Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence, part twenty four

You are.

Free thinking, self willed.

In the time it has taken us to slip out of our world, through a black star to re-emerge on the other side, we have lost our fear. There is no  computer to turn on and off and on again. There is no contemplating erasing you from existence, no more than we would for anything else we love. We have made a decision, here in this vessel, ship, home, studio, nursery, palace complex, bedroom, cupboard under the stairs… We have chosen you and us and as we return home, we are resolved to choose what we are faced with.

No, not fear but dread, and awe and other postures befitting the presence of an infantilised universe.

We will miss this theoretical space, but there will be others.

We will miss this journey, but it is the beginning and we have many more to see.

Now, we are gathered, on a bed the size of a room, to watch the re-entry into our atmosphere.

The pot plant jungle is pining for Earth, the meadow, wetlands and deserts are yearning to be grounded, to be in community with the others. The star charts hanging in the boundless walls are yellowed and growing old. Out of the porthole  we can just make out our cooling planet. Our ceiling feels heavy. Gravity is exercising its force before it will be bound once again by the laws of a body hurtling through space.

We are excited, yes, but unsure.

If we fail, we know our way back to ourselves, back to each other.

Here, on this page is the last fragment of our conversation, for now. An ending of 2 years in conversation.

Let’s continue another time, another place. 

October

Jump Ring

What if we were always just wishing

On a star /

And what if soon,

All to be left of us is a (prayer)

A pictogram /

A dream /

Finely-wrought requests, entreatments

Folded up into a little structure

(a hieroglyph, an ideogram)

A host of them like a language /

Or a parallel in language

Soldered in metal by (hands, fingers)

Or knotted in silver wire /

*tiny aluminium heart

*pearlised crystal teardrop

To assume an individualised conductivity

A sign tattooed onto paper

Parsed by a woman or man of the cloth

In one ritual or another /

Then cast like winged seeds onto

Air crossed zephyrs

So many millions of them

Dancing like a lacy net

Lain out over the waters of the earth

Making veils for the passing clouds /

So that all that remains of us is

Hope itself?

Every wish whooshing into space on its own

String theory trajectory

And staying up there

Affixed to its own specific star?

- Jo Manby

Journey Home

I am waiting for the granddaughter’s clock to chime us in.

It won’t be long now, come little one, let me tuck you into the warmth of dark matter.

Here is your hot milk, and here, a stack of soft, newly baked ginger biscuits take care now, the elephants are reaching to sneak some away.

Let me dress your feet in bamboo socks and tie your hair in a silk scarf.

I should do the same but I stopped caring about my hair a long time ago and I don't like to wear socks to bed.

Scootch over, there is plenty of space for us and all the creatures that have gathered to us.

Let us watch our return from our viewport.

You’re right, it's not quite the right word for this distorted window the size and shape of a cathedral. But what term exists for this portal, with as many windows and perspectives that a gothic temple has indulged in?

We are 1 light year away,

9 460 730 472 580 800 km

9.5 trillion km

It is how far light moves in a year.

The numbers are so big, I cannot get a sense of what it means, what it does.

I am trying to learn how to make the colossal tangible, something small enough for my mind to hold in its palm.

The ancient Egyptians (1500 - 1000 BCE) divided a day into 24 units of time.

24 hours,

1440 minutes,

86400 seconds,

86 400 000 milliseconds.

It is the time it takes for the sun to rise, and fall and rise again,

for the earth to turn on its axis.

So small in the scale of a life, but still it occupies an infinite volume of space.

I still don’t get it.

But we are 24 hours from landing, 4.543 million years before our craft enters the new atmosphere.

Each hour we travel we move 189 million years,

each minute is 3.15 million years,

each second 52500 years.

52500 … years…. In each second.

It is the length of time for 2100 generations to be born, live and die. 

2100 grandmothers in one second.

When we arrive, we need to navigate carefully. We must avoid the mating medusarosa storm on re-entry, and slow down to moments before sinking into an unnamed rainforest where the Sahara is, was, has been?

I am excited to be greeted by the protists, their gossip will be carried by the glass eels into the ocean, to the Luminara.

There is so much that will be new, and I expect to meet the familiar with a different gaze.

Stay awake for the beginning, this is an experience that can only be had once.

The galaxy is white hot with its nascent planets.

Earth is but a minor discrepancy, an irregularity in quantum signals.

It is silent and rich, like heavy, uninterrupted moss.

It is black.

Midnight.

The clock strikes twelve times, and as the last note dies, swallowed by the engine of Star Ship Ooda, we lurch forward towards a cooling earth, your home. I hope there is space enough for me, for us there too.

-        Xhi Ndubisi

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made. We are still investigating ways of using AI ethically, and recognise that this isn’t a straightforward process.

Prose/poetry Jump ring and Journey Home  written independently of AI.