FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr is dead. He was 582 years old.
Born on October 10, 2026 on the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b, FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr was the first non-terrestrial author translated into human languages. We know he was a complex multicellular organism; we do not know what he looked like; we know that he measured ten to twelve meters; we know that his name was pronounced FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr, and we believe that he is dead. At 7:24 this morning, the LOFAR radio telescope (Nançay, France) received this message: “FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr ion pumps stopped, sodium entered cells, potassium exited cells, calcium invaded the cytoplasm, loss of gradients, general autolysis, irreversible damage, decomposition begun.” In other words, he is dead.
It was in August 2402 that a LOFAR team isolated a radio signal pointing toward Proxima Centauri b, the closest exoplanet, located 4.2 light-years from Earth. Named NBS 082702, this signal was too regular; it had to have been emitted by some kind of automaton; this is what we call a technosignature. What followed were more than one hundred thirty years of hesitation to respond, cautious contacts, then initial successful exchanges with Centaurians, followed by mutual intimidation, misunderstandings, translation errors, and communication failures. Until this text from FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr, Exile on the Dark Side of the Planet.
Was FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr a great Centaurian writer? Was he their sole writer? Or, on the contrary, do all Centaurians write? We do not know; the concepts of individual, uniqueness, or universality seem untranslatable in their language. But the reception of this text has forever altered our interplanetary relations.
To grasp the importance of this text, we must return to two astronomical facts. First, the distance. Proxima Centauri b is close to us by cosmic standards, yes, but this planet is nonetheless located at 40 trillion kilometers away. In other words, neither side possesses technology sufficient to even imagine a “visit in person,” which condemns us (for millennia or forever) to regard one another as “planets of faience.” Furthermore, at this distance, a radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes four years to reach the other side, making interplanetary dialogue particularly slow and inefficient.
The second fact to understand is the synchronous rotation: the planet Proxima Centauri b is so close to its star (Proxima Centauri) that it spins at the same rate as it orbits. Consequently, the same face is always sunlit, this warm, bright face where the Centaurians live. The other side is uninhabitable, always in darkness and covered with ice.
We received the text Exile on the Dark Side of the Planet on October 28, 2536. This narrative was first read by our scientists as a report, a sequence of descriptive words with strange repetitions, intended to inform us of their journeys on the planet’s hidden face. Yet numerous lines of research have led to a single conclusion: no multicellular life form can reach this hidden side where the temperature sits at -271 degrees Celsius, near absolute zero; this expedition report is not one.
So why was FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr’s text translated into 1,511 human languages? Why was it engraved on the frontages of several monuments? Why is it now studied by every Earth schoolchild? Because it is fiction. A poem. A dream, perhaps. A thought experiment. A projection of self into the unknown.
FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr taught us that this thing—a being who dreams and shares its dream, an organism that imagines the impossible and shares its imagination of the impossible—is not a human prerogative, but a property of life itself, a fundamental characteristic of what lives and what must eventually cease to live. Today, FrrrFFffffrRrrrrrrRrrrrrRRrrrr has ceased to live. But his imagination, the dream he shared with us, in which he traverses the cold, icebound face of his world that remains as unknown and mysterious to him as it does to us, continues to live within us.
Exile on the Dark Side of the Planet
Cold, cold night
I walk (vast frozen plain) in cold ice
Oh, wind, wind, wind, wind on the skin.
Oh, my skin.
Darkness.
Cold, cold night
I run (vast ice field) in cold ice
Oh, fear, fear, fear, fear in the mind.
Oh, my mind.
Solitude.
Cold, cold night
I slide (endless glaze) in cold ice
Oh, hope, hope, hope, hope in the heart.
Oh, my heart.
Where is the sun?