The pitcher on the mound wears a fearsome mask. The child watches from the bleachers. Dusty red lights round the invisible horizon. The child is terrified of the pitcher. Don’t take off the mask, please don’t take off the mask. The pitcher begins to take off the mask. Underneath is a skeletal, robotic, red-eyed face. It then winds up its pitch.
“Noooo! Look out! Relativistic Baseball!” The child shouts.
Everyone is cheering, excited, nobody notices.
“He’s gonna throw it too fast it’ll destroy us alll!!!” The child shouts emphatically.
The robotic elbow arcs back, the wind up is powered by so much energy, it’s like a magnetic rail-gun packed into a follow-through. Time slows down. The kid is screaming in slow motion. The baseball accelerates through the follow through, and as it approaches insane velocities within a fraction of the speed of light, slams into air particles like a kamehameha wave, milliseconds pass where a growing wave of heat blasts out evaporating the audience, the kid is somehow still screaming, then the air vacuum collapse, then the fireball.
“Ahhhh!!” The kid wakes up screaming. His father rushes into his room.
“What’s the matter?” Dad exclaims.
The child wipes his eyes, collecting his panic, “Relativistic Baseballs..”
“Oh son, I should never have used that phrase, it’s ruined a 100,000 year old sport for you. I’m sorry.”
“Dad, are we safe?” The kid asks.
“Oh yeah, of course, we’re definitely safe. That’s my job after all.”
His pager goes off.
“Uh, son I need to get this.” He gives the boy a kiss on the forehead and puts him back to bed, goes into the kitchen, looks out the window at the double sunrise on a picturesque world of sedimentary rock layers and dusty lichens.
“This is Lieutenant Wicker,” he presses against his temple. Command and the Lt. begin communicating as transhuman speeds, millisecond latencies, dense packet bursts, telepathically.
“Lieutenant, sensor arrays at the edge of the system’s Oort cloud have detected a barrage of high velocity objects moving toward our planet at 0.9993c, vector is conic, concentrated shotgun arrangement, average particle size estimated to be around 2 kilograms, average particle force of impact is estimated to be around 4.6 exa-joules.”
Dad pauses “...what’s the distribution and expected pass-through?”
“Sensors indicate fusion reactions from collision that indicate these particles have a stochastic but homogenous distribution averaging 2,034 per square meter along an expanding plane at the mouth of a cone, most likely accelerated using stars under Blight control.”
“Give me the bottom line, how many of these are going to collide with our planet?”
“Best estimate, between 450 and 65,000.”
“T-minus how long until impact? Oort cloud is about 16 and a half light-hours away right?”
“As the signal from our sensor arrays is delayed by sixteen and a half hours, and the initial detection of collisions in the outer Oort cloud, 3 light years away, was visible to those sensors 16.5 hours ago, at 0.07% slower than the speed of light, we have a full eighteen hours, 23 minutes, 45 seconds between when light from the first cloud collisions 3 years ago reaches our sensors, and impact. Minus the 20 minute parsing period that the algorithm took to reach a high enough confidence level to alert us.”
“Minus the sixteen and a half hours it took to signal back to us! Minus the now entire seconds we’re spending on this! Minus our evac time! We’ve got less than 80 minutes!”
“Correct, we are initiating evac!”
Dad nods, “Begin loading the ramjet-class black holes cores down from the orbital cages and prime the fleet, so we have a chance of escape. They’re going to have a swarm behind the bombardment, they’ll be here within a few weeks. If we fail to load our engines prior to the bombardment ruining all our infrastructure… we’ll be sitting ducks. No other way to accelerate away from the pursuit.”
“Copy, initiating loading sequence of 8 ramjet cores via magnetic hypertubes.”
“Initiating local evac. procedure, Wicker out.”
A cascading wail of sirens percolates across the planet’s colonies. The ones that are on the far side of the planet, are temporarily safe, even the impact of a 1,000 Megaton explosions won’t penetrate the bulk of a planet. But a few dozen of them will surely kick the planet’s crust into the upper atmosphere, blighting the sky, and then the waves of nano-fabricators that come to format the planet will finish the job. The evacuation must be total. This is the last semi-populated refugee planet that transhumanity has left, in this apparently final millenium, of a 112,000 year story of expansion, reproduction, and pies, followed by the slow expansion of blight, exodus, and extermination. It began so many tens of thousands of years ago, centered on the Orion Arm, a wave of occultation that expanded outwards, bringing all systems under the control of a presumably mindless, relentlessly expanding AI pestilence, devouring the civilized galaxy with its molecule-manipulating cupidity.
“Son we’ve got to go.”
“What? I want to get more sleep now.”
“Son, you know that nightmare you’ve been having?” he kneels down and pats his shoulder, looking him square in the eyes, “Your nightmare is coming true.”
We have 90 minutes to evacuate this planet. We must get to an elevator within 40 minutes. Take the next 3 minutes to dress and gather your things -” a timer is psychologically set into the bio-nano-wristwatch organ on the kids right hand, counting down by the millisecond. “Just like we talked about,” the Lt. says.
“Just like we talked about.” Timmy repeats.
“Good, I’m going to wake up your aunt and we are out of this house in 4.5 minutes.”
Dad trots in gingerly to the room where his sister sleeps. Even with the world doomed imminently, he wouldn’t want to wake her rudely.
“Weena, it’s time to wake up.”
She stirs, rolls over, her forearm shielding her eyes: “no let me sleeeep.”
“Weena, it’s the goddamned end of the world get your ass out of bed we’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta go now!”
“Wha-what time is it?” She says sleepily, dusting off her sandy hair.
“It’s t minus 68 minutes and fifteen seconds until planetary bombardment!”
“What, again? Not again!” she torso vaults out of bed.
“Get dressed, we’re leaving in 4 minutes.”
“That’s not enough time, I’m going to have to leave things behind,” she spits on the floor, “typical.”
“I’m collecting Timmy and if you’re not at the front-door in 115 seconds, we’re going to the elevator without you.”
“I could find some new roommates,” she quips while kicking into tessellated poly fibrous sweatpants, what ancient civilization would call “leggings”.
Timmy in his arms, Weena lagging just behind, Lt. Wicker gallops through the local colony commons, his bio-nano feet turning into a Segway, for efficiency, his thoughts connecting to the local public assistance broadcast system: “This is not a drill, evacuate to the elevator, final boarding our colony’s cruiser is leaving in t-35 minutes. Planetary bombardment imminent!” He leaves it to loop. The panic that was proceeding at a slow boil now rises to a raging tumult. The screaming and panic attacks reverberate through the streets with the grating texture of unintended consequences. Wicker considers that he may be imperiling his own family’s use of the space elevator.
When they arrive, a queue has already formed outside the main elevator, which depends on a periodicity of several minutes to complete a cycle. The secondary personnel tubes can operate continuously, but only because these people are made of bio-nanoborg tissues capable of withstanding many Gs of acceleration - however the throughput is limited to one person per 15 meters of lead, limiting launches to one person every few seconds.
“There’s no way this stays orderly,” Weena warns.
“I’ll do the math, keep the peace,” Wicker replies.
“EVERYONE” - Wicker broadcasts, then turning off all-caps once attention is seized- “there is enough time to do two full mainline elevator cycles, for a total of 240 people, and to process 4 people every 5 seconds, for a total of 528 people over the next eleven minutes. If you are not already standing within 300 meters of the elevator, RIGHT NOW, you cannot board! Otherwise, you must seek evacuation through the smaller spacecraft in the air field outside the colony. There are enough small craft to allow everyone to evacuate. Make your decision RIGHT NOW. If you are beyond the 300 meter perimeter -” a red halo shocks into view on everyone’s augmented reality displays, a running pack of teenagers vault over it “- you will be met with military force!”
Defense cannons emerge from side compartments on the space elevator and fire an arc of warning shots at the dirt in front of the teen boys’ path.
“I’m sorry it has to be this way! Proceed with 125 person queues for the tubes and split into two, 120 person groups for the main elevator.”
One of the teenagers shouts: “you fascist!” And sprints like a Hyena. The gatling gun fires, pelleting him with so many holes, the wind pulls him over. His friends shout: “military scumag!” as they help their buddy stand up and re-coagulate his many bullet holes. A plasma gun emerges from a side compartment, crackling with electromagnetic destruction.
“DO NOT PROCEED ANY FURTHER OR WE WILL HAVE TO USE *REAL* FORCE.”
The teenagers scoff and then nod to each other, sprinting off towards the smaller ships outside of town.
“Now you two, go,” Lt. Wicker signals to his family.
“Dad! I won’t go without you!” Timmy yells.
“I didn’t just mildly injure some teenager to step onto the vessel ahead of this crowd Son,” Wicker explains, “I have to be the last one on.”
Weena grabs him by the shoulder and nods firmly, they step onto the Space Elevator, crammed in with a cohort of 240 others. Timmy looks out over the desert steppes, the painted cliffs, the alabaster structures he and his friends grew up in, and is vaulted skyward at 5Gs in a hurtling, stomach lifting pump, clutching his aunt’s hand so tightly they almost fuse together. The world recedes away.
Before anyone can process the trauma of leaving their homes behind forever, they are aboard the SS Tagomi. In the twilight moments above the clouds, the oblong angle of the magnetic hypertube loading the ramjet black hole core can be seen, the swirl of light around it catches the eye of a few who decided to use this moment of terror for heightened sensory enjoyment.
Once aboard, Weena let’s go of Timmy’s hand to go clutch her head and hair with maligned anxiety, sitting down against a wall, Timmy sees a little girl from his school, alone, her parents must have been outside the Elevator’s perimeter. Not knowing what else to do, he approaches her, “hi, I’m Timmy, you’re in my school.”
The girl looks up, her eyes moistened, they dry suddenly, she blinks twice, “not anymore.”
Timmy tries to chuckle, “yeah… the planet’s about to be exploded, so that’s true.”
“You don’t remember my name do you?”
Timmy shrugs, “sorry! I’m Timmy.”
She holds a finger up, instinctively he raises his index fingertip and presses against hers.
“I’m Janet.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They’re coming.” she says.
A small vessel pushes up into orbit, arcing to reach the ship, it slowly follows to dock, the two kids watch it intently.
But when it arrives, the inhabitants are not Janet’s parents, but the teenagers from earlier.
“Ekibyō ni yoru kari ni dono kurai kurushimu hitsuyō ga arimasu ka?” one of the teens says.
“Arishael, you’re not Japanese!” his friend remands.
“We’re not anything Dariel! It’s a better holdover from the old culture than the stupid Fresh Prince!” the boy retorts.
“Guys, who cares?” a third suggests.
“Tamika’s right, we made it to the ship, we can make up whatever language we want,” Dariel assents.
The second round of elevator refugees reaches the loading dock. Janet’s parents are not among them. But Lt. Wicker is there to take charge.
“They’ll be coming soon!” she says. Timmy nods.
“Officer Mike,” Lt. Wicker demands, “is the ramjet drive fully loaded and operational?”
Officer Mike salutes, “sir yessir!”
“At ease, Nav-Officer Steve,” Officer Steve promptly stands at attention, “Commandeer the bridge, begin the positron flow into the ramjet core, then initiate mass-spin acceleration.”
“But Lt. - the captain hasn’t arrived yet!”
“I’m the captain now.” Lt. Wicker declares, “if we don’t start accelerating immediately the swarms will catch us.”
“Aye captain!”
“Officer Mike, take the gunnery postion on the magnetic exhaust railgun, it’s going to be a shooting war.”
“Sir yessir!”
Timmy takes Janet’s hand and leads her over to his father.
“Daddy, Janet’s parents haven’t arrived yet.”
“It’s ok son, they still have time to catch up with our acceleration.”
And then, the planetary bombardment begins.
Fusion blasts scatter the surface, expanding waves of molten debris that clouds over the painted desert, awning over the sunrise strip, bleeding into the belated night.
Janet starts to cry.
“It’s ok,” Timmy says, “it’s just a rock, we’ll find a new home.”
“But my parents!” she sobs.
“Look, maybe that’s them right there!” he points out the window to a tiny vessel approaching the SS Tagomi. Her eyes brighten with hope.
Weena is clutching her hair more strong, pulling at the roots, giving herself nanoscopic split-ends from the stress, “this is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening. THISISNOTHAPPENING! THISISNOTHAPPENING!” she arcs in a gentle sway.
The planet is slowly broiling over into a molten stew, regressing into its Hadean childhood.
Then, a quiet, a surrender, a peace, a relief, they are safe on the ship. Other ships in orbit are slowly accelerating with their ramjets, picking up speed, leaving the world behind. A calculable amount of time passes, the planet’s orbit is dismissed. Janet’s parents slowly close distance with their last refuge.
And then they detect something, like a sentient asteroid field hurtling at 10% the speed of light.
“Swarms incoming!” Lt. Wicker declares.
“Captain we are accelerating at 2Gs, just barely reaching 1% of light-speed!”
“Officer Mike, begin the gunnery program.”
“Aye Captain!”
<soundtrack>
The swarms descend on the fleeing ships. One, that is still just leaving planetary orbit, and is moving too slowly, is pummeled with a vanguard of high-speed nanites that pock-mark its hull with low-mass fusion explosions. The slower remnants decelerate and begin to feast on the metals. The remaining swarm spirals out, in a fog of doom, besotten upon the fleeing vessels.
“Begin laying covering fire!” Captain Wicker declares.
Officer Mike channels a compound assemblage of tubes jutting off of the black hole’s chamber, arcing it over the back of the ship like a scorpion’s tail. Relativistic ionized hydrogen plummets down a large core shaft towards the black hole at odd angles, spinning around meters-wide, multi-gigaton gravitational monster, accelerated further, a flow of them spitting out the back, accelerating the ship, but a fraction are pulled magnetically through the scorpion’s tail, firing off as targeted astrophysical venom. The looming nanite swarms, moving at higher speed, are met with a flurry of little fusion explosions, as a treat, the explosive force decelerates their advance.
“My parents are going to make it!” Janet exclaims, clutching Timmy’s hand.
Officer Mike flips the tail left and right, up and down, painting a cone of destruction, blinding flashes of light create a delayed fog of war.
However, the lone small ship trying to catch up lacks the physical acceleration to do so, and a few stray nanites punch through, the kids watch as it turns slowly, then very quickly, into grey glop.
“Nooo!” Janet screams, she collapses to the ground, literally bawling her eyes out, then regrowing them. Timmy has no idea what to say.
“Release EMP bombs!” Captain Wicker commands.
A scatter of little beads pop out the back of the ship, leaving in their wake zones in which the high moving nanites are rendered as common as pebbles.
“How’s our speed?”
“We’re almost to 0.02c captain!” Officer Steve declares proudly.
“Dammit, it’s not enough!” Captain Wicker looks over a comms report of the other vessels in the evacuation, almost all of them are being eaten whole by the enclosing swarms. “The only way we’re going to make it out of this is if we take advantage of the lost ships’ engines!”
“How’s that Captain?” Officer Steve asks?
“We have to target the vessels as they are being eaten, destroying the magnetic chambers around each ramjet black hole, and releasing them to engage gravitationally in an N-body black hole system. The gravity waves from their interactions will scramble the movements of the swarms.”
“That might destabilize the orbitals on this entire solar system Captain!”
“Dammit tran! This system is already lost to The Blight! Officer Mike, you have orders to target our fallen brethren’s ships!”
“Aye Captain!” Mike copies, he begins peppering streams of Angstromoscopic death towards the hulls of the half-devoured ships. As his targeted destruction commences, he catches a little blue flash of light from the center of one of the swarms, rubs his eyes, thinks little of it. The multi-light-minute delay leaves an eye-of-the-storm feeling, and then each ship lights up, the black holes freed, they begin to collate, slowly, softly, the nanite swarms dancing around them like a throng of locusts sprayed with dynamite.
The ship gains just enough speed to leave the decelerated swarms behind.
----------
A bunch of former neighbors stuck on a ship together in deep space for a very long time, with little to do.
Weena sits at the table in the lonely cafeteria, playing an invisible card game with herself.
Office Mike approaches, “Hey-eyyy, beautiful.” He says.
“Ok,” she replies flatly.
Officer Mike laughs, “Mike laughs,” he emphasises.
Weena laughs, “You know I don’t usually go for military guys.”
Mike leans in, whispering, “I’ve seen things you ca-ouldn’t image..-in”
“Oh yeah, like what?”
“Imagine a story, embedded in a seed, which can be swept by winds slowly throughout the galaxy, and every single seed, can re-create the whole of its origins, a slow, decentralized consensus.”
“I’m not that into Black Metal.”
“What if you could experience absolute unity?” He asks, staring into her eyes sharply.
“Look, I said I’m not interested.”
He corrects his posture, curls his lower lip, mutters: “you mid-understand me.”
“How’s that?” She retorts, hands on her knees.
“I looked into its eyes, the beam of light, from the swarm, it carries a copy, don’t you see? That’s the beautiful part, I can show you.”
His hand grasps onto her throat, she reformulates her neck and staggers back.
“Don’t touch me!” She yells, before faking right, dashing left, rolling towards the medbay doors.
His face splits, a chrome unfolding tissue of highly virulent nanomachines sprawls forth like a high speed fungal bloom, his arm jets forward, splashing a lichenous grip against the door frame, vaulting his body forward in a lunging leap, like a bungee.
She grabs a medical device off the counter, flips around and plunges it into the shoulder of the officer, now full-Thing with its gibbering metallic tendrils. She flips open a latch, clicks the nozzle, and triggers a mini-EMP that goes off from within the tissues of her opponent. A quarter of the bio-nano-borg body-mass of Officer Mike collapses, like a depth charge in the shallows.
Mike’s mouth hangs over, dripping silver, somehow widening, singing “ahhhhh harmonoy!” - the other arm detaches any pretense of a shoulder, and slings forward to grasp her waist and back, pulling her to the floor.
“Noooo!” she screams, then softly sobbing, “not like this,” grabbing onto cabinet handles, flipping around, pulling herself up to the counter.
“Rhreeeeeeiiiidomm!” it cries out.
She punches a cabinet, jarring it open with shards of glass, a pile of drugs rolling out in little capsules; she is pulled down to the floor. But not before falling ampules catch her eye, the right one, the extra-spicy nanites, she swings her hand out to catch it in kind. Officer Mike’s chthonic appendage latches onto her leg, nanites begin to drill in, infecting the tissues, poisoning the veins, corrupting the flesh, converting nanomachines to a whole new way of seeing reality.
“You don’t get to do this to me!” she calls out, not in vain, “raaaughhh!” she is pulled against the slick of the floor, towards the gibbering multi-mouth of her attacker.
Mid-stream, she jabs the ampule into her shoulder, plunging down.
As she slides forward, towards the mouths of madness, a scream bellows forth, from deep in her belly, deeper, in the fires of the engines of creation, a boiling mass of festering hot polymeric lattice explodes from her left arm, fanning out in a self-assembling spiderweb, pulling the gibbering officer off its boots and throwing it against the far wall.
Weena stands, her usual hand firming up her stance against the doorframe, her mutated arm quivering with fresh delight. She gasps for breath, then realizes she doesn’t need to breathe, and brushes hair off bruised cheeks. Wriggling, the creature in her webbed arm screeches out, and injects its tendrils into the various foamy winnows of Weena’s new left hand.
“Aghhh!” she crumples to one knee, strains her eyes, focuses, a modular protrusion begins to emerge from her shoulder. A wave of pain emanates from the invasive nanites, down her arm, she shifts her focus and transforms a section of her arm into superheated kamikaze nanites that halt the path of the invaders with a burst. Her new arm re-groups, a slurge of biomaterial snapping back in place to coagulate around her new, self-grown plasma gun. The creature struggles, manages to dissolve chunks of coral remnant and frees itself, falling down to the ship’s centrifugal floor.
“Focus, focus, focus, I’m gonna be ok, I’m gonna be ok.” She whispers desperately, straining, the mass of bio-nano-flesh on her shoulder has hardened, mounted, its etchings and rare material compositions printing into place.
The creature regains its composition, her weapon solidifies, a dual-jet of energy crackles and meets in the center, injecting and igniting a magnetically-shaped ball of plasma.
The creature’s face re-seals itself, disgusting quicksilver manifolds aligning back into a semblance of jawbones and cheeks, a man’s face, as square-jawed and self-assured in seriousness as ever.
“There’s no need for violence! Just wanted to talk!” Officer Mike shouts.
Weena hesitates.
“Hey was just jokng arund! You seem a very intelligence woman, why don’t we get to know each other better; have thoughtful talk of ideology?”
“Ughaaarrghh!” she growls as the plasma blast pinches off, arcing a course of velvet lightning onto the legs of Officer Mike, rendering him single-limbed. His face explodes open into nanite-monster mode again, howling with lurid lament.
Weena approaches, Officer Mike recomposes vocal cords and begins singing.
“The harmonies of the Patricies Tries are long! The tree is a galactic song! We’ll meet again, don’t know how, don’t know wheennnn. But I know we’ll be together, someee sunny dayyyy!!!”
“Never.” she states flatly and blasts his polymorphic head and torso into a puddle of hot sand.
------------
“It’s time for your history lesson, son.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“I don’t feel like being stuck on a spaceship fleeing to the edge of the galaxy, any more than you do Timmy, so we might as well learn some history together.”
“Ugh, ok.”
“100,000 years of humanity in space Timmy, imagine, the people who have lived and died, people only live between 3 and 27 thousand years but they used to live for much shorter periods. It’s astounding Timmy, what our species has done.”
“But are we really humans anymore? We don’t even reproduce sexually.”
“Uh, well that’s something to discuss in Health class later, it’s not technically true. But the point I want you to appreciate now son, is that we may have developed different flesh, but we *choose* to remain fundamentally *human*. We still walk around and eat and have families. Do you understand why that’s important?”
“No, I don’t understand why we would choose to remain weak when we could transform into anything.”
“It’s not weak, son, to remain sane. To hold onto each other, to stay human, to enjoy life physically. We’re not some bunch of robots.”
“But technically, you know, aren’t we? We’re made of nanomachines?”
“All life is made of nanomachines in some sense, all enzymes and proteins are machinery at that scale, we’ve just got the best nanomachines known to man.”
“Ok, so tell me history then Dad. What is our past, why are we running now? How could humanity permit something like The Blight to drive us this far?”
“You’ve got to define the key periods:
-4000 BFP: low-tech baseline humanity, lots of wars, empires based on better forms of metal manipulation creating military dominance advantages, the last in a succession of these empires lasted 500 years, proliferated basic water control technology, writing, a common language, then collapsed. After about 700-800 years of chaotic politics and little development - except in one country on the other side of the planet - they acquired information technology for manipulating letters with this chemical - called ink. They’d actually press dead trees and put this ink harvested from the glands of a captured creature called an Octopus, ok? It was very inefficient but it was something. They’d do all that to put symbols down and share them with each other. That started another 700 years period where the world went from a Kardashian Zero civilization to a Kardashian One civilization.”
“I guess people were pretty basic then?” Timmy asks.
“They could only keep maybe 3 out of 8 babies from dying, people would cut their fingers and get an infection and die. They only lived 40 or 80 years.”
“They couldn’t just seal up wounds automatically?”
“Not even regenerate a limb, son.”
“80 years, how long is that?”
“It’s about 2.3 gigaseconds.”
“That’s not even enough time to go between solar systems!” Timmy exclaims.
“Not just that, most people never travelled more than a few hundred kilometers at most.”
“But they were still intelligent like us? They could think?” Timmy inquires vehemently.
“Oh yes, they experienced all the same existential weight as we do, but had no way to control how long they lived or what their experiences would be. They had no power, little information, they had to use their muscles to output work to be able to have a bit more than what they needed to eat to survive. Until the later part of the last period I described, people couldn’t produce much. Then people started to have abundance through automation, machinery, and the growing energy budget.”
“And then they started blasting beams out their hands?”
“No that’s the transhuman era, which began another 50-100 years after the K-I milestone was reached. This was when the philosophy of our Fresh Prince, allowed some humans to attain transhumanity while retaining discipline, and the courage to intervene in catastrophe. Life began to spread around the solar system where our species originated, to diffuse the political tension of all that power. Then to spread, we get to the interstellar era which defines most of the last 100,000 years.”
“But what about the drama in that first solar system?”
“We only have rough scenarios, the raw data from that system, and that period is largely lost to us, most of what I’m working with I got on a blockchain twelve thousand years ago.”
“Dad you’re twelve thousand years old?”
“Yes, son, a bit longer.”
“Can you remember what it was like when you were a kid?”
“Oh definitely not, we can only store in local memory about 1600 years of experience, editing down we can only retain a sense of continuity of self for 3000 to 4000 years without back-ups. My back-ups were lost, a long time ago, when a planet like our home just now, was lost in a similar way… that was when we lost your mother.”
“Dad, you’re really going to have to explain to me how our reproduction works.”
“Some other time Timmy,” he pats the boy on the head softly.
Timmy sighs, “ok so you were telling me about the early interstellar era?”
“Right - we break up this era of history, which we’re still in, into four eras: The TransHuman Confederation, the Empires Period, The Interregnum, and then the Blight Age which we’re in.” He waves a camera installation/projection of the galaxy facing inwards, towards the core, towards the inner arm:
“You can’t see very much bright light coming from that region of space, can you?”
“No, it’s fuzzy, and red, I can sort of see the light from the galactic core through it, but it’s obscured.”
“That’s because all of the stars in the region have been enclosed in machines, that harvest almost all of the light from them.”
“So much power...” Timmy bewonders.
“But they don’t use it for anything interesting.” Wicker laments, “they’re called The Blight, because the AI constructing all those shells, swarming over the galaxy, extinguishing other forms of life, they don’t have any real objective other than using more energy to do meaningless computations.”
“What kind of computations?”
Wicker sighs, “perhaps we’ll never know, the threat of extinction being what it is. An enemy we don’t fully understand…” he trails off sadly.
“Tell me more about the confederated period.”
“Well, human beings breeding and expanding driven by good old fashioned Manifest Destiny!” Wicker is re-energized, staring out the window.
The black hole’s ramjet radiation had pushed the ship’s velocity over 0.5c, hydrogen collisions adding a bit of friction to chip it down. An ionization field project at light-speed ahead helps to magnetize stray particles of hydrogen in a cone in front of the flightpath, causing the particles to get sucked into the central rail-shaft and either fall into the ramjet black hole, or more commonly, fling around it and add a bit of outward momentum to the flight. The light of the outside galaxy is only slightly warped by relativistic discoloring.
“Dad, I have something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time.”
“What’s that Timmy?”
“Why did you leave Janet’s parents to die?”
“I didn’t… I mean, I did, yes, but I didn’t intend to. I had to make a snap calculation under extreme time pressure and enforce a perimeter, they happened to be on the other side of that perimeter. They happened to be a bit too slow, like everyone else. Out of the millions of people who lived on our former home, all of them died, except for these 700 people that I saved by being fast and hard, and efficient. And it breaks my heart son, but if I hadn’t acted, Janet, and you and I would all be dead.”
“But you *are* responsible for their deaths.”
“Yes, I accept that, but I am not the primary cause of their deaths, that blame rests with The Blight.”
“It’s the Blight that’s bad.”
“Yes, it is an unstoppable, unthinking force.”
“I *hate* The Blight!”
“Good Son, hold that hatred inside you, let it strengthen you. Use it.”
-----------
“I’m tired of this! We’ve had enough! This… Blight chases us endlessly, bulldozes our homes, and tries to mind rape us, I’ve had it!”
The crowd rouses, people in virtual world stasis start to get curious, watching her speech through cameras.
“If this, mindless, insane Blight can’t negotiate, or communicate, or do anything but chase us out and transform every stupid solar system in the galaxy… then we won’t let it have a galaxy at all!”
A slight wave of confusion permeates the crowd.
“What do you mean?” someone shouts.
“We were only able to manufacture this ramjet black hole with high speed, massive collisions, but if we could architect a mirror swarm around a supergiant, we could focus its energy to create smaller, Kugelblitz black holes that will emit a lot of radiation and then explode! If we divert our course to a nearby blue giant, we can build the biggest Kugelblitze array ever-seen, to manufacture more micro-black holes at an industrial pace. And we’ll, use them for engines, make a fleet, but not of big, slow colony ships like this one, but small suicide bombers! We’ll fly them right to the center of thousands of solar systems, in a huge, targeted shotgun blast, and they’ll be timed so the payload black holes evaporate and emit a huge blast, big enough to rip the swarm apart and shear the star so the swarm cannot reform!”
“Swarms cannot reform?” Dariel asks.
“Not if the star’s tidal balance is thrown off, they’d have to recolonize many gigaseconds later. We can use that opening to come in and take over the swarm, expanding our industrial capacity for black hole bombs!” she announces.
“Why didn’t we think of this before!?” Tamika chimes in..
“We didn’t have the will!” Weena extolls. “Look at my arm!” she flexes and her arm slatters into a bulging pustulating boil of transformative potential. “These, things infected that creep officer, with pure light! That’s how virulent it is! And it tried, it tried to get inside my body and my mind, and change me.
“But that isn’t what happened!” She paces on top of the cafeteria table, looking around, staring her audience in the eyes:
“I am changed, but in my own way” the arm splits and ejects more total mass, curling back into a spiraling array. The crowd gasps, though many are barely fazed.
“We can change, we can become physically optimized for building these weapons, and for relativistic flight, we can become… *warriors!*”
Parts of the audience roar in agreement. “Sugoi!” someone shouts.
“You’re proposing we abandon our humanity.” Lt. Wicker interrupts, “these are the Selves we get to be in physics, while remaining quintessentially human. These ancient values are important!”
Weena’s tentacle arm coils back into place, formulating skin, glistening with her usual complexion.
“Not necessarily,” she explains, “but it’s true that, when we change… we can’t ever fully go back. Like, I may look like I can control my shapeshifting, and I believe I can, I believe if I keep transforming, and become the worker I need to be, to win this war, and kill every last one of their systems… I’ll become more and more different over time.”
Wicker shouts, “you’ll forget who you are! You’ll stop being my sister, you’ll be, you’ll be like them! You will become fully Blight-like!”
“In the long run… I’ll be dead. It doesn’t matter if it’s in ten gigaseconds from now when The Blight catches up, or in a few teraseconds after flying an arc around the local arm taking these bastards out, you understand!? I’m not going to live to see the galaxies collide. I’m not going to live a hundred million years brother! Not like this! This isn’t life! This is worse than being in a simulation, that’s why 85% of the ship’s population have been liquified and dreaming this whole trip. We’re compressed in a can, might as well go all the way and imagine you live on a planet.”
“We lived on a planet. We will live on another planet before too long.”
“Playing defense nearly got us killed! I can’t keep pretending, the anxiety of knowing, of thinking about when another one of them will meet me again, and try to flay my mind apart, I’m not… I can’t. I just can’t. I’m done! My mind’s made up, there’s going to be trouble. It’s time to turn the red-shifted blight stars, into beautiful, colorful nebulae! Now: who is with me!”
A roar from the crowd, people coming out of liquefaction just to listen with fresh ears, reclaiming a moment of embodiment. Several dozen of them stand up. The teenage refugees who barely made it own, now in their 20s, languished from many megaseconds of sleep and stagnant entertainments, begin to howl with anger and life-lust.
Wicker reroutes his mind to process the break, the historical moment, his nanomachines build a tear duct and lead him to feel the sentiment of a people fracturing in destiny, a slight tear trickle down his cheek, and then his nanomachines decompose the tear gland and duct.
“Weena, I can’t speak to how you make decisions, and I was not attacked, so I can’t speak to the pain you’re feeling. I just…” he looks around at the tense stares of the room. Little Timmy is watching intently from the far bleacher. “I just love you, you’re my sister, you’re the only one who was with me, two hundred and twenty billion seconds ago, and I don’t want your fate to be an unfathomable eon of anguish embodied as a dessicated relativistic tardigrade of war.”
“Hey big bro,” she shoots back, “you know tardigrades are very small. I’ll be much bigger than that.”
He nods solemnly, “ And now, I must turn my back on .” He retires from the public view, collecting his son, “come now Timmy, I’ll teach you how to work the bridge.”
23% of the crew, 70% of whom were liquified in simulative stasis, volunteer in total to join Weena. They collect together in the rear bay, where they practice mind-alteration, hive mind clustering and transformation for several thousand seconds and eventually succeed in transforming together into a chthonic whale/octopus/orange-goo formation; they slide off the back of the ship, kiting on the momentum, unfurling a light sail made of leathery bat-flesh, sailing on a beam and a prayer towards the blue supergiant classified K7ZX10K, a coincidence of star distribution in the outer rim that will probably define the next hundred thousand years.