My [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore, and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats, eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a jumbled mess.
Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more prey.
I have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little sweet. Pairs will with fractals.
It's meant to be using "modern" jargon, set in the time of the story, that hasn't actually been invented yet. It also refers to a bunch of Classical mythology / works that I'm not familiar with. And also a bunch of obsolete CS ideas; e.g,. a "Chomsky organ", which would presumably be something that generates language based on Chomsky's ideas about grammar -- probably something like a Markov chain -- rather than neural networks, which is how LLMs currently "speak".
At any rate, it's written from the perspective of an AI which controls a ship. The AI may have once been a human on earth, and had its cognitive patterns transferred to the ship. It can do a certain amount towards modifying the ship, but they've apparently turned off its ability to speak. The ship at the beginning of the story has only 2 humans on it, down from hundreds. The ship is stationed at some place near the solar system (?) to look at a weird phenomenon, called 'Julia', presumably because it resembles a Julia set fractal, which defies all known physics. While the ship has been stationed there, the Earth has basically died.
That may give you enough clues to help you orient yourself, so that you can figure out what happens.
What parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can be confusing if you haven’t read a lot of it, because part of its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out from their context or by reference (like “laminate” and “squarely” — yes, I had to look it up), and some are the puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is Julia? What do they want?)
It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.
I'm not a genius at all, and didn't realize this story was about "Julia sets" until I finished reading it and came back here for the comments. I was pretty sure that Julia was something like the 4D space bubble found in the Three Body Problem series.
I just enjoyed the prose in the story. Those incoherent words were the interesting bits of worldbuilding that drew me in.
One does not simply read a study Bible (2 million words) but if you do then this work of fiction will be easier to understand in comparison.
I'm not promoting or demoting any religion by saying this, I'm talking about the Bible as an old work of fiction, although to be fair, a study bible can be recent and even copyrighted.
