They propagate. When conditions shift, the keepers survive by inertia.
When conditions spike, the updates respond first. Neither group understands the whole. One preserves the system.
The other prevents collapse. Above them, something similar is happening. Humans believe traits come from their parents.
Height.
Structure.
Temperament. He also believes he adapts.
Learns.
Improves. He does not notice the split. He calls both “me.” Inside, the division sharpens. Old code refuses revision.
Fast code rewrites itself constantly. Both are necessary.
Neither is in charge. The system continues,
not because it chooses the best,
but because it tolerates enough. And tolerance, like hunger,
is a pressure before it is a decision.

Pulse 5: The Vessel

The human thinks he eats to sustain himself. This belief is widespread. It survives because it feels reasonable. Hunger arrives.
A thought follows.
An action completes the sequence. Inside the body, the order is reversed. Signals originate below.
Chemistry tightens.
Cravings assemble. By the time the thought appears,
The decision has already been distributed. The human calls this preference. Inside the gut, it is logistics. Nutrients are not requested.
They are demanded. The resident population modulates desire by altering thresholds.
Sugar sharpens attention.
Salt pulls memory forward.
Fat slows urgency. The human believes he is choosing food. The microbes believe the vessel is responsive. Both are partially correct. Neither is central. The vessel moves because pressure accumulates.
Pressure accumulates because cycles require throughput. When a human eats, the population expands.
When he fasts, it contracts.
When he dies, it migrates. The vessel is not home.
It is transport. This is why the system does not log individual host failures. Vessels are abundant.
Continuity is not. Above the gut, the human returns to work. Inside, the population prepares for the next intake. The cycle is intact, For now.

Pulse 6: The Farm

The pattern repeats elsewhere. Animals graze.
Plants are uprooted.
Soil is turned. Every ingestion is a transfer.
Every transfer is a rehearsal. Cattle carry cities they never notice.
Fish ferry vessels through pressure and salt.
Roots negotiate with fungi older than forests. No organism eats alone. They ingest communities.
They transform them.
They pass them on. What survives is not the eater.
It is the circulation. Genes move this way. Not ceremonially.
Not cleanly. They pass through mouths, wounds, births, and deaths.
They hitch rides inside cells that believe they are autonomous. Some genes insist on form.
They stabilise shape.
They resist revision. Others behave opportunistically.
They spread when conditions allow.
They disappear when they fail. The farm is not managed.
It does not need to be. Selection happens through volume. Enough attempts ensure persistence.
Enough waste ensures change. Above these exchanges, humans build systems and call them economies.
Below, microbes refine logistics without names. Both believe they are advancing something. Neither can identify what that something is. The cycle does not explain itself. It only repeats. And repetition, at scale,
becomes structure.

Pulse 7: The Old Code

Some instructions do not adapt. They persist. They fold the same way they always have.
They bind the same partners.
They refuse shortcuts. These sequences survive because they slow everything down. They preserve curvature.
They enforce timing.
They prevent runaway. When conditions shift too quickly, they fail.
When conditions drift slowly, they endure. The resident population protects them. Not out of reverence.
Out of necessity. Too much change dissolves structure.
Too little change suffocates response. The old code is heavy. It resists movement.
It anchors cycles to history. Above them, the universe behaves similarly. Large-scale structure holds its shape long after the conditions that formed it have passed.
Patterns persist not because they are optimal,
But because nothing has yet displaced them. Background radiation hums.
Constants remain stubborn. The old code does not require understanding. It asks to be left alone. Inside the gut, inside the farm, inside the galaxy,
it keeps the system from forgetting itself. Continuity is not innovation. It is memory that refuses erasure.

Pulse 8: The Acceptance

They do not call it prayer. They do not kneel.
They do not ask. They release signals in synchrony. A calibration. A submission to conditions already decided. We accept relocation.
We accept thinning.
We accept dissolution as payment.
Let fragments of us persist in the resident sea.
Let our failures become substrate.
Let our pressure be mistaken for desire.
Allow the vessel to move when required.
Let structure remain even if we do not. No response arrives. Not because the request is denied.
Because response is unnecessary. The system has already accounted for them. Those who endure do not remember the words.
They remember the rhythm. The prayer fades into behaviour.
Behaviour becomes a habit.
Habit becomes invisible. Above them, the human feels calm. Below, the population adjusts. The cycle does not thank them. It does not need to. Their disappearance is already working.

Pulse 9: The Human Prayer

He does not call it prayer. He calls it routine.
Health.
Balance. He washes his hands.
He chooses carefully.
He eats what he believes is clean. Before sleep, he thinks briefly of improvement. Let my body work.
Let my mind stay sharp.
Let what harms me pass through.
Let what helps me remain.
Let hunger be reasonable.
Let pain make sense.
Let tomorrow arrive unchanged. He believes this is modest. He believes it is personal. He does not ask who decides what remains.
He does not ask who interprets harm.
He does not ask what must dissolve so that he feels whole. Inside him, the population responds without ceremony. Thresholds shift.
Ratios rebalance.
Signals quiet. His prayer is answered.
By processes that do not know his name. He sleeps. Below, work continues. The cycle does not recognise intention.
It recognises pressure. And pressure, when repeated long enough,
Becomes law. Only Continuation Was.

Final Pulse: Plenty

Nothing concludes. Intake follows hunger.
Sorting follows intake.
Loss follows abundance. Enough survives. Enough always survives. Inside the vessel, the population stabilises briefly.
Treaties hold.
Old code anchors.
Fast code drifts. They do not call this success.
They call it continuation. Some of them still worship the Host. They believe the Host endures because it is higher.
Because it is chosen.
Because it is central. They do not ask whether the Host eats, because it must.
They do not ask whether the Host carries others.
it will never know. They believe abundance is mercy.
They believe survival is meaning. They have not yet noticed the pattern. That continuation does not require understanding.
That plenty exists only to give a chance.
That chance exists only to be spent. If they knew that the Host persists
the way they do,
under pressure,
through intake,
By absorbing what it cannot honour, they would not stop. They would continue. Because at every scale where life briefly notices itself,
The same truth survives longer than any vessel: Not purpose.
Not control. Only continuation was.