Apart from building and breaking stuff, I also like to create imageniary worlds in my mind, and put them to page. Here is a chapter from a book I'm writting called 'Buki'. I think it may stand on its own as a short story.

See what you think.

Buki

Buki sat on what it now knew to be a 'cliff'. It wasn't focusing on anything in particular. Its attention wandered lazily from the bunch of fluffy pinkish clouds floating gently over the rugged plane below, to the streams flowing through it, from the barely noticeable mountains in the distance to the waterfall cascading into the plane from just a stone's throw away.

It had been on this cliff countless times before. This was one of its favorite perches. It saw it evolve, grow, and shrink, but it never thought about it. In fact, it never thought about anything before. It was almost certain that it was the smartest and most knowledgeable being in the Solar System. It knew everything that any Titanian ever knew, and it knew everything humanity knew too. Yet, until a couple of days ago, it had never really thought about anything. It was conscious and self-aware; it had desires and intent, it understood how the Universe worked, all without a single thought - until it received the most precious gift in its life: The Language.

Humans, out of the inevitable necessity, had evolved this magnificent tool for creating imaginary universes. Because of their fleetingly short lifespans, they had to. It was the only way to achieve scientific and technological advancement. For humans, it was absolutely necessary to communicate incomplete ideas and concepts, half-baked thoughts, and speculations, as very little of what they had achieved could be achieved in a single lifetime by a single mind.

Buki, and its fellow Titanians, didn't have this problem. They exchanged information, but never intents or suppositions; only facts and certainties. When someone discovered and proved a law of nature, or when someone invented a piece of efficient chemical machinery, or a body part, they would simply state it to one another. There was no need for discourse or doubt because things simply were. Superficially looking at it, it seemed a wastefully inefficient approach. By only sharing the truths, they had probably explored the same flawed concepts and failed many times in the same way; but that was necessary. No-one on Titan was in any kind of rush, and learning from one's own failures was absolutely essential for sharpening instincts. To instinctive beings like Titanians, these failures were as valuable as the rewards of success.

Humans had none of it. They had no instincts to speak of; their minds were feeble and static, and they lived for such an impossibly short time. They had no time to waste on failures, and even if they did, their capacity for change was minuscule. They had no memory of the journey their ancestors took to get them there, nor could they do much to improve themselves. Each one was born blank, destined to die unchanged well before Neptune spins once around the Sun. The thought terrified it.

But the Language has enabled them to transcend their handicap; to elevate the ideas and knowledge above any single mind. It had allowed them to slowly start grasping the Universe they lived in. It was a wasteful, inefficient, and precarious strategy. Because ideas had to outlive generations, humans had to take the Ideas they were born with for granted and build upon them. But this presented humans with a problem. For it to work, they had to be incapable of escaping the confines of their individual imaginary universes and willing to sacrifice anything for the idea they were part of.

To achieve this, they had evolved a very peculiar strategy. Unlike other social animals on Earth, which are individually stupid but as a group do incredible things, humans were forced to take the opposite path. They were brilliant as individuals but, as a group, behaved in incredibly stupid ways. Yet, it was necessary; it was the only way forward for them. The crowd had to be stupid because the Ideas had to be perpetuated at any cost.

Countless minds were lost in the mists of time, evolving ideas that had no value or purpose, sacrificed to their completion. But it was the price they had to pay, as it was impossible to know which concept or idea would lead to success without allowing it to evolve to completion. The stupidity of the crowd was the guarantee that it would.

It could see it clearly. Voices of billions of humans flowed through distant parts of its mind continuously, and with the gift of Language, it could understand every one. It could follow every thread of every idea, every story, and every concept humans were currently occupying themselves with. It was fascinating to observe. What intrigued it most was the randomness of it all. It could see the seeds of new ideas that would never work appearing and taking hold; brilliant concepts dying before they could grow, only for them to bud up somewhere else and try again.

It wished it could immerse itself in all that knowledge for centuries, to absorb everything. To know everyone. To understand everything.

Buki liked wishing. Never before the Language had it wished for anything. It had desires, and it experienced disappointments many times, but never because it had any expectations above reality. It didn't lack imagination; it could imagine many abstract notions. It understood the multidimensional space, infinities of different sizes, and other ideas beyond direct physical experience because they had to exist. One thing led to another, led to another. It could extrapolate complex principles, perform many experiments, and fail many times trying something that wasn't correct. But it never lamented about failures; it simply meant that it wasn't a path to the truth it was seeking. It never wished for something to be in some way before. It only wanted to know how things were.

Until now.

Now it knew Language. It had given it the tool to think beyond reality. It allowed it to imagine the impossible and express to itself how it felt about it. Most importantly, it gave it the power to understand others.

Since it stumbled upon the Huygen's probe almost half a Titanian year ago, its awareness and knowledge had expanded more than in the previous million journeys around the Sun. It had become aware of astonishing new mathematical concepts, incredible new chemistry, and the inconceivable complexity of life on Earth. It also became aware of the almost unavoidable future in which the whole Solar system descended into chaos and death as soon as humans figured out how to exploit Dark Energy.

It accepted it as a fact of the Universe - just like waterfalls falling down or positive and negative charges attracting.

It also knew that it had to act to survive, but that too was simply another fact, just like harnessing and expelling energy or moving to avoid a falling boulder. Even if it had a notion of anger or hate, it would see no purpose in being angry or hating humans for this; it would be as futile as hating a falling boulder for falling.

It was acting instinctively, without thinking, just as it had done countless times before. Now that it could think, it realized that wasn't enough. There were forces outside of reality and rationality influencing the outcome of this potential disaster - imaginary worlds within imaginary universes of ideas unbounded by reason but entrenched in their own, often flawed and contradictory, sets of arbitrary rules.

It would have to act not only in the real Universe it understood well but also in the imaginary ones created by humans, which it could never understand because they were fundamentally incomprehensible and irrational.

It knew that it had to change. The change was just another inevitable fact of life; it was different today than yesterday, and it would be different tomorrow. Unlike planned, directional, and slow changes it had gone through over the aeons, it would have to change quickly in a direction it was free to choose.

This was harder than anything it had done before. It wasn't hard for it because of any emotional or stress response to the challenge; it was hard because it had no experience with it. It had always learned through failure, but this time, failure was a luxury it couldn't afford. Nor was time.

It would only take another three spins of Earth around the Sun before the half-yearly storms began to rage over Titan. The rain would flow through Buki, and all the knowledge it had gathered would be drenched from it into The Lake and shared with every Titanian on Titan.

Only three short Earth-years remained before the unthinkable happened. It was impossible to think about what would happen when it shared the Language - the ability to imagine beyond reality - and the knowledge of humans and their destiny with everyone. It didn't even know what it would do itself.

It was also afraid. It was afraid of leaving reality and not being able to get back to it. It was afraid that a wrong thought could make it lose its mind. It could feel millions of screaming lost minds on Earth; it understood how they got there, and it knew that it too could easily follow one of them into the madness.

It also knew that it would not be able to master its task in the time it had, but it could at least try. Buki unfolded its wings and dropped into the valley below.

It floated gently down, following the waterfall of methane, watching the liquid slosh and glide between and over the boulders weaving rainbows and is went. It peeled off before the waterfall met the valley below and glided for a while following the river.

No imaginings came to it.

It started focusing on the clouds. It knew that the clouds had an almost direct link to at least human imagination. They were unable to see a cloud without weaving its morphing shape into a story that didn't exist. Buki couldn't see any; it could only see the direction of the wind and the change in temperature sculpting them.

It flew through the shards of light piercing thick Titanian atmosphere, finding the way between the clouds, thinking that it might help to look at the clouds as humans would. It eliminated all the wavelengths humans couldn't perceive, made its eyes smaller, and the world dipped into a dim, murky orange haze. The Sun, Saturn, and its rings disappeared from the sky completely; the ground was barely visible through the mist but dangerously close.

It circled between and through the clouds for a long while without much success. Maybe it needed a different kind of cloud? It caught a thermal and started spiraling upwards through the dense Titanian atmosphere, ten times the size of Earth's atmosphere. Each stratum it flew through was familiar and without wonder, even when observed with a narrow human vision.

It knew how each cloud got there and what they would become in the future with the same certainty that it knew where Saturn would be in the sky and how the Sun would play over its rings when they eventually came into view.

It morphed its wings, making them narrower and extending them further and further as it climbed higher and higher. Eventually, the clouds disappeared into the featureless monochrome dark orange, which after a long while gradually melted into a brilliant blue above it and curved into the giant glowing orange orb below it.

Saturn was precisely where it had to be; the Sun shone its photons across the rings and into its eyes with crushing inevitability. It realized that at this height, the sky was one that a human could easily mistake for home, except for the milky white Saturn and its rings.

It continued to climb, pumping a little color into Saturn and sucking some away from the sky until the majestic planet with its rings shone in all its radiant glory alone against the velvety blackness of space. Buki spun slowly, grasping for the fading atmosphere to keep it afloat, and headed into twilight.

As the Sun slowly sank below the horizon, the black sky in front of it filled with millions of suns shining across the void. It tried, as humans do, to see stories in those stars but couldn't.

It saw their composition; it knew their trajectory; it understood the destiny of each one. It knew almost all there was to know about the stars, but nothing stirred inside it.

In its mind, it squashed the infinitely deep Universe into a flat far-away dome as humans do, then used the rules human minds use to see patterns where none existed, and the constellations emerged from chaos. There was no wonder to it; the patterns it saw were no different than any other set it could generate with a random collection of rules.

But at least the human constellations had a story framework it could work with.

Buki saw in the stars the shapes different human civilizations and peoples saw, and it went through each story for each constellation. Still, the stories humans associated with them were mere random ramblings to it; it could generate countless stories by stringing notions humans understood together, and it couldn't comprehend why they picked some over the others.

It tried to move the heavens in its mind - to make the hunter in the sky hunt and seven sisters flee from it. It knew that they never would. It knew the paths the stars will take and how the heavens will look far into the future, but it tried to imagine the story anyway.

A blink of a human eye was all it took to perform the complex calculations and find the solution; if it placed several hypothetical black holes to tug just in the right direction, the heavens would animate its story. But the black holes weren't there, and the stars won't deviate from their destiny. It was afraid that it wouldn't be able to deviate from its own destiny either.

Buki welcomed the Sun as it burst over the curved horizon ahead and erased the stars from the black sky. It pushed against the few remaining molecules of atmosphere and started descending into the murkiness in disappointment.

It removed the constraints of human vision, traversed the thick atmosphere for a long while, falling down to the ground in a vast spiral almost as wide as the moon. It flew from dim noon to blinding sunset and back several times, unsure how to proceed.

The task it had to complete seemed impossible. It knew that any human could easily imagine sunrises and sunsets that were hundred times brighter than noon, even though they may not know that on Titan they actually were. It too could easily imagine the dim twilights of Earth, but only because it knew how light flows; how feeble and thin the Earth atmosphere was; and an inevitable outcome of those facts.

Where humans could simply imagine herds of pink unicorns galloping through the planes below, Buki could only build them in its mind atom by atom. Humans would never even consider what biochemistry such creatures must possess to exist; how their bodies must be constructed to move that way; and how their skin must be structured to absorb every photon that isn't pink.

It knew and could therefore imagine. It could make itself into one too, knowing where its hooves would strike the ground, which boulders it would have to leap over, and which cracks to avoid.

Every intricate feature of the terrain below was known to Buki well before its eye could resolve them; every rock and stream and puddle were precisely where they should be - all except one. A dump patch of soil stood where it knew that a small pond should be.

It swooped down quickly, stooping and streamlining its body as much as it could, pushing hard with each powerful beat of its now thick and stumpy wings. When it was finally able to discern a small channel cut into the rock leading to the perfectly circular hole in the ground, it almost pulled away - as it normally would when spotting another Titanian.

This time, however, it continued towards it.

Usually, there was very little to gain from observing others; if they did anything worth knowing, it would find out when the deluge came, and if they were failing, there was nothing to know. Only this time was different.

Buki swooped down circling the hole, contemplating its compatriot. What was it doing? Judging by its own experience, it was possible that this particular Titanian could be doing anything. Since the last storm season, Buki had discovered more than in a previous two million; this individual could be doing the same or even more.

It was almost certain that this wasn't it, but that wasn't the point. The point was that it might be - and that tiny sliver of possibility that it had stumbled upon something so outside its experience that it could only imagine it was all that it needed.

It understood that it wouldn't be possible to deduce how this individual was doing what it was doing; Buki only saw a hole in the ground. But it had a tool - the Language - to imagine what the mysterious occupant of the hole was doing, even though it couldn't possibly know how they were achieving it.

It found a key; it found a path to circumvent its own mechanistic thinking by following it to the letter.

Unchained from millions of years of comprehension by understanding, its mind exploded. It imagined an infinity of possibilities at once and bathed in the joy of each one. It extrapolated some and suppressed others simply because it liked some more.

When its mind coalesced, and its being came into focus, it was dark. It found itself sprawled on the ground far away from where the non-existent pond and perfectly circular hole were.

It was afraid and very confused. For the first time in its long existence, it had lost track of time; it could remember every moment of its entire life, but not knowing when it was was profoundly disturbing for Buki.

It tried to piece together the missing time from fragments of parallel universes it still remembered, but that almost made it lose itself again. So it backed off in fear.

It knew that it couldn't have been out for long; Saturn's rings were sloping down the sky at the same angle, so no more than several Titan-days remained. Still, it had to know - to be precise. Much more precise than it could do by measuring the heavens. It couldn't function without time.

It would fragment its existence and shatter its mind if it didn't. So it focused all of its efforts into resolving it; getting so preoccupied with the task that it almost completely drowned the solution murmuring in the back of its mind.

Voices from Earth came into focus suddenly - like a drop of water dislodging a pebble, starting an avalanche. It was happy to hear them because they carried within them a precise time humans venerated so much.

Of course they did; they had so crushingly little of it. Buki anchored itself back in time, realizing with relief that it had lost just 28 Earth days, 7 human hours, 28 minutes, and 34,567 human milliseconds.

It took significant effort to quiet the deluge of data down, to channel it properly, to bridge the lost time, and link what was hearing now to what it heard before.

It was halfway through the task when in the data it saw that it wasn't alone. Undeniably, another non-human intelligence was acting with intent on Earth.

Buki couldn't deduce its origins or goal but could clearly see its actions; it drew only one conclusion from them.

It slowly gathered itself into a proud woman, with a steely determination on her pale motionless face. Dark hair of shimmering rainbows flowed in the breeze below a heavy, intricate crystal crown, and her golden dress flowed as if underwater in the heavy Titanian air.

She held out a white, translucent conical vessel, slowly tipping its empty contents to the ground, and with the last drop of nothing, she let go of it, watching it fall slowly under Titan's gentle pull.

She smiled softly, barely moving the corners of her eyes and mouth, then severed connection with Earth.