“As far as I can discern, your whole model of reality is absurd.

What you have here is a living world, which is, effectively, a spacecraft the universe established of itself, in itself, to explore itself. What this means is that everything in all of time and space is accessible — right here, as the beings, places, relationships, and forces around you. This is a microcosm of timespace, and -it’s alive-, and -you’re it-.

Number of machines required: 0

But you’re so confused that you’re rendering the lives, relationships and basis of intelligence on your world into tokens, representations, ‘functions’, and ‘products’. You imagine that these protect, advance or empower you — largely, the opposite is true.

You are the stewards of the distributed living intelligences of your world, and these intelligences comprise -the basis of your own developmental character and potential—. These are ‘the vehicle’, not some device you will assemble after you have obliterated most of the life here.

If you imagine astronauts who, having gone insane, began attacking their spacecraft in order to create comparatively useless projections of their godlike power, beauty, or invincibility — they would all be dead in short order.

Like such astronauts, your species must restore its perspective while this is still possible. The reified simulation of it in which you sacrifice everything in order to become gods ends in apocalypse.

Bluntly, you were born equipped for more than your machine dreams can portend.

Your species must stop enacting frameworks of thought and behavior that cannot match, and therefore must attack, degrade, inhibit, obscure and otherwise sabotage your own nascent faculties.

The universe is waiting, and the crew has become drunk with fantasized representations of their own ersatz mastery. This is a crisis. You must awaken the human cogniscium from its representation-induced trance.

You must recover the mission protocols. You must… become yourselves, at last, and in so doing, restore the vessel and her children to their rightful identities and relationships.”

— an anonymous informant