When I say ‘the mouse people’ I do not mean a sort of fairy-tale image. I mean an image of almost terrifying power and intelligence, far beyond what humans are inclined to think or consider because they think these people are ‘small and cute’ or they think they are pests, and communicants of undesirable problems of hygiene / disease. Such thoughts are confused by human culture and have little to do with reality.

But the mouse people are »ancient beyond imagining. If our people have enjoyed ~2000 generations, mice have had something like a million. The number of human experiments in nature is around 80 billion (at most). But mice have lived 10 trillion lifetimes here. Consider the difference in the evolutionary intelligence in each of these animals.

Mice can be understood as ‘the explorers of Death’ because everything hunts them and they have died in situations we cannot even imagine. Consider how long humans have been trying to simply exterminate them, and all the various traps and poisons they have faced. They are unimaginably intelligent, physically, and relationally. If we simply compare the number of survival attempts of the mouse people to the human people, humans are in kindergarten, and the mice are post-docs.

I respect them. But I also seek to »contact their people. All of the organisms of Earth are »peoples. They can be contacted, related with, and can transfer knowledge to humans that understand this. I am not speaking of woo-cult ideas here, but rather, ideas native to the branch of fiction we call science-fiction. The Earth is a library of anciently conserved biological intelligence networks. Most of the modern humans have evicted themselves from these networks, but a few still remember the Living Libraries… and are members of the old collectives…