In the space between stations, out there in the static, something is coming.

There's a bit of a tension worked out in this image. The next set of images basically depict the flight of an insect  – (a 'lacewing') while in the distance a pair of lights gets closer and closer, eventually filling the page and presumably colliding with the insect.

But there is a secondary interpretation to these images that the text allows us to make – the message is coming. But we can't see from this, whether the message is symbolically carried by the lacewing (coloured green, just like the wave, just like the quanta, just like the radio stations and the tuning needle), or whether what is coming is actually the light.

Does the message reach us, or is it annihilated by the light? Is the light the message? Is the lacewing the message? We can't know, and we can't know whether the final message is that the urgency of the journey, the toil of the message across the universe, is over, is done/undone.

Continuation from the previous page. 'Away from anywhere sense has taken hold' – into the spaces between messages, between programs, perhaps between our thoughts about our own presence.

The narrator now asks us to turn away from this reflection – towards somewhere where sense has never taken hold, i.e. away from 'human' sounds, 'human' thought, towards the random, towards the static, towards the emptiness, where a message may be waiting.

This carries on the 'interpretive' note of the preceding pages. Interpreting data creates not just the outlines of phenomena, but the apparent presence of a speaker on the radio, someone who is speaking.

The same goes, perhaps, for ourselves. Someone is thinking. But perhaps it is the experience of interpretation that makes us feel like there is actually something, someone other that static there.

Nevertheless, the messenger is still important.

A'regime' here is simply a way of looking at information, of projecting it in such a way as to render it coherent. if we had the right regime we could listen in to static and pick out, say, the particular pattern of a pulsar, amongst other things.

By 'listening in' to the various patterns that constitute lnguage, appearance and other qualities, we can create interpretations that allow us the experience of our world. Another interpretive regime might see it differently.

The image is pretty much straight up illistration. A 3d graph plots the distribution of a bunch of data points so that a typical form of distribution becomes apparent : a line seems to form because of the qualities and scales of the graphing regime.

The moon is back, bathed in the same 'surf' that can describe our thought, and placed into an 'atmospheric' perspective by the presence of clouds.

The 'surf' here, is of course static, the presence of energy in the universe that Radio (or consciousness) can pick up and ascribe meaning to.

Bonus: I now have a new catchphrase 'The moon is back!'

Every time I see this I wish I had thought of some other visual metaphor for thought rather than a blasted brain. It's like the old illustrative problem that most things seem to want to be illustrated by an image of the globe. It's to be avoided.

You can see that I didn't really want to do this. The image itself is fairly obfuscated and difficult to read. Even a more microscopic 'neuronal' perspective would have been more in keeping than what amounts here to a stock metaphor. Oh well, at least I didn't stick to it for long.

Anyway, this continues the theme of the content of consciousness as being made out of the same stuff that static noise is. Following pages develop this notion.

This sequence will serve to bring together ideas of random 'noise' and consciousness. The same medium (radio) that can give us an experience of human communication  – the illusion of the presence of another conscious speaking being – also gives us noise; the conversion into sound of the phenomenon of random bits of electromagnetic energy moving through the cosmos. This too has meaning, if we only knew it; reporting on the activities of stars, the composition of materials, and so on. It's a matter of tuning-in.

But who is doing the tuning? And to what?

Again, this page is part of a sequence dealing with the possibility of messages being 'swallowed', ie absorbed, deviated, lost to entropy, or whatever. We'll come across it in a diferent form in pages following.

A continuation from the previos page. The traveller might not make it all the way to its destination; the broadcast may not be received.