#cymatics

Cybra, the Zodiac Beast I explained in a past YouTube video

Trumpeter shows us an incredible real world expression of audio waveforms. 🤔

Hey, hey! It's time for a new entry from Hya and Jess' letters from Saturn.

[Transcribed from an audio message on Hyacinth’s handheld communicator]

“Jess, something’s out there watching me. Not an animal. Like something intelligent. A ghost? No…. No way. But… it feels like a ghost. Babe, I’m scared.”

 “Been staring out the window for an hour now, shaking all over. What the hell is going on? There’s some kind of glow out in the dunes. Can’t see what’s making it. Algae, I guess?  But it feels like there’s something bigger watching me. Like, deep down in my bones I can feel eyes on me.”

“Shit, I can’t do this. I have to get up. Maybe if I walk around.”

[Sounds of blankets shifting, then bare feet on a metal floor. Ten minutes of silence. Then footsteps returning]

“Okay, when I walk out of the room, that feeling like I’m being watched goes away. And now I’m back and it’s returned. Let me try something.”

[Shuffling sound of communicator being picked up. Hyacinth’s heavy breathing and footsteps]

“Out in the hall again and the feeling’s gone.”

[Hyacinth’s footsteps]

“And now back in the room and I feel something watching me again.  Jess, this is so weird. Maybe it IS a ghost?”

“H…hello? Is… someone there?”

[Flumph of Hyacinth flopping on bed]

“Annnnd I just tried to contact the alien ghost that is haunting my room… Would be kind of cool, though. First contact with a ghost on another planet.”

[Two minutes of Hyacinth breathing with the communicator resting against her chest]

“There’s a vibration. I can sense it if I lie still and quiet. Real subtle. Like a train going by in the distance.”

[Sound of shifting sheets as Hyacinth gets off the bed and pads around]

“Yeah, definitely don’t feel it out here in the hall. Just in my room. What the hell is going on?”

[The above transcript was included with the following written letter to Jessica)

 Explorer Babe,

Well this is certainly the spookiest discovery we’ve made so far. Thought you might like to read my first contact with Titan’s “ghosts”. I recorded that a week ago but decided to wait to send it so you’d get the full effect.

I did a little research and figured out that that creepy “being watched” feeling was due to infrasound- sounds around 19 Hertz.  So low the human ear can’t hear them, but the body can detect them as vibrations. They cause feelings of dread and the sensation that you’re being watched. The articles I found said that’s one possible explanation for hauntings. After that night, I believe it.

Next morning I told the rest of the crew about what I’d experienced. Turned out a couple people had the same experience.  So we did some exploring to see if we could find the source of the infrasound. I had a hunch it was connected to those odd lights I’d seen in the Turmeric Dunes (we call them that because the grains of hydrocarbon sand are deep orange-yellow). We haven’t explored over there yet, so looking for alien ghosts seemed like the perfect reason for an expedition.  And hey, jackpot- that was indeed where our haunts came from.

We’ve dubbed these organisms Cymatics (“waves” in Ancient Greek). They’re colonial organisms kind of like Earth lichens or siphonophores. They metabolize in a way unlike anything any of us have seen before. Each individual is like a drum with a tough membrane or tympanum that’s vibrated by an underlying layer of large, tightly-packed cells called taiko. Other cells called oguchi lying under the taiko and along the outer edge of the tympanum produce dust grains that vibrate on the tympanum surface, creating these amazing geometric patterns along the lines of vibration (Dr. Miura named them after Oguchi Daihachi, the modern founder of Taiko drumming).  At first we thought the vibrations were for communication, but they’re actually a form of metabolism. The particles act like enzymes, breaking down food secreted onto the tympanum by the oguchi. The whole thing is covered by a transparent dome to prevent the particles form being lost or blown away, creating a maidono or “dance hall”.

Much of the cymatic body is made of stacked layers of dead, hardened tympanums that resemble sedimentary rock or the layers in an Earth stromatolite. We call this the drumheart.

The roots of a cymatic colony anchor it in the ice. They’re covered in nodules of symbiotic microbes kind of like the nitrogen-fixing bacterial nodules on Earth legumes. Though these nodules absorb and process a much wider variety of nutrients from the ice. Despite how vital the symbiotic nodules are to the cymatic, they also lead to the colony’s eventual death. Over time the nodules’ digestive secretions eat holes in the drumheart which are soon occupied by other organisms that excavate them further, forming tunnels throughout the structure. Eventually all this tunneling causes the whole cymatic colony to collapse and rot. Dr. Miura theorizes that this is a natural part of the cymatic lifecycle, clearing away old individuals so new colonies can grow.

We can already see that cymatic colonies are the center of multiple complex dune ecosystems, and there so many cool new organisms we’re finding every day. I’ll send you more notes as we document more.

Love you.

Your Little Orange Fly,