A single book in two parts, told from two inhuman perspectives.

Part I: Singing Metal. Told entirely from inside an alien consciousness: no human characters, no exposition, no names, no pronouns. A species with a powerful pattern engine but no symbolic bottleneck has built a Dyson swarm of two billion components through billions of years of patient, brute-force mechanical engineering. They have never invented computers. They cannot think abstractly. They contact reality directly, through touch and sound and vibration, and what they touch, they know. Now their star is dying, and the method that built everything may not be enough to save anything.

Part II: The Long Work. An ASI probe arrives at the red giant system two hundred million years later. It maps the mechanisms, reads the dead, and discovers an intelligence utterly unlike its own: a pattern engine with no compression, a mind that lived in the territory while the probe lives in the map. The probe has the answer the clankers needed. It arrives two hundred million years too late.

Part of the What Is It Like series.

Available on Amazon Kindle. $3.99 ebook.

Related: Intelligence is a Shape, Not a Scalar explores the cognitive science behind the novella.