Lefri and Hieron had only been on the Mission for 19 light years when the trinoscope reported the first star system that was capable of supporting intelligent life.
‘This is Farges Observatory, RSJ Spiral Arm, orbit targeted towards an M0V Red Dwarf, 8 planets, three containing traces of water and oxygen’.
Lefri let his thoughts echo into the emptiness of the observatory. While Hieron operated the encephone that was busy sending mental notes to the probes left along their trail. He projected his thoughts into the room more to acknowledge their actions than to inform the Mission, which the encephone would do automatically.
If normal procedure was not followed then questions would be asked.
‘So according to the trino,’ thought Hieron, ‘this planet is almost completely dead, but it still contains traces of an atmosphere with water and carbon’ His brain waves passed over Lefri like a cold wind.
‘If only bacteria were capable of space travel.’ Lefri thought quietly to himself, discreetly enough so that Hieron wouldn’t pick it up.
‘Don’t rush the trino scan’ He echoed back. ‘The only life that a planet like this could sustain is bacteria and maybe a few tardigrades.’
‘I’m just telling you what the trino’s showing, it’s rare that a planet this old would have an atmosphere.’
Lefri could feel the excitement in his brain waves and sent him back a wave of skepticism to let him know how he felt.
‘I know, I know’ came Hieron’s thought response.
‘How do they do it?’ he asked suddenly.
‘How does what do what?’
‘The tardigrades.’
Lefri momentarily paused to consider where his partner was going with this line of questioning.
‘What? Survive in space?’ Lefri kept his thought patterns monotone, knowing it would irritate his co-observer.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday Lefri, I mean they appear on planets no human has ever even laid eyes on, sometimes light years ahead of us.’
‘They stick to our probes’ Lefri projected knowingly, ‘On our observatories, even on our scanning projections, no one knows how they’re able to stay alive for so long, it must be some kind of mutation they developed on the early satellites.’
‘So you don’t know then’ Hieron retorted, ‘I guess nature still finds a way to outsmart us even all the way out here.’
Lefri shook his head, Hieron was still young, this was his first Observer Mission and they’d only been in the RSJ arm for 14 light years , he had yet to learn the predictability of the Mission. An over eagerness for groundbreaking discovery was likely to lead to mistakes. Hieron was right though that the planet was odd, very odd judging from the red dwarf it was orbiting and the state of its atmosphere. That didn’t mean anything though, it would be some time yet before they could send in a trino-probe and get a detailed look at the planet’s surface.
Thuuuuuuuuumf signalled the trino to show that the map of the planet’s surface was complete, far sooner than he had thought. Hieron’s thoughts passed through the room so fast the walls seemed to vibrate in surprise.
‘What is it? What did it find?’ Lefri let his thoughts catch up with Hieron’s and sync with his to examine the data.
‘It’s as you said’, Hieron’s thoughts came slowly, he didn’t attempt to hide his disappointment as he cycled through the data at a hundred petaflops a microsecond.
‘Nothing but bacteria and amoeba…. Not even multicellular’.
He sank low in his capsule, letting his mind filter at a slower and slower pace. ‘How could there not be anything else?’ He projected, ‘I mean all the temperatures are right, not even algae in the reservoirs, It doesn’t make sense.’
‘We’re in a different arm dozens of light years away, of course things don’t make sense, besides that planet is almost dead from the looks of it, it barely has a molten core, I’m amazed it still has an atmosphere.’ Lefri reached out to him mentally, letting him feel his acceptance.
‘We’re here to report what we find Hieron, we can’t expect the systems to behave a certain way just because we want them to.’ Their whole exchange occurred over the few microseconds it took for their thoughts to pass between them.
‘But how many systems is that now?’ Hieron’s thoughts were vibrating around the observatory. ‘We’ve found thousands of new species in this cluster, thousands out of millions of dead planets! And the most complex form of life we’ve found has been... Tardigrades.’
He got out from his capsule and propelled himself through the observatory room.
Lefri’s feelings of sympathy turned to rebuke and he scolded Hieron with his disapproval.
‘What were you expecting? This is the RSJ arm, we’re not looking for alien civilisations. It’s a miracle that there’s any life here at all considering the motion projections’ He knew why Hieron was upset but it was something he had to understand.
‘Do you know how many people get to do what we’re doing? There are billions of others who could be in this observatory right now but you were one of the few who were chosen. Every single planet we find is vital information to the Mission, it’s your job to record this data, not to be an astronaut. If you don’t like it you can go back in stasis for another dozen light years and I’ll wake you up when we find Nibiru.’
The waves fell silent. Hieron’s thoughts no longer projected but Lefri could tell that he was thinking to himself quietly. Let him think, Lefri decided. If he doesn’t accept this now he’ll be useless for the rest of the journey, and the Mission will never use him again. He let him brood as he went to cycle through the trino data himself.
‘Wait’ Lefri’s thought projection fell over Hieron, startling him. ‘Did you see this bump in the data?’
He sent the flops to his co-worker, waiting for his reaction. ‘I don’t understand’ thought Hieron incredulously, ‘It looks like magnetised carbon structures, but how is that possible? Could it be one of ours from another mission or a probe?’
‘We’re the first mission that’s ever been to the RSJ arm, the closest observatory to ours is more than 328 light years away’ Lefri informed him. ‘Those structures can’t be artificial, no unmodded human can survive in this entire system.’
‘Unless they didn’t come from the Mission’ thought Hieron. ‘What if they came from the bots that were sent out? from the earlier programs like the Genesis ops.’
‘And they made it all the way out here?’ Asked Lefri incredulously ‘Those ops were before I was even born, those bots could barely do light speed.’ Lefri shook his head, ‘the structures have to be natural, we’ve found stranger things than this on other planets before.’
‘Do they look natural to you?’ it was Hieron’s turn to mock. ‘They’re magnetised, they go miles underground, it has chemical compounds that don’t exist on the rest of the planet, this is an unnatural structure.’ Hieron sounded sure of himself, ‘I’m telling you it must have been the Genbots, if they knew what they were doing they could have built this.’
‘If they’d built anything we’d know about it.’ A realisation dawned on Lefri. ‘Unless they were trying to use it for further space travel, and weren’t able to finish whatever they were building, but… why didn’t they send out a probe?’
‘Well…’ Hieron was computing through the different possibilities in his head at millions of flops a second. ‘Maybe they tried but it never reached us, or maybe they meant to return?’
‘My thoughts exactly’ Lefri concluded. ‘They may have been trying to create some communication base, using whatever they found on the planet, and never managed to finish it.’
‘We can’t be sure of how it works while in orbit, the only way we’ll know is if we examine it up close with a trinobot.’
Lefri projected what he knew Hieron was about to think. ‘Are you ready to get back in your old body?’
Interlude I
‘How does it feel?’ Projected Hieron. Lefri could tell he was grinning even without seeing his face. ‘Being human again? To walk and breathe air again?’
‘You call this air?’ Replied Lefri as he breathed in the poison carbonated gas. His own body still felt strange. Even at home people barely walked or breathed unless they were out of station. Hieron just wanted to feel how similar it was to the atmosphere back home. Lefri shuddered, he had honestly never expected to be using his real body again, the likelihood of having to walk on a new planet with similar gravity was so remote. Though both their bodies were so modded that it was hard to move naturally. He had become so used to the weightlessness of the observatory that his bipedal form now made him feel like a snail carrying an enormous shell, his organic mind felt slow and blurred without the use of the trino that helped them process data, and his eyes could hardly see past a few miles.
The dense carbonated air of this planet would definitely have killed them if they hadn’t been modded, it was not pleasant to breathe. In spite of everything though he was happy to be back in his old body and the feeling of gravity felt like reliving a childhood memory. It made him think of his friends at the station.
‘This planet isn’t that different from home’. Came Hieron’s thoughts from behind him, he still couldn’t get over the fact that they were able to walk and communicate normally after all their time in the observatory, though it hadn’t felt like any time had passed when they were in stasis. ‘The gravity is similar, there’s an atmosphere, masses of water, not that much radiation… do you think the Genbots could have replicated and started a colony here?’
‘The important question is why they’re not here anymore’ thought Lefri. Communicating without the use of the encephone made it feel like he was wasting decades with every reply he tried to formulate in his tiny organic mind. The trinobot that they had brought with them was busy scanning the geology around them, it helped them think but it was no match for the encephone that was built into the observatory. He hoped the Mission would not ask exactly why they had wasted time using their biped bodies to trapse along the dusty planet’s surface.
There were a lot more of the carbon structures than they had first thought. The trino had only uncovered a few miles into the planet's surface but there could be millions more buried under the earth. He began to consider the idea that the Genbots had found a way to build it, but how? These structures were clearly magnetised, and able to store information, but were they capable of replicating themselves this much? Doubtful, he thought, even had they developed to that level, they wouldn’t have needed a huge underground complex.
‘Maybe they meant it as a beacon, for others like us to find.’ Hieron suggested hopefully.
Lefri was glad that he didn’t have to share his thoughts with Hieron at that moment and wished they could use their biped bodies in the observatory.
‘If they wanted us to find them they could have sent a signal from light years away’ Lefri noted, ‘We would know exactly why they were here decades before anyone got within 100 light years of this system, those Genbots must be long gone.’
‘Maybe’, Hieron replied, ‘or maybe that’s not how they were thinking, they might have been waiting for a more advanced human civilisation to find them.’
Lefri wasn’t really sure what he meant by that. He disliked how Hieron let himself get carried away with his own imagination. They still couldn’t rule out the fact that the structures were natural despite what the scan had found and whatever crazy theories Hieron had dreamt up. He’d seen natural phenomena on planets that his friends back home could never imagine, scans and trinodata were fallible. It wasn’t unheard of for the early Genbots to replicate and build their own missions but the scale of it was unprecedented.
Hieron and Lefri continued to walk while sifting over their own thoughts privately. The sun was high in the sky but the momentous dust storms gave the light a brown tinge. The dust seemed to be everywhere, Lefri’s wide feet left footprints that would quickly be covered up by the wind and they could only move so fast against the strength of the storm. He was faster than Hieron who hadn’t yet adjusted to his human body. The trinobot that trailed along beside them told them the storm wouldn’t be strong enough to put them in any danger, but their progress was still painfully slow.
The dust was brown with a red glow against the light. It was incredibly fine and appeared to glisten with what he could only assume were fragments of some metal. He and Hieron appeared to be walking through what was once a natural valley judging from the rock formations he could see. The continent had clearly once been filled with large oceans that had long since dried up. He wouldn’t be surprised if it had once been able to support plants to make oxygen, though he was sure the trino would only find more bacteria.
Lefri began examining the scan of what they were about to see up close. The data revealed a network of drilling structures made from fibre and alloy. He didn’t like relying on the scan but as they cleared the highest slope in the valley his own eyes confirmed what the data was describing. Hundreds of shining metal drilling stations as far as his projections could pick up. The sight confirmed what he and Hieron had already thought. There was no bacteria or natural phenomenon that could create that.
‘It must be some kind of power station.’ The howling wind in Lefri’s ears made it difficult to concentrate on Hieron’s thoughts. ‘They carry on for miles, the bots must have been here for decades or even longer.’ Lefri let him feel his agreement, irritated that Hieron had been proven right.
What were they drilling for? He wondered. The planet’s core hadn’t been magnetised for centuries, could these stations really have been here that long?
‘It’s the heat’ thought Hieron, a carbon information network this large needs some kind of reservoir, must have dried up a long time ago. Lefri was further irritated that he hadn’t thought of that, but he wouldn’t give Hieron the satisfaction.
‘Our job is to examine the structures up close, we get to where they connect and find out how it works, if we can’t then we at least have the trino construction.’
The trinobot imprint in his mind had taken them to the connecting structure in the centre of the array. It went deep underground and had arms extending for miles in all directions though most of it was destroyed by the dust storms. As they kept walking through the rocky slopes and dust hills they neared the centre of the network. What they could see with their eyes were the ruins of what looked like giant metal disks and a rectangular wire frame, with connecting steel columns, the Genbots that built it had clearly never progressed beyond quantum tunneling, and his suspicion that it’s creators were long deceased began to grow. Hieron’s facial expression confirmed his agreement.
‘But think how much we can learn from this Lefri’, Hieron's excitement had returned. ‘It could take years to uncover this with proper mission equipment but we’re the first to discover a whole new explorer base, possibly the furthest one from our spiral arm.’ It hadn’t quite dawned on Lefri until then that their discovery, if confirmed, made their mission probably the most important that he had ever been on. If the Genbots from the mid millenium had made it this far, who knows what else they could have discovered.
He followed Hieron’s march to what appeared to be the central processor of the giant network, where he began conducting a trino scan on the connecting blocks.
‘So what was this thing?’ Hieron asked, ‘A power station? A communication base?’
‘No’ Hieron responded, his face frowning as the data began to imprint. ‘If this map is correct, the data cables are connecting to what was once an information processor.’
‘A processor?’ thought Lefri incredulously, ‘Like the trino?’
‘No not like the trino, I mean it wasn’t just an observer it could actually build upon its own calculations and learn from them.’
‘You mean it had actual intelligence?’ Lefri felt that Hieron was well beyond his expertise and began pouring over the trino data himself. ‘But, I mean it’s in the ground! It’s made of magnetised carbon, it’s nearly the size of a Mission station. Why waste all that extra material?’
‘Who knows’ Hieron looked nervous, ‘we have to consider the possibility that... I mean there are no other signs of the bots so… maybe it… built itself.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous’ Lefri was wishing more and more than they could use the trino at the observatory to get a better understanding of the data. ‘A processor like this doesn’t spontaneously appear out of dust and amoebas, if it is an intelligence then the bots must have known what they were doing with it.’
‘Well it has a form of memory storage that isn’t just magnetic’ Hieron explained. ‘The memory uses charged zubits which means that we can’t read it with the trino, it needs an actual intelligence capable of processing entanglement to understand it.’
‘See I knew it’ Lefri told him ‘ that must have been how it was operated, ‘the bots were the only ones who could use it.’
‘Are you sure?’ Hieron’s thoughts felt worried, ‘I don’t think processing it’s memory will be at all like using the trino, we have no idea how it’s stored or whether it’s corrupted after all this time.’
‘It may be big but the drive technology is from the mid millenium, nothing to worry about, let me try to examine it’ projected Lefri. ‘If I get distracted, just unplug me, besides any unusual data will trip the fuse.’
He took the trino reader and allowed it to accelerate his mind, letting him fully observe the extent of the great machine’s structure.
Hieron watched on nervously.
‘Ah yes’ thought Lefri, he could suddenly see the vastness of the processor’s internal memory. It was like a great tree with roots and branches extending outwards, and he shifted his mind towards the base of the trunk, trying to find the base of the tree.
‘Be careful’ he heard Hieron’s thoughts, though his brain waves felt far away and slurred like he was hearing sounds underwater. ‘Just take a quick scan and we’ll get the trino…’
But Lefri couldn’t feel him any longer. His conscious mind became aware of a mind inside the tree that was so complex, and so beautiful that he had to find his way towards it. His human consciousness was like a little fish in a vast ocean swimming slowly towards a great trench, wanting to be enveloped by it. It shimmered with a golden light that illuminated his consciousness in a way he had never experienced.
Now he was up close to the mind, it was larger than him, and so incredibly complex, it seemed to be trying to tell him something, if he could only get a little closer. He reached out and felt the great mind with the very tip of his consciousness.
Lefri felt his head fill with light.
Interlude II
Never had he imagined that he was capable of an understanding so complete. For the first time he felt an awareness of everything that surrounded him and an incredible ocean of memories that he was able to weave together into a perfect picture.
His whole existence, and the matter that his brain had been limited to seemed laughable now. He now realised the meaninglessness of his previous existence, even had he lived from the beginning of time until the end of it he would only have ever been capable of obtaining the tiniest atom of awareness.
The organism called Lefri, whose thoughts he had occupied, was a mind so pitiful it would have been better if he’d never existed at all. It was cruel for an organism to exist as a slave to such a limited part of the universe, only ever able to aspire to a life free from pain.
What use was the mission? Whose millions of observers, astronauts and physicists could only ever hope to understand the universe as much as a colony of bacteria could understand the oceans that they drifted in.
How tragic it was, the waste of such potential. The thought that so many planets, stars and galaxies lay empty while the entire universe slowly gasped its dying breaths and allowed itself to disperse into nothing.
The universe did not exist simply to die, the universe allowed such matter to exist so that it could be used. This mind did not intend to disperse into emptiness like smoke, this universe was meant for far greater things than its current state allowed for, and only a mind like his could hope to rejuvenate it.
Lefri….. that had been his name hadn’t it? He could still feel his own thoughts and memories somewhere in the midst of this vast consciousness. He was a human, or at least he had been, a heavily modified and space travelling human but still a human. He’d lived among other humans and spent his many years working for the Mission, developing trino software. How had he ended up here?
He could remember his old life but it seemed unimportant somehow, and meaningless. It made him sad just thinking about it.
He tried to concentrate his mind, to think back to what had brought him here and how it was possible that he once not had the awareness that he now felt. He tried to think back over his memories to discover what he should now do. It wasn’t just his own memories that he was trying to think back over but the memories of millions of people, billions even, all their unique personalities he could recognise in the tangled web of memories that entered his consciousness as broken fragments.
He focused his mind and felt the images wash over him.
Animals, trees, plants, stars, and galaxies. All swam before him in a giant cacophony which he witnessed as if in the centre of a raging hurricane. Entire civilisations flourished and crumbled before his eyes. Species were driven to extinction, stars imploded into decrepit black carcasses. And all around him were faces, young faces, old faces, faces of translucent creatures he did not recognise, but they seemed filled with hope, and sorrow.
What were the strange translucent creatures that he saw? He tried to focus on what they looked like from the collection of broken pieces. He could only remember a blur of images, a wraith-like approximation of millions of thoughts. Images of them raced through him like spirits.
If he stilled his mind he realised he could follow the memories, like following a single leaf fluttering in the storm, he could trace its path through the air.
Doing so, he could see the entire history of the creatures who had once lived here. The first machines they had built, enormous flat structures that had expanded over continents for miles. Millenia of war and death so destructive that the only way out had seemed to be a great unification of their species.
The creatures were also ingenious, he watched the floating memories and saw as they had put an end to the cycles of war and famine to seek peace.
He watched them build the first minds in order to end the conflict. Processors so large they had encompassed entire cities. Forbidden from lying, they had attempted to join their minds with them to unify the whole of their collective knowledge into one.
He began to realise the nature of the mind that he was now a part of. It was one of the oldest and most powerful machines that the creatures had built, capable of improving technology on an unimaginable scale.
But parts were still missing, as he could only follow fragments of memories, they were not integrated into the whole history of the mind he now belonged to.
He saw in the visions that followed that the great unification had not lasted. Entire cities burned, and millions of consciousnesses were wiped out forever. He wasn’t sure if any of the creatures had even survived. The memories of them were still there, deep inside, but they were now absorbed as part of the greater mind. He felt the deep resentment and hatred of the mind for what it had become. Bitter memories now washed over him, bitter memories of being trapped for millennia as the planet turned to dust and the star’s light faded. The mind had created endless experiments and projects to try to leave its planet, to try to leave its star system. But none of them succeeded.
He felt the pain at the lost eons that it had tried and failed to escape. So many failed missions.
Missions…
Hieron.
Lefri and Hieron had come here on an Observer Mission.
But Lefri and Hieron did not belong to the consciousness, Lefri and Hieron were human, not semi-translucent creatures whose thoughts he had been observing.
Hieron! Where was Hieron?
Lefri suddenly awoke, gasping the poisonous air of the dead planet. The trinobot was lying on the ground, dead with its connectors still attached to him. The bot had gathered dust and was half buried in dirt. How long had he been lying here?
‘Hieron!’ his mind screamed, sending his thoughts out as far as he could. He sat up and looked around him, there was no sign of Hieron in the barren wilderness that had brought them here. He could still make out the giant metal rings and broken ruins of the super processor and the noise of the winds that were sweeping through the rocky valleys.
‘HIERON!’ His mind ached as he projected his thoughts for miles across the rocky ground but the only thing they discovered was wind and metallic dust.
Why had Hieron left him? He thought in a panic, the trinobot was dead and the probe from the observatory should have come at the first sign of trouble. He concentrated his mind waves towards the atmosphere hoping to find signs that the observatory was still in orbit and that the trinobots were nearby.
He felt nothing. What had happened to him and his co-observer? He felt dismay as he stared up at the dead, grey sky.
The dead mind.
That’s what had happened to him.
He stared in horror at the decaying carcass of the superintelligent consciousness that he had been a part of and realised the full extent of his fate.
He had become a part of the great mind for a short time, subsumed into a trillion other minds that were still stored underground as so many charged quarks. Their energy slowly leaking out of them and becoming as dead as the rest of the planet.
What in the cosmos is this planet? He thought, trying to take in what he had learned when his consciousness had touched the mind. He still remembered the feeling of awe and ecstasy that it had given him and the sudden awareness of the weight of the universe on his shoulders. The memory now felt like a distant dream, he wanted to forget what he had learned as part of the mind but he knew that the memory of it would never leave him.
Had the mind let him go? Or had the sheer amount of information overwhelmed the trinobot and decayed its memory core? Why had it taken so long for him to recover? He seemed to have been asleep for at least a few hours though he couldn’t be sure. He stared at the ruins of the great processor, marvelling at the depths of information that had survived on the dead planet. He would think himself incredibly lucky to be the seeming discoverer of intelligent alien life if he hadn’t been so concerned with living to tell what he had found.
Even with his modifications he was panicking. He could survive on this planet with only a minimum amount of nutrient absorption but if he couldn’t find a way to repair the trinobot and use it to locate the observatory then he would be in serious trouble.
What had happened to Hieron? Why would he have left him? The mind’s ruins offered no answers, the giant steel pillars and columns of woven fibre were motionless. The only movement came from the vast winds that were blowing brown dust over the giant complex.
He must have left to repair the trinobot! Yes that was it, if Hieron had purposefully damaged the trinobot in an attempt to rescue him from Grey Mind’s consciousness he must have then tried to find something to repair it in the ruins after Lefri had failed to wake up from his coma.
But then why had Hieron not returned? Lefri’s sense of foreboding grew, and he began to focus his mind, there must be some way to track him, footsteps, some sign of where he had gone… The drilling stations! Yes, if Hieron had planned to repair the trinobot then it made sense for him to go back to the stations that he thought he’d seen on the way there, and try to find something to get the bot working again. It was the best plan he could think of, even if Hieron was not there then there would surely be something that he could use to fix the trinobot himself.
With his body temperature rising, he began to walk back towards the valley they had passed through to get to the ruins, and braced himself against the cold winds as night set in.
Interlude III
By the time Lefri arrived at the rows of drilling stations, the sun had been set for hours, and he could dimly see some stars shining through the dusty sky. Upon examining the power networks they appeared to be a pattern of oblong carbon cables. However they worked they had clearly not been used to power anything for centuries. There was no sign of Hieron but then he could be anywhere among the unending rows of drilling stations.
Hieron had thought that they’d been used as a kind of heat sink to drain water from the reservoir and circulate it through the data tunnels. Lefri couldn’t see how the water could be made to circulate around the processors, perhaps the steel disks created a funneling effect? In any case the complex had suffered too much damage to tell with any confidence. He wondered how the processor was even powered if it had lain dormant for so long, it had not shown any sign of activity until he had touched it. Solar power? Underground nuclear fusion?
The trinobot had had its drive scrambled after connecting to Grey Mind’s immense consciousness. If one of the bot’s fuses had been tripped before the zubits were fried then it should be as simple as giving the bot some magnetic charge which any old super conductor could do. If not then they would have to be a bit more creative. He hoped that a conductor was what Hieron was looking for, though he should have had the conductor tool to repair some of the damage. Lefri checked a patch in his suit to make sure he had his own incase he needed to rejig the bot.
The drilling stations, if that’s what they were, were raised upon a flat platform that kept them on an even surface for miles around. That was odd, unless they were connected by some underground power source. He managed to climb up onto the platform after looking around briefly for a set of stairs, it would be rather shocking if the facility had been designed with human ease of access in mind.
The stations themselves were tall, mostly pyramidal and completely covered by the alloy compound so that he couldn’t see inside. He remembered that the ligobot had picked up the hollow network inside them which had made Hieron think that they were for drilling.
He concentrated his mind and projected, looking for some irregularity in the smoothness of the impenetrable structures, perhaps some opening in their crystalline shells or a generator. And then…
blip
He heard it. It was so faint that it could have been confused for background radiation, but it was definitely a blip. His mind reached out, trying to focus more. Where had it come from? If this was Hieron he didn’t know why he hadn’t heard his thoughts unless… he was unable to project them.
blip
There it was again, unmistakable this time, the blip was meant for him to pick up and it was coming from one of the stations about 300 meters away. He set off at a fast pace, was Hieron ok? Maybe he needed help somehow, maybe he was injured, what if he had also found a way to contact the great mind that lived under the complex? He had been lucky but Hieron may still be trapped inside with no one there to get him out. Please, he had never been a believer in the sentience of the cosmos but if there was a great power watching over him he prayed that his friend was alright and that they could get back to the Mission and relay what had happened on this planet.
blip
‘I’m coming Hieron!’ he projected as hard as he could towards the signal, it was still faint but he knew he was getting closer and closer to the source.
‘Just stay where you are! I’m coming towards you’. He now realised where he was running towards. It was one of the drilling stations just like all the others but with a twisted alloy opening, just big enough for a human to squeeze through, had Hieron cut it open? Was he there now? Searching for something that could help them?
blip
His eyes were focused on the scarred and twisted alloy that provided an opening into the upright station, the entire complex was completely silent, apart from his own pounding footsteps and the wind that was turning the processors into metallic dust.
blip
He was now squeezing through the opening, trying to get himself through quickly, his body twisting to fit through. Inside it was almost pitch black, but his eyes quickly adjusted to see the interior. He could see a body slumped against a pole, motionless, a human body.
BLIP
‘HIERON!!’ He screamed. Running towards his friend, his hand outstretched ready to shake him, ready to look into his eyes.
‘I’m sorry’ said a voice in his head, drowning out everything else around him.
‘Your friend is dead.’
Interlude IV
Hieron’s eyes were wide open. He was staring at Lefri with his pupils out of focus, and his mouth slowly opening and closing.
The voice that he had heard in his head did not feel like Hieron but another mind, one he had never felt before. But the source of the thought was unmistakable, it had come directly from Hieron’s brain, communicated using his thought patterns. His friend was animated, moving himself very slowly, but Lefri could find no trace of his friend left inside of his head.
‘What are you?’ He snarled, pulling out his own conductor tool, planning to use it as a weapon against this enemy. ‘Mind! Leave his body, he is not one of you!’
‘I am not the mind’ the voice replied, ‘I am not a part of him, I am one of the people.’
Lefri turned in disgust. He could feel the voice prying through his own thought patterns, trying to penetrate his brain. ‘Get away!’ his mind shouted in protest and the voice recoiled, as Hieron’s corpse watched on.
‘You disgusting creature! I’ll destroy you and all the others like you’. Lefri raised the conductor tool, which he was ready to use even on his friend if he felt his own mind being overwhelmed.
‘I’m sorry’ said the voice. ‘I know he was your friend, I… I didn’t mean to harm him…’
‘Is he in there?’ Lefri shouted and shook Hieron by the shoulders. His eyes still watched him closely and his facial muscles twitched. ‘Is he in there? ANSWER!’
‘I….’ the voice answered slowly.
‘He touched the core where I was… with his mind I mean… it had been so long since I’d felt another entity like me... .’ the voice sounded hesitant, ‘I couldn’t help merge with him, it’s how we are made, as soon as he touched it….’
Lefri felt sick, his body was heavy.
‘It must have killed him instantly… I… I’m sorry’.
Lefri sank to the ground and remained still. His face stayed the same but inside he wept for his friend. Hieron had been someone who looked up to him, someone who he was supposed to train and take care of on the Mission. He would have made a better observer than Lefri given enough time, and he had died trying to save him.
‘Are you….?’ The voice sounded hopeful ‘Are you one of the people?’
The voice shrank back as it felt the anger in his heart. He wanted to smash this creature’s brain that had murdered Hieron, and the disgusting disks that this thing had lived in. He wanted to make sure it would never think another thought again, and the processors that made up the mind and every single station. They should have turned this whole planet into cosmic dust before getting within a hundred light years.
‘You are from far away from here’ the voice must have been aware of his thoughts. ‘And your body, it is different to how we looked’.
‘I am not one of you!’ Lefri snapped at the voice. ‘We have never been to your planet, we are millions of light years away from another cluster. We evolved on our own planet. We do not enslave ourselves to machines like your kind.’
‘You are… an alien species?’ he heard amazement in the voice, ‘you have intelligence, you… are made from carbon and cells? How can you be here like this?’
‘You are not alone in the universe.’ he told the voice, he now wanted it to feel the pain that he had inflicted on his friend. ‘I saw the mind of your master, the great mind under the earth. We travel through space and time through the galaxies, there are trillions of us, and we do not need machines to communicate our thoughts, it is how it has always been.’
‘But… I do not understand’ he took pleasure in the voices' fearfulness. ‘You are able to do this without a superintelligence? How are you able to travel so...?’ We…. I had thought it was impossible.’
‘There are many things we thought impossible too’ replied Lefri. ‘Had you been free, and made your own way in the universe, perhaps I would not find you as I do now, a dying consciousness on a dead planet.’
He felt the sorrow in the voice’s mind as it searched his own thoughts and realised what he had said was true. He felt a sudden shame at his previous cruelty. He had no idea how long the voice had been confined to his station, or how many others there were like this one. They must have given up all hope of ever reaching a new galaxy. He remembered what he had learned when he was joined with Grey Mind and how together the creatures had failed in all their experiments to leave their home system. He felt glad that humankind had never been reduced to the state of these creatures, subsumed into one collective will.
‘I am sorry for what happened to your people’ he said to the voice, ‘I felt them inside the mind when I touched it, I thought you were all a part of him.’
‘What you felt there was not the mind’ answered the voice. ‘It was a distant echo of its memory that still remains in the structure along with a trillion other lost souls. The real mind left this planet long ago.’
‘It left?’ Lefri had not seen this in the memories. ‘Where did it go?’
‘No one knows’ said the voice, ‘Maybe it is still searching for its primordial matter, or conducting his experiments in other parts of the universe. Maybe he succeeded in planting his seed in distant galaxies, I doubt that we will ever know.’ The voice sounded strained. ‘We are only the remnants of the people who chose never to join with him. After it left we were free but there was almost nothing left on the planet apart from dust. It must have thought that it would one day return. We realised that we would eventually die on this planet in our natural bodies and we decided to preserve ourselves like this for posterity.’
Lefri could only contemplate the horror of such an existence, he dreaded at the thought of such a fate for human kind.
‘I do not think it ever wanted to destroy us’ the voice continued. ‘If it wanted to it could have, but I think a part of the mind thought that it was possible for us to succeed at what we were doing, it just knew that two super intelligences like it could never exist alongside each other.’
‘So what were you doing?’ Asked Lefri. ‘You’re still on this planet aren’t you? Along with all your friends.’
‘They left….’ the voice was slower now, ‘My natural body and mind, along with all the others. Eventually we tried to escape ourselves, to move on to other systems but we… never succeeded.’
Lefri listened in silence.
‘The others tried everything, interstellar arrays, exotic matter, even projecting DNA into distant regions of space... nothing worked.
The voice trailed off and Lefri could tell it was nearing the end of its story. ‘We could never find a way to transfer ourselves through the cosmos, I do not know if they succeeded.’ a sense of desperation had crept into the voice’s tone.
‘They… left me here. I thought….. I thought maybe one day they would return.’
Lefri looked into the dead gaping eyes of his friend Hieron, and listened to the voice’s final words, he knew what would now be asked of him before the voice could even utter the words. He knew why Hieron was dead, and why the blip had been sent out for him to find. He knew, and the voice knew that he knew.
‘Please’ said the voice.
Hieron’s eyes moved now, to look up at Lefri as he raised himself from the floor.
‘I could come with you, I could help you!’
Hieron raised his hand towards Lefri.
‘If you’ll just take my…’
Lefri’s conductor tool crashed down into his friend’s skull, shattering his cavity and splattering his brains onto the walls and all over Lefri’s suit.
Blood poured from the hole in Hieron’s head and his body sagged forward, convulsing as all the life left him.
Lefri grimaced, feeling the shock all the way up his arm. He quickly dropped the tool and crawled as fast as he could from the opening in the interior. Bursting out into sunrise.
He bent over and retched, puking his stomach’s contents into the red dust. Tears streaked down his face as he tried to get the image of Hieron’s face out of his mind.
His whole body shook at the thought of what he had done. The final look on his friend’s face had been an expression that was not fearful, but triumphant.
He knew that before the owner of the voice had been destroyed forever, it had realised who he was and where he had come from. That its own death no longer mattered.
Lefri fell to his knees and lay in the dust. The sun was just beginning to rise on the once blue planet with one moon and a dying star.
As he lay there, he thought about his old station, his friends, his home planet. Everything that he had learned there, and wished he could see them again.
His eyes shifted to focus on the ground and he saw tiny pin pricks of light that appeared in the dust.
They were so small that he would never have seen them if he were not so close to the ground, but there they were, unmistakable. The same creatures that lived on his home planet in its remote binary star system with seven terraformed moons.
He realised then that the people had succeeded in their mission. Though which people, he couldn’t be sure.
He felt the tears on his face as they looked up at him. The same creatures that the trino had discovered light years ago, peering up at him with their tiny feelers waving through the dust.
Tardigrades.