Iridescent algae glowed upon the ice and rock of the world, signaling the start of a new day. The patterns of their light, which we had trained over many estrous cycles to respond to environmental changes and alert us of predators, indicated the presence of a visitor.

We came out of homes carved into the ice of the world to greet them. We felt the ether vibrating around us and saw their blurry silhouette swaying amid the currents. It was one of us, a Community.

The Community arrived with soft tissues exposed from their partially shattered exoskeleton and six of their ten arms mutilated. They carried a round object resembling a pearl, with a strange shell inside.

“Where do you come from, Community, and how many Minds dwell within you?” we asked, contracting and relaxing the muscles around our swim bladder, causing the ether around us to ripple, as we tended to its wounds.

“There are nine of us in this body,” said the Community holding the strange pearl, “but there used to be many more.”

We soon learned that their entire village, half an estrous cycle away, consisting of a dozen Communities that were home to more than a hundred Minds in total, had been destroyed when a massive fissure opened up in the ice of our world. The Community that had come to visit us was the only survivor.

We remained silent for a long time, trying to come to terms with the immense loss of life their village had suffered, a tragedy rarely seen in the recent history of our Communities. We held them close with many arms and fed them through their wounded mouth with the utmost care, making sure they had enough strength to swallow.

“What is that pearl you’re carrying?” we asked, as we covered the holes in their shell with seaweed and ice.

With our ten hands, we felt the pearl: a strange, almost smooth object. We could sense the differences in texture between its surface and the strange shell it contained within, so unlike anything we had ever seen.

The shell had belonged to a sentient being, there was no doubt about it. Its soft, clinging tissue, empty eye sockets, a row of teeth as white as ice, and its bilateral symmetry evoked strange memories that made our cilia quiver.

The pearl encasing the skull emitted a sequence of tones that repeated every few heartbeats. Its cadence suggested a language rich with meaning, and it began to awaken memories that had long lain buried deep within us.

“During the accident, we discovered that beneath our village, beyond where no one has ever ventured, there was another village, inhabited by tiny four-limbed creatures,” said the Community, after having eaten a little, though with their swim bladder on the verge of deflating. “These creatures also perished in the fissure in the world’s crust that destroyed the village. The pearl is the only thing of this being I was able to salvage; it seems they used it to protect their tiny heads, as their physiology does not allow them to survive in the ether. Unfortunately, their brain is almost completely incinerated, incapable of generating new life.

The pearl, which we now realized was the protective helmet of an alien entity, kept repeating a message. We listened intently as its vibrations caused our cilia to oscillate.

“Do you understand what the pearl is saying?” the Community asked us, eager to know if what they had recovered was of any significance. “We have heard that among your Communities dwells a Mind that, a hundred estrous cycles ago, came from beyond the world’s boundaries, from an ocean very different from ours, one even darker, with enormous luminaries shining at unimaginable distances. Until now, we thought they were just legends.”

“We think . . . ” we replied hesitantly. “We think we understand the message.”

When we finally grasped the pearl’s words, they struck our language centers with a painful force, like a turbulent current that violently drags you into the depths of the world and crushes your carapace with the strength of a thousand hands.

“Earth to Galileo Base,” said the pearl’s voice, which we now understood clearly, as if a veil had been lifted from our memory. “We’re receiving readings from the orbiter indicating intense crustal movement very close to your position. Report your situation immediately.” The eye sockets in the skull inside the pearl seemed to look at us with deep sadness. “Earth to Galileo Base, report your situation immediately.”

When we began exploring the deep turquoise waters of the ocean within the moon Europa, we encountered the chatter of a myriad of voices, with the vitality of birds on a summer morning. Like ornithologists on Earth, we found in those voices the instructions that life requires for survival, but little else, nothing that addressed the human need to find meaning amid the static.

Ever since the first radar and sonar readings revealed the movement of buoyant masses just a few meters in diameter in the inner ocean, one of the main objectives of our mission had been to prepare for a possible first contact. However, the way in which contact was established surpassed even our wildest speculations.

These creatures, native to Europa and resembling large crabs with ten jointed legs, possess a swim bladder like that of many fish; by inflating it, they can float and remain in contact with the inner surface of the thick crust of ice and rock, which, for them, is the surface of their world, a world we can now call our own.

To an explorer digging through the crust from the surface, organisms from the distant past would appear first, some well-preserved by the low temperatures. Then, as one approaches the vast inner ocean, kept liquid by the tidal forces of the giant Jupiter, a succession of layers follows, like inverted terrestrial geological strata, containing increasingly complex organisms, including those of the dominant species.

Our submersible descended from Port Two at Galileo Base, where long, narrow fissures in the rock and ice of the crust lead to a deep cave system connecting the surface to the vast inner ocean. All around us rose the many canyons that striate the moon, and a network of geysers taller than Mount Everest on Earth, reminding us of the changing world beneath our feet.

Even after three rovers, a swarm of drones, a handful of crewed orbital missions, multiple successful landings, and two unmanned submarines, our mission was the first to fail, leaving behind four dead astronauts inside a submersible crushed flat like a sheet of paper from a discarded manuscript.

It was in one of those caves, two kilometers below the surface, that the creatures native to Europa found us, hours after the accident. With their nimble ten-fingered hands, they used stone tools to cut through the twisted metal of the submersible and the thin fabric of our suits. Two of the human bodies inside were completely mangled; a third, the pilot, had only half of his skull intact; the last had her waist sliced open and her entrails exposed: the body that belonged to the human who now lives among us.

There was no need for a supercomputer more powerful than any ever built by humankind to scan those brains and bring them back to life. In Europa, evolution itself gave rise to the organic equivalent of such supercomputers: an organism capable of assimilating the Mind of another being and integrating it into its own.

The native creature, the Community that had found the human crew, opened their enormous mouth, lined with multiple rows of teeth, and swallowed what remained of the mangled bodies. Once inside their stomach, which contained as many neurons as their brain, they began scanning the cells and their connections. There, the Mind of the most intact human we were able to rescue awoke and joined the swarm of Minds in our Community.

Since then, any specific term the human once used to refer to what she was has lost its meaning. Since then, we are us; we are Community.

Nearly a hundred Communities stretch across the undulating hills of Europa’s inner face, forming a ten-by-ten square with a few gaps.

Within one of those Communities dwells what could be salvaged of that human, and the even smaller remnants of Eleazar, the submersible’s pilot, whose Mind could not be fully recovered and integrated. His fragmented consciousness weeps at irregular intervals, longing for what he once was and for all the things and people he will never see again.

Several estrous cycles have passed since the submersible accident. During this time, Galileo Base continued to grow, both in population and in the hope of settling a new world, and its inhabitants came to terms with the loss of their colleagues. Now they, too, have perished. Although, with a little luck, we will find them again.

Although the Minds among us no longer possess the physical bodies that once distinguished them as individual beings, the human’s connection with her colleague Eleazar is deeper than it ever was in her previous life, her thoughts flowing within the sea of Minds without words to act as intermediaries. Now we share the same body. The boundaries that unite and separate us, like the intersection of sets in a Venn diagram, allow us to maintain a vague sense of individuality, which fades like memories of a distant past.

We sense the other Communities around us, each one also an island inhabited by a multitude of Minds, floating in the cold ether.

Our arms, like dendrites of a greater brain, remain in contact with one another and with the ice surface, swaying slowly amid currents that grow stronger as we approach our destination.

The expedition consists of eighty-four of the one hundred Communities that set out initially, hailing from our small town and the neighboring villages, though this number is merely a rough reflection of the diversity of Minds that inhabit them.

The Minds that inhabited the Communities that perished along the way, whether from exhaustion or accident, still live among us.

In this world, nature created redundancy to ensure survival.

Not only do we ingest them to assimilate them anew, but the Minds they contain, such as that of the one who was once human, are replicated within other Communities, in slightly different versions, experiencing multiple lives.

Even though the flesh may perish, redundancy allows us to achieve immortality.

Our carapaces, covered in a thick layer of organic matter and glowing algae, ready to provide protection against the environment we are heading toward, stand out against the surface of our world, which we perceive with rudimentary eyes adapted to the dim light produced by luminescent algae and the creatures swimming in the waters, gathered around the hydrothermal vents that sustain life.

Exhausted, thin, and hungry from the long journey, we stop to hunt smaller organisms. We bury ourselves under the ice until we are almost completely covered. We then raise our arms and rhythmically wiggle our fingers like bait. After catching some organisms and swallowing them with mouths full of rows of teeth, we feel their more primitive Minds come alive, expanding our shared understanding of existence. In this world, even after being eaten, we continue to exist.

Except when swallowed by a mindless creature.

Through the cilia on our shells, we sense the presence of one of them nearby. Its tentacles barely disturb the ether as it swims silently, despite being nearly as large as our cities’ towers. The shifting chromatophores covering its skin betray its presence. We burrow back into the ice to avoid it.

Due to the lack of a common language and shared understanding of existence, we don’t know what happens after being swallowed by a mindless creature. We suspect that if a Community falls prey to one of them, all their Minds would be lost in the void of nonexistence, for, unlike the Communities, it seems they did not evolve the ability to assimilate the beings they feed on and thus preserve life.

When the creature moves far enough away, we emerge from the ice and continue on our way.

After a brief meal, far from being full, but with our Minds now more alert, we inflate our swim bladders to continue the long journey and descend beyond the limits of the universe we know, to where the great ether gives way to the outer surface. We must not eat too much, for we need to leave enough room in our stomachs for what we will find further on.

Some time ago, during a night of unknown duration, as the human who dwells among us was being digested down to her very last synapse, her Mind, in the process of being integrated, had visions in which she spread her arms like wings. Now we fly without wings, swimming through cubic kilometers of territory no human has ever known, sensing through the carapace of the Community we inhabit what fish scales know in detail.

We’re almost there: Galileo Base, or what’s left of it. As the ether rushes frantically through the gaps in the world’s surface, the currents all around us intensify.

Where the small village of the surviving Community once stood, there is now only a vast, rugged canyon that splits the horizon in two, where the ether swirls violently. And between the massive rock walls, deep below, we behold a darkness so profound that to our eyes it appears as the absence of all things, a place where no Mind can dwell.

In a song refined over thousands of estrous cycles, we wave our cilia in undulating patterns, caressing the layer of algae that covers our carapaces. Little by little, as they grasp the message we convey, both a command and a hymn, the algae on our bodies begin to glow, driving back the shadows.

Transformed into symbiotic candles, we enter the mouth of the enormous canyon.

As our bodies expand painfully due to the loss of external pressure, we travel through a cave system similar to the one the human who lives among us had once descended into aboard the submersible.

After thousands of heartbeats traveling through a desolate landscape, we come upon an ice barrier. Judging by its color and the way it refracts sound, we estimate it to be only a couple of bodies thick. The ether around us seems calm, but to continue on our way, we must once again confront its fury.

With six of our ten hands, we grasp rock and metal tools and begin to break through the ice that hinders our progress. With our remaining four hands, we remain intertwined with our immediate neighboring Communities, like the bonds in a crystalline network.

We dig slowly but steadily. As we make a small hole in the ice, the ether around us rushes into it and jolts us violently. Holding onto each other, we continue digging. As the hole grows even larger, the ice shatters, and our bodies are sucked forcefully downward, which, long ago, was upward for the human who dwells among us. Our carapaces tear as we crash into the cavern walls, but we stay together like puzzle pieces.

In the early days of the human’s new existence within the swarm of Minds of our Community, as she was being assimilated, we tried to make sense of the new ideas she brought us, among which was the concept of a puzzle. Our Community, contracting the muscles around their swim bladder and fluttering their cilia, produced sounds that the human identified as laughter. When we understood that concept, we knew that, more than a human game, it was a metaphor for our existence.

“We are a puzzle,” our Minds said in unison. “A whole made up of smaller pieces, trying to fit together. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don’t, but life goes on among us.”

Even the human was never a single individual, but rather the constant interaction of multiple lives: the microbiota in her intestines digesting proteins she could not otherwise process; the semiconscious biomechanical assistants that expanded her cognitive capacity, whose silicon architecture could not be fully incorporated; the tardigrade genes present in all her cells, to better withstand radiation on the exposed surface of Europa, genes that became part of the Community we inhabit and, following communal copulation, also of the other Communities.

The swirling ether threatens to tear us apart, and one of our Community’s arms is violently torn from the rest of their body. We scream in pain, our cilia standing on end, but we cling together. Nature gave us ten arms so that we might have ten chances to cling to existence. We continue descending through the torrent that drags us toward the outer surface until we reach a cave almost devoid of ether.

Desperate, pinned down on the ice and rock, we clumsily try to move through an environment that is foreign to us, for our bodies no longer find a physical medium to sustain them, only the icy, thin atmosphere of our world, Europa, separating us from the silence of the void.

We feel the weight of our bodies for the first time, once buoyant, now without ether—without water to make us weightless. We continue downward, though our senses, confused yet adapting quickly, tell us that this is actually upward. We travel through a narrow system of tunnels until we see something glimmering in the distance, like the flickering chromatophores of a deep-sea predator. We arrive at a space with no rock walls around us, and our rudimentary eyes are overwhelmed by a light a thousand times more intense than that of the world’s interior.

Above us, we gaze upon the immense disk of Jupiter.

The other Minds, who had never ventured beyond our world and had only experienced it through the memories of the human among us, look around in wonder. Our carapaces are illuminated by a distant sun and by the life-giving gas giant, whose tidal forces keep the heart of the world in a liquid state.

Soon, our carapaces begin to crystallize, even with the thick layer of algae and organic matter separating us from the cold. The cold hurts and breaks down our tissues; it seeps all the way to the brain and contracts the swim bladders we need to keep inflated to survive. Through the vibrations transmitted by our intertwined arms and the thin outer atmosphere, we hear the cries of pain from the other Communities.

We feel the fury of the enormous geyser erupting from the world’s crust just a few bodies away. Before our eyes, the water jet looks like a multicolored fan, like light refracting off the ice-covered buildings of our biggest cities. The constant spray pouring from the geyser falls on our carapaces like snowflakes and threatens to bury us.

“We can try,” Eleazar had said half an estrous cycle ago, when we were planning the expedition, during one of his brief moments of clarity amid the pain. “With proper insulation, we can survive long enough in Europa’s atmosphere to rescue the Minds that can still be assimilated.”

The other Communities had agreed to take that risk. If successful, the result would be to reclaim the Minds of our sisters who had succumbed to the fracture, as well as those of the humans living below, on the world’s outer surface, and the knowledge of the vast and terrible cosmos they possess.

Galileo Base, one of humanity’s attempts to find a home in a hostile world, had succumbed an estrous cycle ago, ravaged by the onslaught of raging geysers, buried under ice and rock, shattered, and exposed to intense radiation and the frigid atmosphere. The human individuals who inhabited it, more than two hundred in total, each possessed barely one distinct, individual Mind, but that did not make them any less worthy of rescue than the native Communities that contained multitudes.

We are a puzzle, and there is still room for many more pieces.

Among ourselves, life continues.

Below the breeze from the geysers, we rise with our arms outstretched against the gravity of a world we thought we knew, bathed by the light of a distant sun reflected off our carapaces, a sight that many of the Minds within us witness for the first time.

Intertwined, with our tissues partially crystallized and burning with every step, breathing the air inside our swim bladders, we head toward the site of what remains of the Galileo Base.

As we draw nearer, we come across fragments of plastic and metal, the artifacts and structures that humanity left behind on this side of the world. Eleazar’s Mind smiles when we find, barely protruding from the ice, the communications tower they built shortly after arriving here. His Mind seems clearer, and it gives us renewed strength to press on, though doubt still lingers within him.

“Will we make good use of all this human knowledge and that of the life-forms we encounter along the way?” Eleazar had said prior to our expedition to the surface. “For the first time in the Communities’ history, they will learn about the vast cosmos that exists beyond this small world. Knowledge of death and wars that annihilated millions, as well as humankind’s technology and their ability to cross the void between the stars. Will they—will we—use this knowledge responsibly, or will we become predators, devouring and assimilating everything that exists?

The insights of these two human Minds had given us a small glimpse of the true vastness of the waters, a vastness impossible to quantify in a language of heartbeats and estrous cycles. Now, we stand at the dawn of a new era, one that will test the respect for life that evolution itself has bestowed upon us, for in our small world, among the Communities, there has never been anything like the ravage that plagues human history.

But one thing, above all else, is crystal clear to us: the ability to sustain life and become part of a Community must be shared. Empathy between Minds arises from understanding, and among us, understanding is the foundation of existence.

As we move forward, we come across the bodies of some Communities and several humans. We detect their presence beneath the ice by the way their tissues refract the vibrations of the surroundings. We dig with renewed vigor until we reach them. Some humans are barely protected by their thin spacesuits, while others lie behind the thick metal walls of their living quarters and laboratories, but they’ve all met the same fate.

We break through ice, rock, and metal until we reach them. We dig them out. There hasn’t been enough time since the accident for their Minds to be completely lost; the cold has preserved them.

Some bodies, however, were incinerated by the explosions inside their compartments, swept away by the winds of the void, their tissues too badly torn, their armor shattered, and with no glimmer of consciousness left to recover.

We weep for the Minds that cannot be assimilated.

For those who will join us, however, we celebrate with joy.

They had no choice at the moment of their death. Now, in this new life, they may decide whether to continue living amidst this ocean of Minds or to join the silence of nonexistence.

With the giant disc of Jupiter, the giver of life, reflected in our lacerated carapaces, we open our mouths and swallow their bodies.

And within us, we feel their Minds come alive again.