Codi Cel·lula

A slime mould grows on a screen running Conway's Game of Life. Light from below is the program's only channel to the mould. One generation per day is slow enough for an organism to answer. Scattered in the substrate are pellets of a nutrient medium of my own formulation, dyed with pigment: feeding, the mould stains its own path, so the only record of the encounter is drawn by the living participant, in the colours it ate. Both halves invite the same misreading. The mould is called intelligent because it finds short paths; the automaton is called alive because it is called Life. The title holds both senses of cell.