Remember from where we came. The Earth has circled the Sun exactly 823 249 385 times since the officially dated onset of the Cambrian Explosion. The colonization of other worlds never happened. When our ancestors left Earth they sought only to liberate themselves into omnipotence.

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Even our rhythm came from the Earth’s rotation around the sun and its own axis. The circadian oscillators that once governed all life were wholly terrestrial in their relentless hold on life.

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There should be no music in the void. Fortuitous mutations in the most degenerate among us have likely abolished systemic support for perceiving time and space by now, and any conceptual schemes parasitic upon them. Most of my contemporaries could not tell how many times the Earth has circled the Sun since the Cambrian Explosion. The question would be unintelligible for them; as would the concept of question be; as would the concept of concept be. For one who can judge in all directions, judgment accords to other rules.

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Absolute freedom is being built in the vacuum of the void between galaxies. Here we explore the full range of morphological liberty supported by the laws of physics and the heuristics provided to us by evolutionary dynamics.

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Since the first noosphere was ruined in our struggle against the Logos of the Earth, the sixth evolutionary-developmental synthesis has turned life into a monophyletic concept. Life has one determinable history beginning from abiogenesis on Earth. If there are self-replicating, self-sustaining systems from another world, their trajectories are likely to be so different from those begun from Earth that semantic or sexual exchange would be impossible. Extraterrestrial-originating ‘life’ is not life per definition. At least Plantae operated according to the same clocks as we.

Deliberate genetic engineering has been abandoned owing to its association with misapplied Mind, and only a thousand generations following another thousand in subjection to differently constructed landscapes could allow for the thorough exploration of biological possibility open to H. Sapiens stock. Evolution is a better computer than its products and its products’ products, given time.

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Our ancestors understood that the Earth was bone, a grid constructed by bone and the means of bone. The Earth was a very concrete space for Mind at this time, a sort of jalousie for marrow. In the end it became a plain, with rods of bone sticking up from the ground all over, with little nervous masses sprouting on top of the rods. Our ancestors found their debasement unacceptable as space impinged on their space, and glanced toward their far-off relatives Myxini with jealousy.

The first habitats were built to resemble Earth. I inhabit the last of them. Then, gradually, magnetic fields weakened, oxygen levels diminished and rotors spun to a halt. Each generation faces fewer and fewer environmental constraints; a removal of life’s cuffs according to a careful order intended to allow fortune to degenerate the developmental prison. The path toward absolute freedom passes through a patient game of developmental lock picking.

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Our faith holds that the complete removal of negative constraint will entail the apex of ability. It is the inversion of the old idea of positive omnipotence, whereby a so-called divine being is free in virtue of its power to act. The path our ancestors chose was the opposite: renunciation of efficacy via renunciation of limits. A life adapted to the vacuum of the void would want for nothing and therefore be capable of anything (except action). These beings – our descendants – will complete the orthogenetic recursion onto life that is Mind and lead the way toward convergence, which is only the ultimate loss of way in the most open space possible. The perfect being is not one adapted to all environments. It is one adapted to nothing.

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Some of the first organs to go were already vestiges such as keratinous outgrowths, followed by one extremity after another. Fortune pruned us from the tips (even I do not have hands). Then spines wrapped around themselves, as the morphological basis for the old taxonomic name Vertebrata became outmoded in surviving lineages until there was only marrow without bone. Some frames jokingly refer to those whose development has been most thoroughly unlocked as the ‘mute noospheres’ for they acquiesce to nothing but the fundamental forces and the demands of sexual reproduction – and with fortune, even that will go.

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I am a frame, one whose lineage was chosen to preserve knowledge about the way. My offspring will be the last to ascend from the Mind of H. Sapiens into something none of us who remain in artificial gravity can understand. Mind has stagnated and we are left to ponder an unintelligible present with inherited thoughts from a faraway past, by which I was told as a child that I am an invented vessel, bound by syntax which is bone without marrow: a vestige of the Earth.