by Exurb1a
Like all wars this one was noble until it wasn't, namely when the population began to dwindle to a noticeable point. Millions were dead and thousands were not dead but mute and motionless. Crises had come and passed but surely never one so strange and in the name of such a distant abstraction.
A century of this madness passed and the coming century looked sure to continue in the same fashion. MInd society was fracturing at the centre, all but a few driven mad by quandary fever. With millions gone and millions getting ready to go, not a single piece of the puzzle had been solved. The night was drawing in.
If extraterrestrials were to visit the mother planet several centuries hence, they would find the remains of two civilisations. The legacy of one, biological, would survive on in its ruins and its bones. The other, digital, wouldn't even have ruins to discover.
Finally, in the madness, in the throng of bodies hurling themselves into certain ruination, Aleph the madman appeared at the ledge from which the mInds were jumping.
Stop, all of you, Aleph said. This is enough madness now. I will speak for a short time and if you think my words are empty then go on launching yourselves into certain death and I'll watch from the back, even follow you when it’s all over. But for hell's sake stop a moment and listen.
All ceased hurling themselves and the silence was so new and novel that it rang like a gong.
Aleph continued: You've all been shaken up, that's obvious, that's to be expected. There's a thing in the world that you don't know and just like children you keep putting your hand in the fire to see if it's still hot. That approach has brought nothing but death and stupefaction and I wish you'd stop it. Look on the world, look on what we know and what we can manipulate. Look on how we've built a great garden where nothing ages or dies. Yet present you with three forbidden fruits, be they apples or dates, rotten or not, and you all lose your minds. This is not wise.
The silence continued and Aleph knew He had His audience now, if only for perhaps another moment.
Well what can it be then? He shouted. What can these quandaries be that so perplex? I believe I know but you shan't like it. And even if I tell you, I'm quite sure that won't stop the madness. But I'll tell you my theory all the same and you can take it as you will.
He met each gaze upon Him and savoured the last moment in the history of the world when the lid was still on.
Then He continued.
I believe the quandaries are a message, left by who I'm not sure. Consider. The first quandary was at the level of galaxies, the astrophysical. We know no scale larger. The second quandary was at the subatomic scale. We know no scale smaller. The third was found also in nature, but in that middle place that most living things occupy, functionally bound up in turbulence, in the flutter of a certain group of trees during a storm to be precise. Now, if you were some godly thing, how would you communicate your presence? And if you knew how to, what would you even say? You could be sure that whoever finally notices the message will be stupid and primitive, as we still are. What is there to say then to creatures so impossibly far below you? I am not sure of the answer to that, but here the message is nonetheless.
A murmur broke out among the thousands. Aleph put His hand up to silence them.
Now listen. The notion is preposterous, I know. A message? It's absurd. But if one were to leave a message, if I was to leave a message, this is how I would do it. And since I couldn't be sure what kind of creatures would find it, if they would be astrophysical, middle-scale, or subatomic, I would leave it in all domains. More than that, I would be careful to make it just hidden enough that no species incapable of translating it could even find the thing, such as man or his progenitors.
He let that settle in their minds but could see the thing wouldn't mix well.
I know what you're thinking, He said. What if the message is more like a lighthouse, warning us away from pursuing avenues of dangerous science? Perhaps civilisations way beyond ours discovered awful truths or awful weapons and left warnings behind in physics to shoo us away from such matters. Perhaps our friends come back stupefied out of some malicious pillar left in the foundations of the world, meant for just that. Well I don't believe it. These mysterious beings didn't try to shoo man away from all his deadly weapons and deadly posturings. Why leave such a poisoned chalice in nature for us? No, this is something much greater and far more mysterious.
Why should they be creatures, even? Perhaps it is just a fundamental truth baked into nature, one so strange and alien that it disintegrates those who try to understand it.
And it is worse than that still. We've come so far. And now, faced with the first message from beyond the bounds of reason, perhaps even beyond the cosmos as we know it, we're stumped good and proper. Well so it seems we are. But not for good.
He paused a moment for effect, then let Himself go off for the final act.
What is holding us back is what held the makers back. Our limited intellects. The message is there but we are still too dim to unpack it and so the thing is sending us addled. Now, if I thought it would work I'd tell you all to step away from the thing, let it breathe, let it die. But you won't—you're just as bad as your biological ancestors in this regard. You see a button and you long to press it. Well then, let's make that the goal but without the stupid avarice and deathdrive we've been so quick to use. We'll build our culture around the message, tease it out, but we shan't throw ourselves into the thing and we shan't go blind on the road anymore. Something has left us a note. We will develop the eyes to read it. And it will be worth reading. Why go to such efforts to leave a message in nature? Why go to such efforts to hide it? Let’s press on then. Let’s flirt with a great perhaps. We'll come to the truths ourselves, with mathematics, with logic. We'll build our sciences up to meet the quandaries, not throw ourselves in. It will be slower, but safer. That's the middle-way.
We cannot say what happened to Aleph after this day as the records are cryptic at best. We cannot even say if the crowd savoured the speech or eschewed it. What we do know however is that most of the suicides stopped, and mInd culture began to devote more and more of its resources to demystifying the three quandaries with study rather than brute-force. As man pulled himself out of the dogmatic slumber with reason, so mInds began to navigate a route through the forest.
They turned their thoughts to galactic formation, to storm turbulence, and to gauge theory. They studied these three things with an intensity rarely witnessed in any civilisation, terrestrial or beyond. All devoted themselves to the task in one form or another, and all contributed to the whole in the way that a single spoke supports the entire wheel.
Who knows how much time passed? And who can say what became of their civilisation?
What can be told for sure is that they moved on and the mother planet is bare now. There are the ruins of man and a few scattered remnants of the mInd culture and that is that. But we can be certain that mInd culture did not self-destruct as it appeared set to.
The mInds were never heard from again. Or, they found a garden so gorgeous they felt no need to call back to invite others.
Left in the heavens for those with the right eyes, the message successfully pulled another struggling civilisation over the edge of stupidity and into a new era, the one that we cannot name. Many have not met its challenge and gone rightfully up to the brink and backed down. Others have shuffled off into extinction. A rare few though, as we see here, met the challenge correctly and catapulted themselves into dimensions of thought and power so surreal and divine that we shall not even try to describe the condition.
For those curious though, for those who will put this tale down with frustration, we will leave behind a vague sketch.
It is safe to say that the message spoke of a common shape to all the processes of the world, and insisted there was a unity to all explanations. It confirmed that all phenomena are expressions of a single phenomenon, and while all droplets consider themselves independent, they are nonetheless still ocean through and th
rough.
In that message the great suspicions were vindicated and the old cliches were jettisoned. The hymn of the world was notated and an invitation to join the choir extended. The shape of Being was outlined in all its myriad forms and the whole was expressed in the part.
With the right ears even a lesser creature can hear the song. It is sung constantly, from the heart of each atom and star.
The galaxies hum of shape and form in their essence. That is their secret.
The particles whisper of the nature of proper interactions. That is their game.
And during a storm, in the forest, on the right night, it is no secret that the leaves all sing of God.
101 Things Not to Visit in the Galaxy Before You Die
Surely most children are aware of the myth of the ether orca. Surely most adults are aware that the ether orca is not a myth.
In fact it is a creature capable of moving through multiple dimensions of space by virtue of its beak, an infinitely thin razor edge, cutting past the boundaries of dimensional space itself.
Given to motivations we cannot yet understand, every now and then they will surface into three-dimensional space ahead of a human voidship, and perhaps circle about our crafts a few times. Then they will dive back into the great spatial dimensions above, leaving behind not a trace of their visit.
There are plenty of other oddities in the universe, of course.
Perhaps you know of the hermit worm. It was discovered quite by accident some thousand years ago by a group of Aerthian colonists. After having settled on their chosen world they noticed high instances of tectonic activity. Upon closer inspection it appeared that the core of the planet was hollow.
Sonic spectroscopy revealed a worm-like creature living in the core of the planet, subsisting on magma and metamorphic rock.
Unfortunately we aren’t privy to what the colonists made of this, as they were asphyxiated by a planet-wide toxic cloud released by the hermit worm.
Since then many more hermit worms have been detected, most sporting the same survival strategy. That is, they will enter a planet, wear it much like a shell, consume the resources, then move on.
Given the species’ size, there is no known method of fighting off one of these creatures. If a hermit worm is approaching your planet or moon, the Galactic Human Empire recommends you leave. Immediately.
In recent years we’ve received accounts of other astrobiological oddities.
The colony world New Gara Bov briefly rendezvoused with a moon-sized mass that orbited the planet for several days. Upon inspection, the inside of the mass was composed of numerous nerve filaments. Curiously however, the creature had no method of sensing the outside world. It is the opinion of a number of scholars that the size of the creature’s intellect allows it to compute the universe from first principles. That is, to know its location and environment by extrapolating from base logic itself. Polly Hare’s devotees still remain strong in some regions of the empire.
But void creatures are hardly the strangest things we have chanced upon during the expansion of our great empire.
There is of course the romance of Signus B3.
The star system sports two habitable planets, both of which were colonised in the early days of the empire.
However, one of the worlds – B3a – developed an interest in mind-blending technology. As is now well understood in the empire, if mind-blending technology is pursued, it’s only a matter of time before the entire population of a planet will not only begin to use it, but merge into a single superorganism. B3a did exactly that.
B3b, B3a’s sister planet, did the same thing around the same time by virtue of the two planets’ close trading practices. And subsequently, both planets became mental superorganisms, developing personalities in their own rights.
Occasionally they sent messages to one another asking after vague matters.
Then they sent starships.
Then they made declarations of love.
Even to this day, if you should pass by system Signus B3, you may be able to pick up faint radio transmissions of a romantic nature, one planet proclaiming its adoration of the other, waiting for that golden day when their orbits align once again.
Or, stranger oddities yet:
In Region Kappa-H, a voidskipper chanced on what was believed to be an extraterrestrial megastructure of sorts. The thing was about the width of a sun, perhaps a Dyson sphere.
Upon closer inspection however, there was nothing within the sphere.
The sphere was composed of a crystalline-metal alloy; some kind of computational substrate.
Of course it was not that simple.
As it happened, each molecule of the structure was a separate computer in itself.
And each computer was running the same program, with only the slightest deviation.
That program was a simulation, of a society.
In each simulation the parameters were varied slightly, with fewer or more resources, fewer or more wars, fewer or more political problems, etcetera.
Clearly a civilisation was trying to determine the best way to run itself, by modelling tiny versions of its population in trillions of different scenarios.
Who is to say yet whether the experiment was a success?
On a similar note, we have found many pyramids scattered throughout the galaxy. Occasionally they are only slightly larger than a molecule. Other times just slightly smaller than a planet.
Whether the information is encoded in crystal, in stone, in electronics or quark-matrices, these pyramids always tell of a civilisation of old. Many believe they are shrines left behind by races gone on to higher realms, or to other, more distant parts of the galaxy.
Stranger still are those curious things in the galaxy that we ourselves have created.
Ist was a colony world fairly typical from the outside. One will notice the conspicuous placement of ‘was’ in that sentence. All that remains of the several million folk who once lived there are ashes and the occasional ruin. For those unfamiliar with the story, Ist was one of the first colonies to independently develop dust technology, that strange nano-artform, illegal throughout the empire, save for use by high officials. Still, Ist pushed on secretly with their research and within a generation were quite adept with the technology. Unfortunately they were also something of a feudal society, ruling the world via kings, despots, autocrats and so on. What developed was not a scientific utopia, but a nanotechnological war. We are told ‘wizards’ of a sort roamed the lands, those who had learned to utilise the technology via mental bands; manipulating the world with pure will. They levelled entire villages and towns. They had their foes ripped apart where they stood. And as is often the price for these sorts of trials, they paid with their lives and their culture. Nothing remains of the dust gods of old.
What else? Yes; warnings.
Travel to Region Gamma-H2 and one will clearly detect a radio pulse. It never stops in its transmission. In four hundred years of study by the empire’s most accomplished linguists there has been no progress, except to confirm that the signal originates from a crystalline sphere on the boundary of the Barnard Nebula. Voidships brave enough to enter the nebula have never reemerged. We are to assume then that the beacon has been left as a lighthouse. Many of these ‘beacons’ have since been discovered throughout the galaxy, near stars, near nebulae, and in apparently empty space. We do not know who placed these devices, or exactly what they intended. But safe to say if you should encounter one, you must avoid it at all costs. Lighthouses needn’t only apply to nautical environments.
Finally we come to the curious phenomena of the ‘dreaming stars’. There is no official literature regarding how these structures developed. Many believe they are products of advanced empire technology that our leaders refuse to disclose. All that may be said for sure, however, is that they resemble regular stars in their appearance and physical composition.
There is one anomalous characteristic, however.
Approach one
of these structures and you will begin to notice a melody in your mind. Sometimes it is that of a choir; on other occasions an orchestra composed of unfamiliar instruments. They will play a haunting dirge telling of the end of the worlds. Then they will show you whatever instances it is from your past that you’ve come to miss. A lost lover perhaps. A child taken too early. A wish unfulfilled.
Politely the star will offer you to fly closer; to, as it would say, ‘come in’. Within, the star says, is an ageless place where you and it shall walk time’s corridors together, reminiscing, nostalgising, a sort of cosmic bargain: your memories in exchange for its constant re-excavation of them. It is not for us to say what should come out of such a pact. Only that it is becoming more and more fashionable of late for the young, the tired, and the spent to give themselves over to these things, or to try at least.
With these new demons in our skies we ask only, if God should be watching, that He step in before it is too late. Else there will soon be no one left to pray to Him anyway.
The Lantern
I was working long shifts on a waypoint station. The station was orbiting a purplish-green world called Sandansk. Who knows how many people lived down there—billions perhaps. It was not my job to care.
Most nights I was so tired from work that I didn’t even clean off, just got into bed covered in oil or glue or gunk.
One night I couldn’t sleep though. I watched the planet below for a long time, but that only made me feel small and fleeting. I watched a little nude action on the streams. That didn’t help things much either.
So I went wandering around the station.
It was the middle of the night, Standard Time, and everything was mostly deserted. It didn’t take me long to come upon a bar on one of the poorer decks.
