Three days of conversations with the avatar, and Susan still couldn't parse what the Cethren meant by want.
The geometric forms rotated in the center of the field, shifting in response to questions. ARCHIE translated the modulations into language, but language kept failing. Human words carried human assumptions—desire, goal, purpose, need. The Cethren had been pattern for so long that these concepts mapped onto their experience the way color maps onto sound.
"When you say embodiment," Susan said, "what do you mean? A body like ours?"
The avatar's geometry contracted, expanded, folded through configurations that ARCHIE rendered as careful consideration.
"Embodiment is… participation. To affect and be affected. To change the physical world by existing within it, not merely observing from encoded distance." A pause. "You breathe. The air enters you and leaves changed. You eat. Matter becomes you and you become matter. This reciprocity—this exchange—we have not experienced since before your star ignited."
"But you've been affecting Earth," Margaret said. "The chronicle shaped biology. You've been participating for billions of years."
"Indirectly. Through information, through the slow pressure of organized matter on probability. But not as selves. Not as beings who wake and choose and act and experience consequences directly. We have been tending a garden we cannot enter."
Susan felt the weight of that image. She thought of her own fieldwork…
