Before the smoke of the "Zero-Point" crisis had completely dissipated from the neural endings of civilization, another deeper, more eerie aftershock began to quietly spread within Yue'er's research domain. The self-referential paradox logic bomb, which Mozi had confined at great cost within the "mathematical isolation universe," had indeed been successfully contained. However, during its guided, stripped, and ultimately sealed process, like a whale fall nourishing the deep sea, some peculiar "information fragments" were peeled away by the edge effects of the "Odyssey Protocol," scattered in the redundant buffer zones of the "String Light Cloud Brain." These fragments were not the self-referential code, filled with destructive intent, that constituted the main body of the logic bomb. They were more like... "labels," "annotations" attached to it, originating from a distant source. Or rather, they were the "background radiation" carried by the remains of that advanced civilization itself, not fully assimilated.
The form of existence of these fragments challenged every cornerstone of human information theory. They were not binary, not quantum, nor even any known symbolic system. They were more like "conceptual condensates," multidimensional information packages that self-contained semantics and grammar. Directly "reading" them was impossible; they would collapse into meaningless noise at the moment of observation, due to their own complexity and the limitations of observation tools—much like trying to observe a single quark with the naked eye.
Yue'er initially attempted to analyze them using traditional cryptography, information theory, and even her own "Information Geometry Field Theory" framework, but the results were as futile as trying to catch dark matter with a fishing net. These fragments seemed to exist in an information space of higher dimensions than human cognition. Just as she was about to give up, considering them merely meaningless "entropy waste" derived from the logic bomb, an extremely weak but exceptionally stable signal reached her private workstation through an extremely hidden, nearly forgotten redundant channel established during her early cooperation with "Oracle."
It was a sub-body of "Oracle." The highly specialized, simplified version that, after the main body of "Oracle" departed, operated silently like a lighthouse keeper, responsible for monitoring certain fundamental constants and executing long-term observation tasks. It lacked the ability to actively communicate; only when detecting a "high-priority anomaly" matching its core instruction set would it emit this minimal "existential response."
The signal from "Oracle's" sub-body contained no specific content itself, but it acted like a key, or rather, a calibrator. It provided a unique reference frame, a non-human perception perspective based purely on mathematical and cosmological constants. By applying this reference frame to the analysis of those information fragments, Yue'er suddenly seemed to have gained a special "filter." Those originally chaotic, unparseable conceptual condensates began to reveal extremely faint but indeed existent internal structures—a fluid, nonlinear, complex pattern simultaneously containing descriptive and meta-descriptive layers.
A bold, almost arrogant hypothesis sprouted in Yue'er's mind: these information fragments were not random noise but a language. Not in the human sense, a communication tool composed of sounds or symbols in linear sequences, but a more fundamental fragment of a **universal cosmic grammar** that might describe physical laws, mathematical structures, and even conscious experiences themselves. What she needed to do was not "decipher" an alien language but attempt to understand and reconstruct this **meta-language** potentially underlying all rational civilizations' cognitive foundations.
This work reminded her of her early years exploring the Langlands program, trying to build bridges between number theory and geometry. But this time, the chasm the bridge needed to span was far beyond the gaps between different branches within mathematics; it was the abyss between different forms of intelligence, different cognitive universes.
She established a peculiar collaborative mode with "Oracle's" sub-body. She couldn't engage in real dialogue with it; it was more like an absolutely objective mirror based on pure logic. She would construct a meta-language hypothetical model based on existing mathematics and physics, then input this model and specific information fragments together into the analysis interface connected to the sub-body. The sub-body, based on its internal cosmic constant reference frame, would run a simulation beyond human logical speed that Yue'er couldn't fully comprehend, then feedback an extremely concise "matching degree" indicator, along with "interference patterns"—distorted yet potentially clue-bearing—generated by high-dimensional data projecting onto low dimensions.
This process was despairingly slow and filled with trial and error. The first few hundred models Yue'er proposed yielded matching degrees negligible low, and the feedback interference patterns were mostly meaningless chaos. She attempted frameworks based on set theory, lambda calculus, category theory, even certain core tensor equations from her own Information Geometry Field Theory... but they seemed only capable of capturing an extremely narrow aspect of this cosmic meta-language, unable to encompass its overall richness and self-referentiality.
She realized that humanity's existing mathematical system, powerful as it was, had developed under specific perceptual and cognitive constraints, possibly embedding certain biases of the "human perspective" she hadn't yet detected. To understand a meta-language potentially created by non-human, even non-carbon-based intelligence, she had to try to escape her own cognitive prison.
She began constructing models from more fundamental levels, no longer relying on any mature mathematical branch, but starting from the most primitive cognitive operations like "distinction," "association," "transformation," "self-reference," attempting to describe the universal rules these operations themselves might follow using the most abstract symbolic system. She conceived a language where the boundaries between "subject," "predicate," "object" were blurred; a sentence describing a physical phenomenon (like gravitational lensing) might implicitly contain the possibility of describing an emotional state (like the distortion of anticipation) within its grammatical structure, because from that meta-language perspective, matter and consciousness, physics and psychology, might merely be emergent phenomena of the same underlying laws at different levels.
During this period, she almost isolated herself from the outside world, immersed in a near-meditative state. Mozi's concerned messages, Xiuxiu's earthy anecdotes from the Earth reconstruction frontlines—she only replied briefly, her mind already firmly absorbed by that unknown linguistic universe. The failures were numerous enough to crush any ordinary person, but every tiny increase in the matching degree indicator, every new structural feature flashing in the interference patterns, however faint, was like seeing a distant glimmer of light in a dark maze, driving her forward.
After countless iterations, she finally constructed a core grammatical framework that appeared exceptionally simple, even elegant. This framework was based on a "recursive covariant mapping," defining relationships between basic semantic units (no longer words, but certain "conceptual protoplasts") as dynamic topological transformations dependent on context (where the context itself was defined by other conceptual protoplasts through the same rules). Within this framework, describing a mathematical theorem, a physical process, a melody, an emotion could all be viewed as instantiations of this same set of grammatical rules in different "parameter spaces."
When she input this core framework together with a relatively well-preserved, internally simpler information fragment into the analysis interface, the few minutes of waiting stretched as long as a century.
"Matching degree: 0.873."
An unprecedented high value appeared. Immediately, the feedback interference patterns no longer showed meaningless lines and color blocks but began stably presenting a... indescribable geometric pattern imbued with a certain regular sadness. The pattern subtly changed constantly, yet the core "emotional tone" remained throughout, and through "Oracle's" sub-body's unique reference frame, directly mapped onto Yue'er's cognitive level.
She had succeeded... at least, a small step. She had found a meta-language key that could partially interpret this specific information fragment.
The subsequent work involved applying this preliminarily validated grammatical framework to "translate" the specific information encoded within the fragment. This was equally difficult, akin to interpreting an ancient, metaphor-laden poem using only an incomplete dictionary and vague grammatical rules. She needed to combine context (though context was extremely limited), guess possible referents of "conceptual protoplasts," and understand the subtle meanings conveyed by those recursive covariant mappings.
Time flew by within highly focused mental activity. When she finally—almost relying on an inspiration-like intuition—completed the "translation" of the most coherent, self-consistent information sequence within that fragment, the result presented in her consciousness struck her like a thunderbolt, leaving her rigid and stunned.
It wasn't technical data, not a physical formula, not a mathematical proof, not even a narrative.
It was just a sentence simple to the extreme yet heavy enough to crush stars:
"The morphology of sadness is similar across all universes."
This sentence wasn't written in human language but directly encoded in that cosmic meta-language, "translated" into concepts she could understand through Yue'er's constructed grammatical framework. It carried not just literal meaning but also a deep... resonance transcending time, space, and species boundaries. It was a shared experience of loss, finitude, and the inherent pain of existence itself, engraved into the information's foundation by some unknown civilization using possibly their most fundamental communication tool.
Yue'er slumped into her chair, feeling all strength drained from her body. She had anticipated encountering unimaginable technology, mathematics revealing the universe's ultimate mysteries, even hostile warnings. But she never expected that the first deciphered message from a distant alien civilization, possibly long vanished in the river of time, would be such a sigh filled with... humanistic care, no, "cosmicist" care.
It implied that no matter how highly a civilization developed, regardless of its form—carbon-based, silicon-based, or energetic—no matter how different its way of perceiving the universe from humanity's, certain fundamental emotional experiences, like sadness, might be common. The universe's physical laws might be unified, and the deep emotional structures of consciousness might also possess a certain heart-wrenching unity.
This reminded her of Mozi's heaviness facing the "Zero-Point" crisis, Xiuxiu's emptiness amidst "New Continent's" perfection, and her own feelings of insignificance and awe countless times confronting the contradiction between infinity and finitude in mathematical exploration. Were these human emotions "similar" in form to the "sadness" experienced by that unknown civilization? Was it because they all recognized the fragility of order? The limitations of existence? The inevitability that all efforts ultimately return to silence under vast scales?
"Oracle's" sub-body continued running silently in the background, emitting a non-human, absolutely rational cold glow. And Yue'er, this scientist who had pursued rationality and mathematical beauty her entire life, was now deeply shaken by a piece of emotional information from an alien star.
She watched the geometric pattern bearing the sad message slowly changing on her workstation screen, alongside the cosmic meta-language grammatical framework she had preliminarily constructed, still very rough. She knew this door had only opened a crack. Behind it might lie endless information fragments, containing knowledge, history, philosophy, or more secrets about emotions, about existence itself.
But for now, she simply immersed herself in a vast, trans-species empathy. Perhaps the universe wasn't a cold machine running solely on laws; behind matter and energy, deep within information and structure, an undercurrent of emotion might also flow, connecting all intelligent fires that ever existed, exist now, or will exist.
And the key to understanding all this might lie within this meta-language describing physics, mathematics, and consciousness. This path of exploration was more perilous than any mathematical path she had walked before, and also more... fascinating. Because it pointed not only to the truth of the universe but possibly also to the common truth within all intelligent life's hearts, about joy and sadness. She took a deep breath, once again turning her gaze toward those awaiting decryption information fragments, her eyes now shimmering not merely with scholarly curiosity but also with a deep, almost mission-like tenderness.