by DD White
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Later Deliadre had started up the old quanta-communication device to speak with her old Eagolim friend Beagud, son of Beagud, who had recently took charge of a nomadic branch of the Eagolim species way out there in the Orion arm of Magphoreus. There had always been about a ten second delay between saying something and hearing something with this device so an understood etiquette of waiting for the other to hear and respond was practiced. She watched the hologram of Beagud receive and respond to her last message. He stood a good four feet taller than her with a lighter blue skin color and a round human-like head that had no hair or horn on it. They had grown up together like this, always around 50,000 light years apart. They had always liked each other, and spoke intimately across a distance that neither could probably ever physically cross. Perhaps the impossibility of the idea only made their desire for each other worse.
“So the ego phantasm experiment is still on schedule? You know Aquari doesn’t like those things happening. Are you sure you are not just going to upset the great Aquari with your relentless curiosity?”
“Aquari already suspects this attempt. I think he’s just confident that it won’t happen because mother has been dead for so long. Goag is in on this for its own curiosity too, and Goag and Aquari are good friends that go way back. I’m sure there are no really hurt feelings at stake.” Deliadre’s words disappeared into the void to eventually be heard by Beagud.
Beagud eventually replied. “So does the ego phantasm phenomenon prove your theory of life beyond death, or does it prove Aquari’s opinion that it is a mechanical construct of the reanimated brain that can’t exist in the same location as Aquari?”
“That will have to be determined by research on the evidence we gather from the experiment along with what the ego phantasm has to say when she appears.”
Beagud became very interested in what would happen in the core of the galaxy when Nieniel and Rayalial had dinner later. They both said goodbye before disconnecting the quanta-communicator link, but they would definitely continue to stay in touch.
Beagud turned away from the quanta-communication device after saying goodbye to Deliadre his Eigalli friend in the core of the galaxy. He had always had a crush on her and both of them grew up sharing intimate secrets and details of each other’s lives across the void with the ancient Nephaprican technology that allowed almost instantaneous communication across thousands of parsecs of space. He worked on an experiment of his own that he did not dare to even mention to Deliadre on a quanta-communication device.
Beagud turned on the photon examination equipment in the same control room he had just been talking to Deliadre in. This picked apart photons from different locations in space that were striped of their recorded data on their way through the photon examination equipment. He wondered about life after death even before Deliadre told him about the ego phantasm experiment. His own father had recently died to leave him the main commander of the Eagolim fleet, and he missed his father, wondering if some way existed to ask him for advice now. Yet he already knew what his father’s advice would be. His father had already told him while alive to not go near the old Ti system. It had been forbidden, and he knew this since being a child, but his father who forbade it was now long gone and he had always wanted to disobey that order.
Even advanced galactic beings of the third age of Magphoreus still wondered about the mystery of what happened beyond life. Beagud had been well aquatinted with the life after death debate Aquari had with the Eigalli. It wasn’t that Aquari said that no life existed after death. It’s that he maintained that its ego-phantasm manifestation here had been something different from life after death. Aquari maintained that a ghost was just an artifact of intelligent life’s brain that, by its nature, projected our dreams and imaginations upon reality. The subject had always been important because it linked to the secret of how to live longer than just a few thousand Earth years, like some reptile species that lived for millions of Earth years. As Eagolim prolonged life they ran against a barrier at the point when a being seemed to have reached fruition with living, and they longed for, and even seemed to need to die.
Beagud had now become in charge of his father’s fleet and he might never have another chance to bring the fleet of fusion-warp virtual particle drive ships this close to the old planet Ti where the Eagolim had once stretched out a galactic empire, before they became galactic nomads. A mighty force, according to still existing databanks, destroyed the old planet Ti in a devastating collision. Unseen forces dispersed the empire and it remains a mystery to this day who this unseen enemy was. The Ti Empire had been all that had been left of an offshoot of Nephapricus left behind when the Gralga star-door became lost in a nova event, back in the second age of Magphoreus. All Beagud had ever been told was that this had become a forbidden sector of space. Even for highly evolved galactic beings, forbidding a child to do something only made the child want to do it more.
Beagud became nervous about his forbidden glimpse into the Ti system. Dead father or not, he could still hear his dad speak as he trained the photon collection unit on the forbidden star. “Go back! It is forbidden to return to this sector of space! You know not what you do!”
Beagud ignored his nagging conscience and began to examine the decoded photon data. It turned out the old planet Ti had not really been destroyed. It still existed in a slightly different orbit, and appeared smaller then the known size of the planet Ti. It looked as if something collided with Ti and destroyed it, sending it into a closer orbit with the central star. Beagud discovered that there were even asteroids orbiting in a belt where the old planet Ti used to orbit. Beagud became amazed by the data flooding in, mesmerized by images of Ti still robust with atmosphere, water, and no doubt life. Beagud didn’t notice Trojan quanta-nanocode programs that were being switched on by this very data. The control room glittered with another electrical presence that flickered unnoticed in the glow of the buttons. Beagud continued his exploration into the forbidden. Gravity wave measurements detected the orbit of a large non-elliptical object that dipped into the area of the system’s asteroid belt every 20 teks or so. That must have been what destroyed Ti, turning a great galactic civilization into nothing but abandoned ruins on long lost worlds. There another object orbited off the solar ellipse of the Ti system somewhere. He moved the photon collector carefully along the dark matter fingerprint of a non-elliptical orbit to eventually behold an enormous phosphorescent world with several rings and multi-colored atmosphere that glowed with its own light. It measured equal in mass and diameter to a small sized star except this was a planet. Beagud had seen gas giants this size before but this world appeared completely different, like a non-gas giant cross between a planet and a star, and what a peculiar orbit. What Beagud beheld looked more like technology then a natural object. It looked something like what Goag Ralus had been made of. Beagud marveled at the stream of photon data.
Then suddenly the records of the photon stream began erasing themselves. Beagud pulled his head away from the view and began pressing a control switch. The data continued to erase itself like falling dominoes all the way to the incoming stream where the photon collection unit suddenly turned itself off. Beagud stood up puzzled by what had just occurred, which preceded an old guilt that surfaced telling him that he had been a bad boy.
Then the quanta-communication device suddenly switched on with an incoming message, and the room filled with a large human shaped hologram of an alien being. Beagud shook with fear knowing full well that the being was only a harmless hologram. The being stood at a height larger than Beagud who had been almost 15 ft. tall himself. The being’s skin showed a brownish orange instead of blue. The eyes had no pupils, but glowed with an angry reddish light. The being had what appeared to be hair along with a beard and moustache that looked white and seemed to flow off the face like vaporous clouds. The being had flowing robes for clothes that also seemed to emanate
from the body like vaporous clouds. The being appeared to be noticeably angry as he looked down upon the frightened Beagud. “I always knew you would disobey your father as soon as you took over the fleet Beagud! Take heed of this merciful warning to stay away from your long gone planet Ti! Depart from this sector of space before your foolish actions bring death and destruction to your kind! There will not be another warning Beagud! Stay away from this forbidden place!”
The hologram disappeared without any wait for a reply. Beagud had never been more terrified in his life, which said a lot considering himself to be already nearly 3000 Earth years old. That strange looking being knew his name. How did he know my name?! How did he know me?!? The data became erased. After some typing on controls it became apparent that there had always been Trojan quanta-nanocode programs in the equipment that would be triggered by photons from Ti. After examining the log of the quanta-communications device he discovered that the transmission originated at the giant star-sized planet that he had just discovered above the solar ellipse of the Ti system. The planet had an impossible mass that no life form could possibly exist on. The data didn’t indicate it heralded from one of the planet’s many moons, but from the surface of that giant planet itself. Beagud had been left with more questions than answers as he woke up every commander of every vessel in the fleet with instructions to alter course, and divert away from this area of space by 3 parsecs toward the Perseus arm in the opposite direction away from the Ti system.
At least a light year away, another alien being turned off his quanta-communications device confident that the rotten little brat raised by Beagud would not force him to make good on his threats. Beagud’s father always feared this day, and had been instructed to leave the quanta-nanocode programs in place for the boys own good. He must learn the terms of the ancient truce made between the Eagolim and his kind, which had been established over fifteen thousand Earth years ago. Beagud’s father made sure the fleet would be close by at the time of his death in order to tempt his son into learning this lesson early on in his tenure as fleet commander. The being thought back and recalled several other Eagolim commanders that needed the reminder to include as he recalled even Beagud’s father. The big orange being did live on the surface of the star sized planet in an ethereal form unaffected by the gravity, which defied the planet’s mass on the surface anyway with virtual particle technologies. Here these ethereal beings lived in cities where they seemed to fade in and out of physical existence.
This being had his own quanta-communication device because like the Eagolim, he too had been a descendant of the Nephapricans. It remained unaffected by the planet’s incomprehensible mass because the whole planet had been programmed with quanta-nanocode, which gave it control over the virtual particle phenomenon just like the surface of Goag Ralus. These descendants of Nephapricans were called the Devasuras who were the participants in the great disappearance when seven of the stars that powered seven of the star-doors also disappeared to evidently be turned into giant proto-planets. That must have been what the Nephapricans did, using the secrets of the technologies that returned long ago with the Eagolim from the still-evolving Goag Ralus in the core.
The Devasura faded in and out of existence because they had learned to evolve outside of the dark matter. The virtual particle phenomenon in the universe provided much of the dark matter mass of this universe as it constantly faded in and out of existence. As virtual particles appeared and disappeared there would also be a sub-atomic particle produced that is known to Earth physicists as a WIMP (a Weakly Interactive Massive Particle.) It is these WIMPs that make up the phantom matter scaffolding that most of the matter in the universe has attached itself to. In this way dark matter and matter coexist and symbiotically support each other. The Devasuras flew these virtual particle driven super-sized proto-planets off of the phantom matter ellipse of the galaxy in order to evolve independent of the accumulation of these WIMPs. In this way the ancient Nephapricans evolved beyond being just galactic beings. They turned seven stars into planets and themselves into multi-dimensional beings that now live for billions of Earth years, and control their own mass like beings that have evolved their own mentally-controlled built-in virtual particle generators. The star-door technology had been expanded and integrated into controlling the Devaworlds, which they flew around the galaxy with built in virtual particle drives that could accelerate the planet through quanta-dimensional warp configurations to attain several times the speed of light. This had all evolved an ethereal reality for the Devasuras above the ellipse of Magphoreus however, within the elliptical plane of dark matter where the planet passed through, the Devasuras become extremely dense in mass and were virtually indestructible while the planet’s orbit in the phantom matter plane slowed it down and its own mass condensed.
The Devasura sat on a bench by the quanta-communicator and photon collector similar to the ones on Beagud’s ship. The light of their departure still shined a long way off but he would be watching.
