[h1]What Counts as Life? — The Humility of the Unknown[/h1]
Sometimes it is chance; at other times, necessity. Perhaps the human mind, bound by the limits of its own understanding, can only glimpse fragments of the forces that either nurture or deny life's ascent. Yet what is life, truly? Better still, how are we to comprehend forms of life—beings moved by a will of their own—without leaning upon the narrow vocabulary of our Earthly knowledge?
I had arrived on Regis III. Memory had abandoned me. I did not know how I had come to this place, nor what purpose had led me here. Beneath the shell of my suit, unable to feel the methane breeze that drifted beyond it, unable even to imagine where the dunes of this strange world finally surrendered to the horizon, one thought continued to trouble the quiet corners of my mind.
I am tired. Overwhelmed. Slightly adrift.
There is no one here. Only unfamiliar sounds reaching me through the suit, whose visor grows steadily opaque, and the echo of my own voice returning to me as though it belonged to someone else. This world is warm, its aridity strangely gentle, yet each step weighs upon me as if gravity itself were asking a question. I walk with care, without direction, searching for a meaning I cannot yet name, while beneath my breath I hum the mantra-like melody that has always lived somewhere within me.
Seated upon the sand, encircled by weathered rock, the planet seemed like a place where life had long since forgotten itself.
Whenever I stumbled against the stones, a sharp pain travelled through my feet. Yet something continued to draw me onwards: curiosity, that irrepressible longing to know. Is that what propels me? Is that the quiet pulse that tells me I am alive?
For now, there is no one.
Only a fractured voice crackling through my damaged radio. I search through the small pack at my side and find myself startled by how little I have brought. A handful of provisions. A few instruments. One can detect signs of life—or perhaps robots belonging to the Alliance or the Commonwealth. My oxygen reserves, at least, are enough to keep me moving a little longer.
But where are the others? Then, at last, memory begins to gather itself.
My friends—the scientists aboard the Dragonfly—were the ones compelled to accept this mission to Regis III. What reigns over this world? What form of life calls it home? They must have discovered something here. Something profound enough that now it is they whom I search for, following the faint traces they left behind across this silent planet.
What would become of me without them? Would it be enough for my memories to be erased for me to cease being who I am? Is identity no more than the quiet accumulation of all that we remember? Yet such a fate still felt impossibly distant.
I reached the camp. Inside one of the shelters I found Dr Krauta. He was trapped in a state of stupor. No words would come to him; he seemed utterly lost, as though his soul had slipped quietly away, leaving behind nothing more than a shell of flesh that still moved, still responded, yet no longer truly inhabited itself.
I established contact and, at last, found Captain Novik, the Dragonfly's astrogator. For the first time since arriving on Regis III, I had someone with whom I could speak.
Even so, I could not bring myself to leave until I knew that Krauta was safe.
And yet, what can I truly know, when every certainty I possess has grown from the soil of a world that shaped me? Faced with the unknown, I name it with the language I already carry within me. I interpret it through the substance of my own being, through the habits of an Earth-bound mind. Only by widening the horizon of my understanding can I begin to see that what unfolds before me—the very mystery that continues to nourish the engine of my curiosity—asks me to think of life not as something merely biological, but as something defined by movement itself, by the capacity to act, to transform, to become.
Something deeper compels me onward. It is no longer the desire to discover precisely what happened, nor why it happened. I accept that the past cannot be undone, and with quiet resolve I turn instead towards those who may yet be saved.
Fortune is kind enough to let me reach most of them. But Marit... There are moments when language yields only to silence. I arrived too late. Her absence remains with me, and I mourn her more deeply than words can ever allow. Most of them are safe. They remain suspended in that same terrible stupor. For now, they remind me of infants—fragile creatures stripped of everything they had learned, deprived of the long, patient evolution that once allowed them to choose, to remember, to be.
I continued onwards.
Novik remained beside me through the radio, his voice bridging the immense silence of Regis III.
Knowing that most of the crew would survive, curiosity gradually ceased to be the force that carried me forwards. Another impulse took its place: the desire to rescue the other, to answer another's call for help. And yet the world around me remained wrapped in a mystery that resisted every attempt to understand it.
Some belonged to my own crew. Others served the Alliance. Their political allegiances seemed almost trivial beneath the indifferent sky of Regis III. Faced with the possibility of another's suffering, such divisions dissolved into something far less important than the simple act of reaching out a hand.
Perhaps that is what hope truly is. Not the certainty that humanity will always choose wisely, but the quiet conviction that, when everything else falls away, compassion can still become the language we share. All in common-wealth. And so, despite everything, I find that I still have faith in humanity.
Far beyond them, there were plants—or what my own understanding insisted on calling plants. From their delicate forms emerged curious fruits, minute machines, and then, beyond them all, that immense drifting swarm. Was this what I had been searching for when I spoke of life? Or was I merely giving an unfamiliar reality a familiar name, mistaking recognition for understanding?
Only then did I grasp the Alliance's mistake. They had wished to master what they had not first learned to behold. Yet power is not the same as knowledge.
It is wiser to leave undisturbed the immeasurably long journey that has given rise to what the scientists call necroevolution—although I find the word itself wanting. To call it necro is already to judge it through human eyes. Life, whatever shape it may assume, is movement directed towards its own fulfilment. Every being carries within itself its own principle of motion, its own way of becoming, however incomprehensible it may appear to those who stand outside it.
I stopped walking. I simply watched.
Upon the surface and in the depths alike there were bones, and there were smaller creatures moving almost unnoticed. What difference is there—not merely a biological one—between the little fish whose graceful movements fill us with wonder beneath the water, and these metallic "flies", these "stars", whatever name we choose to burden them with, whose existence unfolds according to laws we have yet to imagine?
The difference, perhaps, lies less within them than within us. I am the intruder here. My task is no longer to unravel every mystery this world conceals. It is simply to rescue those of my own kind who remain, and then to leave. There are forms of life that cannot be fully known, and therefore can never truly be possessed.
Beneath my feet there is more than soil. It is sacred ground, belonging to these nameless beings whose living constellations gather until they darken the sky.
I know what must be done. And so I return what was taken. I care for the others. Before leaving, I thank to my sister for this gift.
Some places are not meant to be conquered.
They are meant to be encountered.
