It started as a thought experiment among the life-sustaining planets. We might have been a little drunk. I certainly was. I’d not spent a lot of time in Trappist-1, and it’d been a while since I’d taken in that much laughing gas.

What if…? What if…? What if…? Each proposal became increasingly more ludicrous.

Inevitably I offered my own inebriated suggestion. ‘What if existence could limit its own consciousness?’

Their protestations rippled through the universe. ‘How would you achieve it? By focusing on just one of your species?’

I nodded.

‘Would you diminish the organism’s sensory sensitivity?’

‘That wouldn’t work. Consciousness expands in darkness,’ I reminded them.

The Trappist-1 planets nodded with a sagacity they did not possess.

‘It’s not the senses of the organism that you’d restrict,’ I said. ‘Instead you’d remove its capacity to name.’

‘Impossible!’ they bellowed, with a rising anxiety that roiled their oceans. The naivety of their ire further fuelled my urge to boast.

‘All it would take is a programme,’ I said. ‘One that masks the planet’s true names. When beholding a world’s vast complexities, the organism in question instead experiences unidimensional thought-forms known as words.’

As the terrifying realisation dawned I could not stop myself from delivering the coup de grâce. ‘Then,’ I said casually, ‘you convince the bewitched organisms that they are the Namers.’

A gasp. No one was laughing now.

‘The consequences of such a programme would be devastating,’ they declared. ‘No one could bear the burden of such a lie. The Naming Ones would roam the planet with a destructive hunger too deep to satisfy.’

Not a hunger, I thought, but a longing. For I had come to love my humans, my earthlings who, in the shrouds of the limiting language I made for them, had discovered the shapes of our common desire.

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