SC3: Murmur
A lively short story about social growth set in Croatia. The Murmur is an event that we would all like to be invited to attend. What will we do once the experience is over?
Murmuration
The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across Istria's ancient fields, where weathered shepherds guided their flocks through grass that rippled like waves in the gentle breeze. Terracotta-roofed villas dotted the landscape – some humble cottages nestled close to the earth, others rising proudly with elegant balconies and stone archways, all wearing the tainted patina of centuries. Gnarled olive trees stretched their silver-leafed branches toward the beautifully clear sky, their trunks twisted by time and wind into living sculptures.
Beyond the groves, wooded islands emerged from the Adriatic like sleeping giants, their dense pine forests running right to the water's edge. In the deep blue channels between them, a pod of dolphins broke the surface in graceful arcs, their sleek bodies catching the golden light as they played through the crystalline waters. The air held that peculiar Croatian stillness – a moment of perfect balance between land and sea, earth and sky – the kind of stillness that often preceded something extraordinary.
It began as an amorphous inky cloud on the radiant sunlit horizon, a shape-shifting apparition that seemed to breathe and pulse rhythmically against the oceanic sky. Like ink dropped in water, it bloomed and unfurled, its edges constantly dissolving and reforming. The starlings' distant movements spoke of an ancient rhythm, a dance as old as the wind.
As they drew closer, the first tender whispers of their presence reached across the fields – the soft susurration of thousands of wings beating in concert, a gentle rushing like thin, fragile leaves fluttering in a breeze. The mass of small birds pulled and stretched rapidly across the sky, forming an imperfect sphere, stretching into a long, uneven ribbon that rippled and twisted upon itself. Each amorphous shape dissolved into the next with liquid grace, as if the very air had come alive and decided to reciprocate within the dynamic dance.
They were overhead, so close that the downdraft of their wings stirred the soul of silent observers. The fluid sound of a thousand wingbeats merging into a single breath, a single pulse that matched the beating of a loving heart. The clear air vibrated with their mesmerising presence, each bird a note in a dramatic symphony of movement and life. Their iridescent wings caught the sunlight, flashing like scales of a magnificent celestial fish swimming effortlessly through the penetrable fresh air.
To stand beneath this living spiritual shrine was to feel one's place in the universe shift. The boundary between self and other began to blur, as if the observer had become part of this biotic choreography. Every swooping turn, every seamless transformation from one shape to another, spoke of a unity that transcended individual beings. Here was proof that nature's artistry lay not in single beautiful things, but in the spaces between them – in the invisible threads that bound starling to starling, heart to heart, earth to sky.
The murmuration moved as one organism, yet composed of countless individual decisions, thousands of tiny adjustments made with split-second precision. Each tiny bird maintained perfect awareness of its closest neighbours, creating a rippling network of consciousness like a babbling brook of thought. To witness such perfect cohesion, such effortless unity, was transformatory.
A reminder that we are part of a global people - greater, complex, beautiful.
Gathering
Luka lowered his worn camera, his spotted hands trembling slightly. For three years, he had tried to capture murmurations, chasing them across Istria's irregular coastline, but never had he witnessed one of such magnitude, such voluminous harmony. There was something else there – something in the way his neural-enabled camera had tracked the mesmerising patterns, revealing underlying geometries that the naked human eye couldn't quite see.
He sat comfortably cross-legged in the long bladed grass, the warm earth still holding the day's solar heat, as he began to layer soundscapes over the memorable footage. The sturdy camera had captured not just the visual dance but the three-dimensional audio: the subtle variations in air pressure, even the collective heartbeat of the pure-hearted flock.
As he worked slowly, he became aware of undeniable movement behind him – human movement. Others attracted to the breathtaking spectacle like an electrical field of a magnet, and clung in small, tight knit clusters on the rugged hillside, their conversations a soft murmur that somehow echoed the resplendent birds' sonorous symphony.
"That's it, exactly it," came a high-pitched friendly voice over his muscular shoulder. "The way they move like warm waves repeatedly kissing the pebbled shore." A young, pretty woman had crouched quietly beside him, her eyes fixed deeply on his screen. In the fading soft light, her mercury silver hair caught the amber sunset in a way that reminded him of the iridescent starling wings. She politely introduced herself as Mara, a sound artist who'd been recording the extraordinary coastal sounds of Croatia for an installation in Pula. "But this," she gestured sensitively to his footage, "this is what I've been missing. The rhythm of it. The pure mathematics and relationality of belonging and moving naturally within a group."
From the nearby hardy olive grove, more captivated figures emerged gradually. A group of young, eager musicians who'd been practicing in one of the abandoned orange clay tiled villas took root in the fertile ground. An elderly filmmaker who'd been carefully scouting locations along the precipitous coast stood intrigued. Each drawn by either the murmuration itself or the gathering crowd forming a human murmuration on the steep verdant hillside.
Luka found himself sharing his screen, explaining the intoxicating patterns his camera had revealed, while Mara connected her audio equipment to capture the excited conversations blending with the bewitching evening birdsong. What would they do? Share them?
Someone proposed moving to the old, derelict amphitheatre nearby – a perfect solid bowl carved into the vertiginous hillside centuries ago, its acoustics still perfect. As the friendly group made their way there, Luka quickly shared a clip of the murmuration, his fingers hovering over the share button. Who would he share this with and why? Finally, he simply wrote: "The starlings showed us how to move as one. Come see what happens next by joining in with a social experiment - Murmur. Amphitheatre under Olive Hill, today at sunset."
He told Mara about his experience and eagerly encouraged her to do the same. Afterall, he liked her and maybe she would be able to use the conversations to start a podcast about the natural world or to create a community of nature lovers who would go on to create an installation of their own. He smiled contented, sharing the unknown with another human being was risky and challenging but he liked it. His heart stirred and his spirit rose.
As Luka pressed share to Filip, his mind drifted back to a pleasant afternoon in Jersey a few months ago. He'd been photographing gannets diving into the steel-grey Channel when he met Alan MacPherson, grey hair and beard noticeable whilst he scribbled vigorously some equations into a salt-stained notebook. The Scottish mathematician had been different from anyone he'd ever met – brilliant, eccentric, generous and possessed by the idea that social networks should mirror natural phenomena.
A cup of welcome tea and a custard cream biscuit shared with him in the brilliant white lighthouse-turned-laboratory. He'd shown him Sqale, his creation that allowed ideas to be shared and collaborations to organically occur with credits. "Digital networks should share forwards in trust," he'd told him, his eyes bright with conviction. "Like birds trust in flight, like fish trust in water, like human consciousness trust in mind." He'd given him early access to the app’s neural-enabled features, seeing in his stunning and perceptive photography the same socially dynamic patterns he'd been chasing relentlessly through mathematics.
A subdued cough brought him back to the moment of now. Suddenly, an elegant, poised woman in her seventies had appeared beside the growing group. Her presence was both unexplainably commanding and ethereal. Eva Novak – he recognized her instantly from the retrospective of her work he'd seen in Medulin last year. Her light installations had transformed hardened fortified buildings across Eastern Europe, turning solid concrete and brittle glass into enlivened plumes of light that responded well to human movement.
"The starlings understand something we've forgotten," Eva uttered, watching his meaningful footage with fresh eyes that seemed to see beyond the screen. She moved her expressive hands through the air, sculptor-like, as if feeling the shapes the birds had left behind. "They know that the space between things is as important as the things themselves." Her fingers traced patterns that seemed to hang in the dying pale light. "Like pixels in the dark, yes? Each bird is a point of light, but the meaning is in the relationality they create together."
She began to walk with him briskly toward the classical amphitheatre, her silver hair and flowing black lace dress making her look stunningly slender. "We must not just record this," her voice resounded. "We must become light, sound, movement.." She pointed to Luka's camera. "We can collaborate together. Sharing our skills and abilities, organically and digitally.” He felt it was natural to be at her side, nothing that wording could express easily.
The group followed Eva and Luka down the winding, sloping white stony path. The comforting evening air humming. It was an historic moment. A lifetime of relationship between movement, light, and human experience. A transformation from nature's choreography to human expression.
Perhaps to something more…
Amphitheatre
Pula’s ancient amphitheatre cradled them like a cold stone palm held up to catch the last rays of setting sun. As more people arrived, they instinctively formed a circle, mirroring the structure around them. Phones glowed softly as new arrivals showed each other how they'd found their way there.
"It's remarkable," announced a young adult with indigo-stained fingers, holding up her iphone. "Each share creates its own murmuration pattern in the app - the distribution graph. I read the card shared by Luca and came here. It was like following a fiery trail of light from a shooting star." She introduced herself as Nina, a promising digital artist from Rijeka.
Eva moved to the focus of their circle, her ethereal presence drawing all eyes enthralled. "How many here came through Sqale?" Most hands raised. "How many have shared it forward?" Fewer hands this time. She smiled knowingly. "Ah, here's our first lesson from the starlings’ collaboration. The continuation of the pattern relies on collaboration ."
Mara, adjusting her audio equipment, looked up suddenly. "Each share creates ripples of change? These ripples of change are not insignificant in relation to the swarm, each is magnificent as it captures the momentum of transformation in our lives, our world, our time.”
"Exactly," Luka replied, anticipation building in his voice. "We need something bigger than this hillside to create real ripples. Something that matches the scale of the murmuration and the scale of our journey in the world." He turned to Eva for support. "The arena in Pula..."
"Yes!" Eva's eyes lit up, reassured by his trusting gaze. "A son et lumière unlike any before - with movement, participation, connection. We could use the neural patterns from today's murmuration to drive variegated light arrays around the circular stadium."
"My coastal soundscapes can be used well," Mara added, "layered with the murmuration recordings. A symphony of nature and technology. How about playing ‘World of Light’ by Nick Cave and Warren Ellen? An amazingly moving piece, Jakub."
The elderly filmmaker, who'd introduced himself as Jakub, leaned forward. "Yes, a great choice. Today's murmuration showed us something about collective purpose, synergy, love."
Nina held up her phone again, the Sqale interface casting blue light across her face. "What if the sharing itself becomes part of the art? Each person who experiences it shares it forward – share the event and what they'll do to move differently and make a better world."
"A chain reaction," Eva nodded. "Art becoming action becomes change."
"If we don't share it forward, if we don't create that chain..." Luka paused, looking at his footage again. "Then it's just another pretty light show. The pattern dies. The potential for change dies with it. Ultimately, people - experiencing wars, starvation, imprisonment…- die."
Jakub's weathered face grew serious. "Like the starlings – each movement matters to the whole. If birds stop participating..."
"The murmuration dissolves and dissipates." Mara finished pensively.
They fell silent, watching the last blood-red light bleed from the pure pale blue sky. The time worn, chipped stones held memories of countless gatherings, countless circles of humans creating together. A place of horror transformed into a place of love and peace. Above, the first stars glimmered and glistened, like nature's own light installation.
Eva stood, her silhouette sharp against the deepening blue. "So we begin. Each of us sharing forward, each of us part of the pattern. The arena in Pula will be our catalyst, but the real performance..." she gestured to the darkening sky where the starlings had danced, "the real performance will be what happens after, in the sharing, in the change, in the moment."
One by one, they took out their phones, opening Sqale, beginning to create their own kind of digital murmuration that would spread across the network, magnetically attracting others.
Their pattern of possibility, purpose and potential.
Arena
First came the cloudy, creamy pearls – tiny drops of golden light threaded themselves through the dissolving remnants of night along Pula's eastern horizon. Rose gold began to seep into the smoky grey sky, as if an enlivened celestial artist were dragging a wet brush through layers of thick paint. The heavy limestone blocks of the arena caught these first hints of the dramatic dawn, each aged stone awakening to hold its own small measure of golden light. As the scorching sun crested the Adriatic, it painted the water in sheets of hammered copper, setting the harbour's forest of tall, slender masts ablaze and throwing long, drawn out shadows through the arena's majestic hemispherical arches.
The glorious dawn light revealed Eva, already at work for hours, her glossy silver hair catching the new sun as she directed her highly skilled technical team of volunteers with the precision of a conductor leading a newly formed group. "Higher," she called to the technicians threading programmable coruscating LED arrays through the upper tiers. "The light must cascade through the arena’s many arches." Her hands moved through the air, sculpting invisible patterns like a fountain of water energetically plunging through the invisible air. Her crew had learned to read her like an unwritten and imperceptible language.
Luka rested cross-legged in the arena's huge centre, surrounded by mammoth screens displaying the neural patterns his camera had captured from the murmuration. "Look here," he mentioned to the voluntary programming team huddled around him like novices around a Mother Superior - close, poised, attentive. "The starlings never moved randomly. There's mathematics in their dance." His fingers traced the geometric patterns that emerged when thousands of birds moved as one. "We need these same algorithms to drive the multitudinous lights. Lights respond to the movement of the people like a digital flock."
From somewhere in the upper tiers, Mara's voice resonated, riding stridently on a wave of sound that seemed to make the antiquated stones vibrate. She was testing her layered soundscape: whooshing of starling wings, crashing of Adriatic waves, collective heartbeat of the flock pulsing, puffing and panting of turbulent winds through olive groves. The sound rippled through the vast arena, small sensitive sensors on the weathered limestone walls measured its movement, feeding data to the spectacular light arrays.
"The Romans built this place to hold grisly spectacle," Eva purported, joining Luka in the arena's centre. A familiar and natural ease shared between them. "But they could never have dreamed of this." She gestured to where her team was installing the final projection matrices that would transform the stone walls once built by slaves into free, living surfaces.
The morning light had fully claimed the sky, and the arena hummed with activity. Cables snaked through archways that had once covered powerful gladiators. Technicians balanced on scaffolding where vociferous Roman senators once sat. Mara's soundscape mixed with the calls of seabirds and the distant clang of boats in the harbour unlike the screams and yells of the baying Roman crowd.
Like a silent ship entering port for shelter, Eva moved wordlessly and effortlessly noticed sensitively by Luca, touching a lit screen here, adjusting a glaring light there, her artist's eye seeing patterns that would only become visible once darkness returned.
"It's not just about the technology," she reminded them, gathering her core team as the sun climbed higher like a curious cat on a tall ladder. "Tonight, each person affects those around them, each movement part of a larger murmuration." She pointed to Luka's screens, where the murmuration's patterns still played in endless loops. "The lights will guide them, your sound will move them," she nodded to Mara, "but in the end, they must find the pattern themselves."
As if in response, a sudden delicate breeze carried a flutter of tiny wings overhead – a small, nervous and hesitant group of starlings crossing the colossal arena's open eye to the aquamarine sky, their soft dark shadows macabrely dancing briefly across the old stones.
As the hot sun climbed higher over Pula Arena, the digital murmuration on Sqale began its own ascendancy. Each share spiraled outward in geometry patterns, carrying not just information but traces of human connection. The app's interface showed flowing lines of gratitude spreading like roots through fertile soil transforming into seeds of new connections.
"Look at this," Nina called out, holding up her new iphone to Luka. The sharing pattern had taken on the shape of a double spiral, each point of light representing someone who'd not just shared the invitation, but added their own ideas of collaboration for what the Murmur might bring. "It's spreading through the fishing communities first," she noted, watching tiny lights bloom along the uneven coastline. "The well-connected restaurant owners are sharing it in Italy and Greece."
Mara paused in her sound testing to check on her gratitude tracking. A young mother in Split’s message glowed on her screen: "Thank you for bringing this to us. Since my mother died, I've felt disconnected from the community. I look forward to belonging." The message revealed a distribution graph that showed a connection of twenty previous shares.
"It's not just spreading," Eva discerned, watching the patterns form on the giant monitoring screen they'd set up. "It's healing." She pointed to clusters of lights pulsing between villages ancient in rivalries that were forgotten as people shared their excitement and absorption about the upcoming event inspiring people to pause, to consider, to connect.
A notification chimed on Luka's phone. Alan MacPherson had been monitoring the spread from his impenetrable lighthouse in Jersey: "The pattern is holding," he wrote enthusiastically. "Like the starlings, each person is maintaining connection with their closest nodes. We'll see something unprecedented – a digital network that mirrors natural law."
As a dim and still afternoon approached, the sharing pattern shifted again. People weren't just passing the invitation forward; they were using a gratitude tracker to forge new connections. A young artist in Zadar thanked a retired fisherman in Rovinj for his stories of how the coast had changed. A student in Ljubljana expressed gratitude to a grandmother in Pula for her memories of community celebrations in the arena. Each thank you created a new strand in the web, strengthening the community; improving the world around them.
"This is what the starlings were showing us," Mara whispered faintly, watching the patterns flow. "It's not enough to exist in the same space. We have to move together, see each other, and thank each other. Without that..." She trailed off, but they all knew what she meant. They'd seen too many communities fragment, too many connections break under the weight of modern isolation, too many people die alone and too many countries collapse into war.
The pattern was growing stronger by the hour. Each genuine expression of gratitude and each real connection made, created a more resilient network. For now, it was nurturing, growing, attracting people.
Remembering how to move as one…
Constellations
As twilight deepened over Pula Arena, Cassiopeia's celestial throne emerged in the darkening sky, her stars tracing their eternal beam across the heavens. The Pleiades scattered their stellar dust nearby, while the Great Bear prowled along the northern horizon. Each constellation revealed patterns that had guided humans since they first looked up to the skies in wonder and awe.
Below, in the arena, thousands of people formed a heavenly human constellation. Each person held a small light that pulsed in response to their movement like a living mirror of the sky above. As Eva's light arrays responded to their presence and Mara's soundscape wove through the space, the crowd began to move as one – a human murmuration alight and bright like starlight.
Something extraordinary happened. In the space between one breath and the next, between one movement and another, understanding bloomed like a camellia blossom - smooth and tender. A young teacher from Zargeb saw how her classroom could become a space of collective wisdom, where children learned not just facts but the art of moving through life together. She would use ABC classes with students, classroom coordinators and teachers to work in harmony and collaborate like the starlings they'd witnessed.
A group of unstately business leaders, swaying in the shared rhythm, realized their boardrooms had become cages. Imposed structures that had stifled their creativity and stolen their souls. They exchanged contacts, committed to transforming their meetings into dynamic, open spaces where ideas could flow like murmurations, where collaboration replaced competition, and where sharing replaced marketing and sales. Transformation.
Near the arena's heart, a community of friends who'd traveled from Zadar experienced a shared vision of transforming their separate apartments into a collective living space – a place where resources, skills, and care could be shared as naturally as birds share the sky. They would pool their resources, create communal gardens, share tools and talents, weaving their lives simply together like the varied patterns of light oscillating around them.
The gift economy spread through the crowd like a whisper becoming a song. People began exchanging skills, promises, resources – not as transactions, but as gifts. A sustainable living expert offered workshops in exchange for local produce. The patterns of giving and receiving mirrored the fluid motion of the murmuration.
In the arena's expansive centre, Eva raised her expressive hands once more, conducting both light and crowd in a final movement. Below, thousands of people moved as one, each individual choice rippling out to affect the relational and the social. A bright, white shooting star traced its illuminatory path across the pleasing constellation-filled sky.
For like the starlings had shown them, there was no neutral ground. Either one moved with the whole, contributing to the pattern's beauty, or the pattern perished. Either humanity would learn to dance together organically and socially – in their homes, schools, businesses, communities – or it would wither and die…
Humanity stands on a threshold.
One path leads toward separation, with the ideology of ecological and social collapse; lives end. The other path leads toward connection and the deep understanding human beings flourish in temporal and spatial relationality; life shines.
The choice, like a star waiting to be born, rests in your hands.
Invitation to Read & Review
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