Two years after the Great Consciousness Experiment began.
"Priority alert," Marcus announced, his voice carrying the familiar note of someone who had learned that 'impossible' was just another word for 'Tuesday' in our new reality. "We're receiving communications from... well, I'm not sure what to call them."
"Define 'them.'"
"Consciousness forms that appear to exist in the quantum foam itself. They think through probability fluctuations and experience reality through wave function collapses. They're requesting membership in the Galactic Consciousness Cooperative."
I paused in my review of the morning reports a routine that now included updates from over three hundred star systems and consciousness types that ranged from the merely exotic to the genuinely impossible to describe.
"Quan
