The Quixnor are an ancient species.
Their dusty clay relics set the earliest civilizations back 50,000 generations. Every edge and isle and rocky new shoreline has been discovered, rediscovered, populated and decimated in the endless ebb and flow of time. Every corner of their red globe has been touched by Quixnor hands. Every moment packed brimming and dense with political action, scientific discovery, advent and breakthrough and progress. It would take 1,000 Quixnor lifetimes to understand even a fraction of their history. It would take unfathomable amounts more to understand the yottabytes of information stored in the species’ silicon archives.
This kind of history–rich and overflowing and incomprehensibly massive–is only to be expected of a species which has survived for 100 trillion Quixnor Eons.
Or, in metric, 5.28374 minutes.
The Quixnor, in that time, have learned much, discovered much, conquered much, mastered much, but some things remain forever outside the edges of their comprehension. At the forefront of this is the Frozen Ones. In the ever-scientific minds of the Quixnor people, there is no natural phenomenon more marvelous, more wondrous, and more terrifying than the Frozen Ones.
The Frozen Ones are an alien species. They are similar to the Quixnor in shape, and structure, and anatomy, and society. They are far off on an enormous watery planet easily visible on the scopes of the Quixnors’ vastly advanced telescopes. The Frozen Ones are easily observed, yet impossible to study, as their individuals have existed for timescales the Quixnor cannot represent in words or numbers. Scientists say the Frozen Ones’ kind have existed for Eons whose numeric representation contains millions of digits. No one truly understands what this magnitude means, not even the scientists.
The Frozen Ones do not move. They do not breathe. Their hearts do not beat. Their synapses do not fire.
The Frozen Ones are not dead.
They are, as best as the Quixnor scientists can reason, still very well alive, and somehow living on a timescale so enormous that millions of Eons may pass unheeded between inhales, between heartbeats. The Frozen Ones can do this without dying. On a more incredulous level–they can do this without even noticing.
The Quixnor have sent out countless contacts to the Frozen Ones, spanning thousands of Eons, two-dozen generations. They understand they will never see the result in their lifetime, nor their children, nor their grandchildren. The hope is only that some day, some Quixnor may hear a word back from one of the great, anomalous Frozen Ones…
James Buckman hitches up his pants and sniffs experimentally at his right hand as he leaves the men’s room. There’s a tepid cup of coffee getting colder on his desk and a buzzing plastic fan fluttering the edges of a few dog eared reports. His pen fell while he was gone.
He drops back into his seat, hand to his stubbly chin and attention set to the half-stack of documents he’d abandoned ten minutes earlier. He pauses, watery eyes shifting to the little satellite receiver angled on his desk. James does a double-take, chest tight at the tiny, green blurb which has appeared on his monitor.
Hello, Frozen One. We have learned your language from the great frozen world around you. You are remarkable to us. We are called the Quixnor. We’ve attached a humble, 1,293 page report of our species’ history for perusal at your leisure. The report includes instructions to contact us in return. We are greatly eager to hear from you, and to understand what your life is like on a timescale so massive.
The text begins to scroll. James’s eyes dart along at the flood. He blinks, baffled, and stares out at the cloudless sky for any visible source of the signal.
There is none. James’s bathroom break had lasted 11 minutes. The entire Quixnor civilization had birthed and died in less than 7.
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