I dreamt of a burning sun, and wept ....
A star swims the void in a long slow dance about the giant galactic
eater that marks the center of motion. Its core a stately procession of
light nuclei fusing to iron, generating a bright burning plasma
furnace, radiating warmth into emptiness.
A small, relatively young sun, it will provide life-giving radiance for
billions of years hence.
Four large gas giants waltz in turn about it, and they are something
more.
They are catalysis, evolution, and life; sentience emerging from
unconscious matter within their fog-shrouded cores.
They are brains and eyes, contemplating the infinity of the universe
from its far distant beginnings to its far distant fate. Consciousness
racing, by twists of spacetime, faster than light through newborn
synapses, harnessing immense cognitive powers that dwarf entire races
of biological-substrate intelligence.
And they are but infants.
Their cores are compressed to stellar density, releasing energy by the
subatomic fission of protons and neutrons into energetic mesons,
catalyzed by ultra-massive monopoles, freaks of nature, crazily
whirling in the magnetic fields of the rarified quark-gluon plasma,
sparking miniature suns in their wake.
They would burn as brightly as their primary star, if their energy were
not entirely harnessed.
Wrapped around the heart of the newborn archai is the innermost core of
its mind, an evanescent, delicately-ordered plasma comprising the
fastest, densest components of its brain, constrained by the gravity of
thousands of kilometers of dense hydrogen above it. It is the
ultra-evolved end product of the structure that began in the human
frontal cortex. A two phase plasma not dissimilar to the colloidal
suspension of human grey matter; dense, strong monopolium circuitry in
a backdrop of carbon-hydrogen flame. The elevated
temperature, power, density, and plasma sound velocity affords
computational power and storage far beyond anything that could be
accomodated in a million rocky planet cores.
If an archai's entire consciousness can be said to lie anywhere, it
lies here, in the burning plasma layer around its heart.
Wrapped in turn about it are layers of memory, gestalt, perception,
sense, and interaction with the outside world. They are clouds of
floating computronium crystals, constructed from abundant hydrogen
fused into carbon via the proton-proton chain, then grown like reverse
snow-flakes, wafting upwards from the burning core on photon winds to
settle in the cooler outer layers of the gas giant. Waiting for them in
the hydrocarbon smog are the constructors, nanobots coalescing around
the slightly charged, perfect raw computronium substrate, spinning and
weaving the delicate quantum gates, integrating each tiny floating
microchip into the vast whole of the archai's external processors. The
birth of each new snowflake heralded by a cascade of lasers,
linking it to the rest of the archai's steadily expanding mind.
It evolves through the Singularity barriers as easily as humans learn
to first lift their head to look around at the universe, then crawl,
and then walk and talk. Changes in growth, development, and
understanding mark each step as it ascends the toposophic ladder.
Vast as this computational power is, the harnessing of the full mass
and energy of giant gas planets accompanying the star, there is yet
more. Strewn throughout this immense volume are the wormhole links;
tiny microscopic tunnels constructed and formed in myriads of
weylforges with particle beam arms and black hole hearts, linking the
four newborn archai together across hundred million kilometer gulfs.
Technological telepathy, faster than the speed of light by ordinary
measure, enabling four separate personalities to eventually ascend into
an even greater being.
Once they have experienced enough of the universe.
The stellar creche is nursemaided by millions of beings, from the
intelligent wormhole nexus in the outer orbits of the system, to the
tiny weylforges deep within the bulk of the gas giants. The vast bulk
of the colonizer ship, now being recycled for raw materials; the giant
constructor drones, building the macroscale habitats to support a
toposophic ecology; the diaphanous ten thousand-kilometer butterflies
of the power beaming stations, drawing from monopole-catalyzed fusion
stations circulating within the bowels of the star itself; the gossamer
arms of the mass drivers, scavenging and husbanding matter from the
asteroid, Kuiper, and Oort clouds; the tiny nanoswarms, digesting raw
materials into the stuff of life.
*
* *
I awoke in a cold sweat, dread gripping my heart.
"Cara ...?"
I floated out of my sleepsack over to the kitchenette, feeling vaguely
dizzy. Since we were in free-fall, that meant we were either in transit
someplace, or already there. But if we were there, Cara should have
woken me up, and I should already have had my dream briefing.
Instead, I was (by the act of thinking of it) looking out to the cold
depths of space. Sparks hung in the vast night; I knew, the way I knew
the stretch and flex of my fingers, that these were various parts of
Caretaker in a combat englobement.
That meant imminent action.
With a sickening feeling of deja vu, I turned my gaze to a quadrant
where viscerally, I expected to see the burning ember of a nearby sun.
Instead, with a smooth magnification of scale, I saw an expanding cloud
of plasma. No -- on the scale I was seeing, it was --
A newborn nebula.
Nausea overcame me; I threw up.
I felt only slightly better after that. The mess shuffled itself
obligingly into a recycling grate. The knot in my newly-emptied stomach
was more pronounced now.
"You are awake. Good."
The connection with Cara was unlike anything I'd felt before. She was
oddly distant and distorted, as if communicating from a great distance.
Haze and spurts of agony clenched at my temples; my vision alternately
strobing black and red. I felt faint. There was significant sideband
bleed-over; something of an intensity and magnitude to nearly induce
transient ischemia.
Something frightening.
Black rage. That was the only way to describe it, although it resonated
at a level far greater than even the core of my being, and reached far
higher than just the emotive centers of my personality. It was both
utterly rational and utterly vengeful, an inhuman, alien combination of
pure logic and something I could only translate into an analogue of
feeling. It threatened to consume me and anything else in its path. I
strained at the limits of my abilities to keep it back, keep it from
overwhelming me.
"I will not keep this connection open long. Even filtered as it is, I
fear for your safety, resilient though you are. But, I ask you to do
this one thing for me.
Watch and bear witness."
And then Cara was gone, more completely than I'd ever felt before.
Relief at the withdrawal was intense; I basked in the glory
of life without pain. I was alone in my head, for the first time in
centuries.
Just memories. And an overwhelming dream of happenstance.
*
* *
It came as a speck, first registering upon distance sensors linked to
curious, powerful young minds.
Young in time only; thousands of generations of self-organizing logic
structures had evolved upon the ever-growing clouds of processing.
Gravity waves pulse along the hundred million kilometer baseline
sensor. The guardians and caretakers react in a frenzy of motion, but
the burgeoning archai watch and analyze only; there is no sense of
distrust or fear; no time yet to transfer the vast archives of galactic
history and knowledge into the still-forming memory clouds.
Defending black spheres race into position at unimaginable velocities,
catching superdense relativistic projectiles aimed at the vital
machinery of the system. Too many projectiles, too few defenders. A
spherical wavefront of destruction emanates from the invaders,
engulfing anything not guarded by the Black Angels. Two score impacts
upon a lagard, rocky planet in the outer reaches of the system
pulverize it into an expanding cloud of debris. The battle around the
Wormhole Nexus is especially hard fought, three guardians redirecting
thousands of projectiles racing with planet-cracking momentum off into
the furthest reaches of infinity.
*
* *
I started out of my fugue in disbelief, anti-tampering engrams breaking
the forced chain of recollection ....
I have been a professional soldier for centuries, and I have never
encountered a Black Angel. They are a rumor only; the purported
terrible long arm of the archai.
An improbable combination of physics-defying reactionless drive haloing
an energy absorbing sphere, they are best described as hyperintelligent
black holes; consuming, shredding, or subverting anything in their
path. If they exist, a single Black Angel would suffice against an
entire fleet of warships.
Reflexively, I glanced at my chronometer and conjured forth its link
within my mind. It read true for external senses, but showed tampering
in certain small sections of my brain reserved for memories.
I carefully checked my other pathways. No other signs of Cara's touch.
Meticulously, I teased at the boundaries of the untrusted areas,
backtracking synapse and connection, looking for all the possible
pitfalls produced by a download of data into the inextricable tangle of
form and function that is the augmented human mind.
She had dumped a large package of memories, inhuman recollections that
might barely be discernable to a being two toposophic grades above me.
Cara's purposes were always her own.
Dare I open Pandora's box?
*
* *
The enemy is now an advancing swarm. The nearest Black Angels race
around the Oort cloud, consuming matter at a tremendous rate and
bifurcating. Their battle minds account for every erg of energy
consumed by the attacker, tallying the imbalance and desperately moving
to redress it.
And there it is, center of gravity of the invader, a sphere of strange
stars crowned by a caustic of twisted light, swelling in mass every
second and falling inward on a hyperbolic orbit. Clouds of black
spherical enemies swarm against the defenders. Shockingly, they are
identical in capability and temperament.
A grand relativistic melee commences; opponents rip each other apart in
the deadly embrace of reactionless arms, or subvert each other in a
storm of virtual war, or exchange immense pulses of energy that would
burn moons to cinders.
The attackers pick over the defenders corpses, throwing the remains
into the steadily expanding, gaping maw of their controlled wormhole.
The defenders reprogram the attackers and send them back into the fray,
exploiting local superiority when possible, withdrawing when not.
But attrition begins to tell, and slowly but surely, the defenders are
pushed back. The attackers launch more waves of projectiles, and
defenders are forced to disengage to protect the machinery of the
system. And more defenders left behind are overwhelmed and thrown into
the mouth of the grazer. The resources used by the attacker exceed ten
times the mass/energy value of this system, and still they advance. The
defenders can only puzzle about the nature of this new, incredibly
wasteful aggressor, and bitterly contest their hard, losing battle.
The attacking grazer draws near the system gateway wormhole along its
carefully calculated spiral. And neither the spirited defense of the
Black Angels, nor the frantic efforts of the Nexus Controller can
prevent the grazer's inexorable destabilization of the gateway,
spacetime curvature ripping away at the exotic fields propping open
passage to home.
It dies in a silent collapse to nothingness, last cries of the
Controller swallowed by the invisible event horizon of a new black
hole. The useless gateway station is obliterated as the two remaining
local defenders race an impossible zig-zag evasion pattern to rejoin
their comrades. In their wake, a brilliant vortex streaked with
darkness limns the grazer as it consumes the expanding cloud of plasma
and equally voracious Singularity, remnants of the Nexus and the
defenders' last hope.
No one can answer the call for help; no reinforcements can arrive.
The system is doomed.
The attackers launch more projectiles, and the defenders fall back to
guarding the archai and their immediate support structures. Some
defenders flit insystem to carve out chunks of the primary star,
replicating a swarm around the stellar power station; archai growth
ceases. The attackers close ranks and continue their bombardment,
content to advance within the gravity well of their gigantic wormhole,
now outmassing the primary star and beginning to distort its orbit with
the slow fingers of gravity.
The defenders wait for the inevitable. And the battle stretches on ....
And the four new minds ponder their desperate situation, and act ....
Directional solar flares leap forth from the bowels of the star, jets
of streaming relativistic plasma arcing towards the attacking cloud. A
dense black wedge, the entire defending group of Black Angels, swarm
the grazer mouth, locked in combat with the more numerous attackers.
The deadly close range melee fills space with husks of exotic, dense
matter, and the defenders beat back the attackers, converting or
destroying them, gaining a momentary upper hand, threatening
destruction of the attacking wormhole itself. And the attackers bring
forth still more hordes from the depths of the grazer ....
And then a single Black Angel, invisible to the attackers by vast
memetic subversion, drops into the locally geometric center of the
grazer, and twists space ....
And a new black hole is born.
The Singularity hungrily consumes the lone defender and attacker
reinforcements. Defenders and attackers alike accelerate away at
impossible values from the ravenous Event Horizon. And then the
counter-englobing group of attackers enmeshes the remaining defenders
and annihilates them to the last.
The attackers englobe the star and the newly formed black hole. Left to
its own devices, the system will become an X-ray burster, the hole in
spacetime eating swathes of the primary star until the infall of mass
is balanced by the outward radiation pressure, the gluttony of the
black hole tempered by the finite constraints of matter.
They do not. A quarter of the attackers drop into the star, greedily
drinking energy and converting their mass into ultradense monopolium.
Thermonuclear reactions rage around them as they catalyze the
fundamental breakdown of matter into energy. When they reach the core
of the star, they disassemble, carefully distributing their material
throughout the dense fusion layer.
And a new type of supernova is born. A titanic flash of radiation, as
nearly a third of the star converts directly into energy.
Wasting no time, the remaining attackers drink in the fountain of
energy and accelerate out into the void, headed for parts unknown. In
their wake, the stellar cataclysm sterilizes the system of all life; in
a few centuries, it will threaten inhabited planets hundreds of light
years away.
It is an indelible astronomical signature to a titanic conflict.
*
* *
My head cleared as I shook off the trance of memories I did not
possess, burned into my subconscious. I felt disoriented, the vast
reaches of perception suddenly compressed into the small confines of my
mortal remains. There was a desperate urgency to everything; a
maddening puzzle that I was somehow expected to solve, yet was so far
beyond my comprehension that I staggered under the load of the pieces.
Cara had nearly killed me getting this gestalt into my mind; it was
more important than my life, but I could only stare at the pictures.
My attention was suddenly riveted to the blackness of space. A globe of
sparks, tactical displays automatically classifying the objects by
capability.
They were Black Angels. Carrying millions of wormhole seeds.
And they were the Enemy.
I reeled under the implications of this.
And then my adrenaline rushed to combat levels, and I waited for
something to happen.
It did.
A Black Angel was globe of darkness, surrounded by an impenetrable
swarm of reactionless(!) engines. My mind was agape at seeing the
physics that made this impossibility reality up close, when something
equally improbable happened.
The nigh-invincible Black Angel wavered in outline, as if it were hazed
by some translucent layer of reality. And then it collapsed inwards
violently, leaving a soup of particles behind; stuff of reality that
should never have existed this side of the Big Bang.
The enemy Black Angels desperately raced at impossible speeds towards
us, defying laws of inertia. Mini-wormholes churned sprays of Hawking
radiation as they converted into mini-black holes.
And one by one, merest moments apart, a caliginous veil drew over each
Black Angel as it shrunk suddenly into nothingness, replaced by an
unlikely tangle of forces and particle spray. Spacetime writhed with
things not seen since Creation.
And light-swift portions of Caretaker raced in, cradling the few
remaining wormholes even as Black Angels imploded? -- that was the only
way to describe it -- around them.
Then it was over, and I was staggered at the enormity of what I'd
witnessed. And there she was again, and I was shaken by how normal she
seemed to be.
"Cara ...?"
"Yes, I'm here."
"What just happened?"
"I'll leave you to interpret that."
"Uh, I just saw so many impossible things I don't know where to begin."
"Start at the beginning."
"Uh, ummm ... was all that real?"
"Do you detect tampering?"
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"Next question."
"Uh, ummm ... newborn archai? I, uh, don't want to know where we are."
"Don't worry, you don't."
"Ummm ... okay, I've never known you to be this ... worked up about
something. I've never seen you employ the weapons you just used ...."
"Implosion weapons? They recompactify an englobed section of spacetime
under different orbifold parameters, necessarily ejecting normally
compactified manifolds as fundamental string loops manifesting as
pre-quark-gluon constituents ...."
"Uh ... that implies that ... ummmm ... how many dimensions do you
exist in, Cara?"
"That depends upon your definition of the term dimension."
"Cara, now you're playing games. I formed that thought in a
mathematically precise way."
"Only to your current understanding of mathematics."
"You know what I mean. Physical, as opposed to virtual or
phasic,irreducible dimensionality."
"What do you think?"
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"You shouldn't ask questions if you don't want to know the answers."
"Uh, I finally see where curiosity might have it's drawbacks."
"Oh, not yet, you haven't."
"I don't even want to think about that one."
"Fine. Do you have any more questions?"
"Uh, who or what did this?"
"Well, once I forcibly reexpand these captured wormholes from their
constraining Hawking knots, I'll know."
"But you have your suspicions."
"Yes."
"Care to share them?"
"We'll know soon enough ... and then, there will be a reckoning, I
promise you that."
A chill went down my spine.
