Imagine, now, how everywhere there must be one universal constant: mathematics. It is not language, as would be commonly assumed. It cannot be guaranteed that all species (if there were, again for the sake of supposition, life scattered across the cosmos) would communicate in the same manner. While speech is considered the most likely method of communication, this is a cultural bias based upon human experience. But suppose there were a race whose biology allowed for them to only communicate through a complex system of released pheromones? It would be difficult to deceive via a method that is so tightly integrated into the fabric of your being.

Another race could communicate via scents. Another, purely through art.

But what about music?

A race dependent on music for its communication could never lie, could never hide away the complexities of its emotions. A race that communicated via music would be the most honest of races, simply because such a race would allow itself to be raw and open, as vulnerable in its honesty as it would be fierce. A language based upon music; a language expressible through mathematics. Their sounds and vibrations cutting into the underlying Strings of the universe, contributing to the great Memory.

Universal Music Memory.

***

I need for you to focus.

Out here, at the edge of the universe, uncounted years past its prime, you must focus. At this distance, all the various signals from pedestrian methods of delivering communication (most often, radio signals) finally coalesce. They have nowhere to go. These signals, in a figurative sense, pound against a wall of night with no hope of escape or response. They devolve, spiraling downwards into static and breaking down as they return to the Strings. If life evolved from an amoeba into a space-faring civilization, what of signals? These signals left alone, wandering a void for an unspeakable length of time?

Consider this: an idea gives birth to another idea. A signal left so long in the void, over such a period of time, undergoes a memetic evolution. Imagine an entire civilization spawned from dying signals of long-dead ones.

There was one here, you know. The Seven-Day Hegemony. And they were so beautiful.

***

Memetics has conceptually been around since 1976. Analogous to a gene, it is an idea, belief, a pattern of behavior which is hosted in one or more individual minds, and which can reproduce itself from mind to mind. It is an idea virus replicating across a cultural mindset.

Now, capture these qualities of a culture, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information, in a signal that has existed for billions of years. In a Petri dish of ideas and subject to time, traveling through dark matter, by-passing black holes, warped by the very nature of the universe- a theoretical evolution occurs. Ideas become self-aware, the signal comes to life; an entire civilization gaining apotheosis from the identities of others.

***

A civilization fully formed out of the womb. They spent their first day coming to terms with their self-actualization. They needed to reconcile their existence with their memories of existence; after all, how could their remember a life so different from what they actually were now, electromagnetic waves traveling through darkness? “Culture shock” took a brand new- and frightening- definition in this light. Without context, the center threatened to pull apart.

A quarter of their numbers were lost from the resulting madness.

Some of the remainder realized what they had become, and unbound from the laws of their progenitors (essentially existing as living concepts) they formulated new ideas and internal memetic constructs to cope. A living dream world constructed out of the infinite canvas of their conceptual state, the Seven-Day Hegemony were prosperous in their achievements. They were a race of gods, where immortality and perfection abounded. Inside this memetic uber-construct they solved previously unimagined mathematical conundrums and ultimately began to pursue an understanding of the framework of the universe, the Strings. They delved deeper, mapping the vast roadways through reality and siphoning the rhythms of the universe. They tapped into the Universal Music Memory, and suddenly the a million new worlds were made available to them. They reveled in this newly unlocked universe, the tapestry of existence bleeding life into their home. Nothing was exempt from them.

It was on the fifth day that they realized something was wrong.

***