First Contact with the Glassmakers

The humming began the summer I realised I would have to leave the mountain. It wasn’t a dramatic realisation; there was no great family announcement or suitcase waiting at the bottom of the stairs. I was simply seventeen, and adults had started asking me what I was going to do with my life as though I had been issued one and somehow misplaced the instructions. University came up a lot in conversation. So did the cities I might move to study. Places I had visited and liked perfectly well but could never quite imagine waking up in every morning, places where the sky at night seemed to be a slightly darker version of the day and where nobody appeared particularly interested in what the clouds were doing. I would tell my family I was excited because, at times, I was, then walk across the mountains and feel as though I was betraying them by leaving. I had lived among these beautiful Welsh hills since I was born. I knew them intimately; I knew where the sheep had made their own little paths through the field, where and what time the sun disappeared. I knew which trees groaned when the wind came from the east and which bit of the valley held the mist longest in the morning. Then I realised that one day I wouldn’t wake up to it. You stop really looking at it because you assume it will always be there. 

   The humming sound started during that anxious period of my life. At first I thought it was something electrical. I unplugged my phone charger, but the sound continued. I turned off my old lamp, and again it continued. I switched off everything at the wall and sat on my bed in complete darkness, feeling ridiculous. The humming stopped. I waited, pleased with myself for approximately three seconds, and then heard three low pulses from somewhere outside. I went to the window and looked at the mountain. There was a light. It wasn’t a star, and it wasn’t an aeroplane; it was too low for one and too restless for the other, moving slightly but never really travelling anywhere, glowing at the edges and brighter towards the centre. I had seen lights like it before. In fact, I had been seeing them for years, appearing occasionally above the ridge, dancing around for a while and then disappearing as though whatever they had come to do had been completed. When I was younger I had given them a name: the Glassmakers. It was a childish name really, but nothing better had ever occurred to me. They looked as though someone had blown glass into the sky and forgotten to let it cool, constantly shifting, transparent at the edges, beautiful beyond words. I had watched them often enough to feel oddly affectionate towards them. My little friends on the mountain. But until that night I had always thought of them as something I was watching. I had never seriously considered the possibility that they might be watching me back.

   I stepped away from the window and the humming returned. I stepped towards it and the sound stopped. I did it again because there are occasions in life when scientific method consists mainly of repeatedly walking backwards and forwards across your bedroom. Away: humming. Towards: silence. Eventually I laughed, partly because it was ridiculous and partly because I was beginning to feel frightened. “Hello?” I said through the glass. Nothing happened, obviously, and I immediately felt embarrassed despite being alone. I don’t know why human beings do this. Faced with something completely unknown, our first instinct is apparently to speak English at it. I opened the window instead. The Glassmaker remained exactly where it was. I switched on my bedroom light, and it disappeared. I switched it off, and after a few seconds it returned. Now I was interested. Light on: gone. Light off: back. I did this several times until I realised that anyone walking past our house would think I had lost my mind, although luckily nobody walks past our house at midnight because there is almost nowhere to walk to. On the fifth attempt, I left the light off and waited. Three pulses came back. Then the Glassmaker flashed three times. I stopped laughing. Seeing something strange is one thing. Having the strange thing notice that you exist is another.

   The following morning I was supposed to be looking at university courses. Instead, I disappeared down the rather wonderful rabbit hole of plasma physics. I had seen photographs of the Hessdalen Lights in Norway before, strange luminous phenomena that have been observed for decades, and they had always reminded me of my Glassmakers. Plasma interested me even more. Physicists can produce structures of charged particles held together by electromagnetic fields in their stuffy old laboratories, and some plasmas can organise themselves into surprisingly complicated forms. I began wondering what would happen if something like that could become vastly more complicated than anything we had created. Human consciousness emerged from matter organised in one particular way, so why were we so certain neurons were the only arrangement matter could use to become aware? Just imagine my Glassmakers really were made of plasma, living structures of charged particles held together by electromagnetic fields, their bodies stable whirlpools of light carrying patterns and information inside the geometry of their form. It was an extraordinary thought, but the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in what they were made of. Something else bothered me. The Glassmaker had responded to me. 

   The next night I waited for them. Nothing happened for almost an hour, and I became annoyed with myself for being disappointed, because you cannot reasonably be offended when a mysterious luminous intelligence fails to keep an appointment it never made. Then the humming returned and two lights appeared above the ridge. They moved slowly towards each other and their shapes began to change. One stretched into a complicated branching structure, and the other changed in response until for several seconds they looked nearly identical. Then one altered again, and the other followed. I sat at the window watching them and had the strangest feeling that I wasn’t watching two objects moving around at all. I was watching a conversation. What if an entire thought could exist at once as a structure, every relationship and intention connected inside one enormous three-dimensional pattern, more like a spider’s web than a sentence? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and sitting there watching those two lights rearrange themselves above my mountain, I began wondering whether the opposite was also true. Maybe the limits of our language stop us from recognising worlds that are already here.

   Over the next few nights they came back, and I started going outside. I would sit in the field with a torch, and try different patterns. Often nothing happened. Once I flashed the torch three times and the humming stopped completely, leaving me standing in a Welsh field feeling that I had somehow offended an alien. Then the light above me opened. There really isn't another word for what happened. Its whole structure unfolded into an enormous branching geometry, delicate and complicated and almost perfectly symmetrical, and then the second Glassmaker changed until it held the same pattern. For several seconds they hung there together, and I understood, or thought I understood, why translating them into English might be impossible. Turning their communication into words would be like turning a sculpture into a symphony.

   They didn't return for two nights. I hated how much that bothered me. During the day I went back to university applications and conversations about what I might study and where I might live, and suddenly everyone seemed terribly excited on my behalf. I was excited too, which made my sadness harder to explain. I wanted to be in rooms filled with people who had spent many years thinking about strange things. But wanting to leave and wanting to stay can exist inside the same person, and that's ok! Thankfully, the humming finally returned; I went outside without the torch. There was only one Glassmaker that night, and it hovered much lower than usual, or at least seemed to. I sat on the wet grass beneath its beautiful glow for what seemed like a long time without trying to communicate at all. Eventually I did the most human thing possible and started talking. So I told it I was going away. I told it about university and cities and how everyone kept saying how exciting it would be. I told this glowing thing above a Welsh mountain that I was frightened I would come home one day, and everything would feel smaller, or that I would change so much that this place would stop feeling like mine. I don't know why I told it any of that. It couldn't understand English. For all I knew, it wasn't alive at all, and I had spent my summer developing an emotional relationship with atmospheric electricity. But it stayed. Then it changed.

   The Glassmaker slowly opened into the branching geometry I had seen before, but this time the pattern was enormous. Lines of light extended from its centre, separating and reconnecting until the whole thing reminded me of the mountain below it. It was as if the place's relationships had somehow been drawn in light. One tiny point sat inside the pattern. Then it began to move. I watched as it travelled away from the centre and waited for the line connecting it to disappear. It didn't. The geometry changed around it instead. The point moved farther away, and the pattern grew larger, making new connections, folding itself into shapes I couldn't understand, but the original line remained. I watched it happen again and again. I had spent so many weeks trying to understand their language, and now suddenly I thought I understood one thing clearly. Leaving my home wasn't the same as disappearing at all. That gave me great relief, and I began to laugh, and the Glassmaker brightened, and I chose to take that personally. “I'll come back home soon,” I told it, and the pattern changed again.

   I still can't translate the Glassmakers. I don't know where they came from, whether they are made of plasma, whether they experience time differently or whether any of my theories about them are right. For a while those questions seemed desperately important to me, but I think I was doing what human beings always do when we encounter something strange: trying so hard to explain it that we forget to experience it. There are things I do know. I know the mountain was here before me and will remain after me. I know that somewhere between being a child who gave strange lights silly names and becoming an adult expected to know where she is going, I began to believe that growing up meant leaving things behind. The Glassmakers taught me differently. I thought in black and white: humans so often do, here and gone, childhood and adulthood. Maybe the Glassmakers don't. Maybe they think in relationships, and in their strange geometry something can move unimaginably far away and still belong to the same pattern.

   I leave for university next September. That thought still frightens me, although I don't tell people that very often because they are usually busy telling me how exciting it is. When it does become too much, I go outside and sit in the field. Most nights nothing happens. The sheep make considerably more noise than any alien intelligence, and the mountain remains stubbornly just a mountain. But occasionally, when everything is quiet, I hear three low pulses beneath everything else and somewhere above me the darkness begins to glow. I used to think the Glassmakers were the strangest things living on my little Welsh mountain. Then I 5thought they were trying to teach me their language. For a while I even thought they might be preparing humanity for first contact, teaching us that intelligence does not necessarily have a face, consciousness does not necessarily have a brain and language does not necessarily have words. I still think they might be doing all of those things, but I think I had misunderstood something much simpler. The Glassmakers weren't preparing the world for first contact. They were preparing me for mine.