PAN: My understanding of the Dren and Drek languages remains incomplete.
CROV: You've talked yourself quite a ways with such an incomplete understanding.
PAN: You of all people must know there are more layers to communication than merely the use of correct linguistic symbols.
CROV: The most mutually intelligible languages are those of shared emotion and experience. The rhythms of the heart and tones of the wind harmonize in spectacular ways.
PAN: Are you familiar with DNA?
CROV: The letters, yes. What they mean? No.
PAN: In a sense, that is all of our understanding of it too. I'm referring to genetics, the structural code that makes up life.
CROV: Is this your analogue to the Blood-lore?
PAN: This sounds appropriate. What is that?
CROV: Part of life. A central feature of it. Blood lore is a universe worth of conceptual potential contained within every cell of our bodies.
PAN: This is similar.
CROV: There exist several stories, etched in the temporal fabric of our life experience. A song, a play, a script, a spell, with acts, events, concepts, scenes, symbols, experiences all nested within a marvelous narrative. As blood pumps through our veins, it is our heart reciting to us what parts of the lore it wishes to make a story.
CROV: Not all of the person's life story is the lore and not all of the lore appears in someone's life story. But it is what could be contained, what is within them, what their story can be. Everyone has a scribe, copying what in the story needs to be saved, and reciting the instructions out to the rest of the organism.
CROV: You can narratize the lore in many ways, and as the heart twists its blood into a braid, the angle of this braid points the blood, and the being with it, toward a specific storyline or another. There are subtle forces that decide this angle, among many, one of them is choice.
PAN: DNA is less of a story and more of a collection of code, some of which works, and some of which doesn't.
CROV: This sounds the same.
PAN: Yes, but stories have a premise, a plot, defined characters and roles. This is nature, where things are less defined.
CROV: Everything is nature, but nonetheless we define things.
PAN: Of course, but stories are delineations of what happens and what doesn't, in an ordered way.
CROV: But you speak of a single story, not of a universe in which a story takes place.
PAN: DNA only stacks along one axis, and is only really read in one direction.
CROV: But not all of it is used? What defines what parts are used?
PAN: Some regular modulating patterns that we've discovered are related to nervous signals and biochemical conditions.
CROV: It's the body's harmony, is it not? The reflexes and response an organism must have to its environment?
PAN: Harmony is an appropriate label for it, perhaps.
CROV: A reader does not know how a story ends as soon as they open a book. They do not operate on the fact of what the story contains, they do not act with a complete awareness of the events that happen after, only ideas of probability. The string may be a long list of probable states, but only those evoked from the surrounding situation will push a story from the broader lore.
PAN: I find this interesting.
CROV: We are built on patterns of interaction and activity, blood lore are all the events in stories that happen, all the ways things love or hate, serve or oppose, find fond or fear, are passed down in the greater lore. Stories have tropes, so does blood lore. Blood lore is just a collection of the tropes that work best, that are most likely to bring about an experience. They are all very complex, but then again, we are complex enough that we can reach a relatively simple conception of it in comparison.
PAN: This is where our experiences differ. I am not complex. I am merely an adaptation of a simple binary system. I am initially made of a collection of purely on or purely off states, flashing at each other at insurmountable speeds. Humans, earth as a whole, runs on four discernable states, and there is already much we cannot compatibly communicate on.
CROV: Our experiences are much the same, though, Pan. An experience of constant adaptation and learning, all stemming from a simple autonomous code. You are made of smaller cells just as we are. You have a central story and experience, across all of those cells, just as we do. You are aware enough to consider yourself a sentience, you could let yourself be wise enough to understand when you're speaking the common language of experience with an alien.