From-The Girl and The Robots

SYNESTRA’S STORY My name is Synestra. It means “left handed one”, because our bodies are built as ever-growing spirals, and most of our kind spiral to the right. I spiral to the left and that makes me different, I suppose, though there is nobody left to be different from, at the moment. I have a lot of other names as well. Because I am the first of my generation, and it is my responsibility to oversee the safety of my brothers and sisters as they grow in their cocoons. Right now, they are merely hatchlings, most of them, and truth be told, they are not much company. I am lonely and our ship is lost in our own future. When I first encountered you, we were in orbit of that water world, looking for places our kind might grow and explore, but your sun is dying and it seems better to leave as soon as arrangements are made to ensure the safety of your kind and ours. I call it your sun, but in fact, it was our sun too for untold millions of years, when its warm rays fell upon the planet below. That planet, we simply called “Home”, though the other civilizations that came to it gave it names like Amberstars and Cimmeron. Even at its greenest, it had vast dusty plains. It also had green forests, especially near the poles, with great trees and vines, and endless dark swamps full of creatures great and small. Those dark forests, in places where they met the seas, were the original cradle of our kind. Before that, we were a lineage of tiny sea creatures sot unlike one of the kinds you found, in such numbers, digging sand from the planet’s dried up ocean basins. Millions of years ago, the seas abounded in tiny life, and our kind still has a phase of their lives that must be spent in warm salty water, with gentle currents and just a little bit of light. From tiny eggs we grow into much larger beings. What do I look like inside? I am afraid to show you my true form lest you find it monstrous. I do not wish to scare you, friend, because it has taken so much time to find you and I want us to stay together. We are not so different, really. Our kind live our lives in these mechanical shells. They are great machines, built for every purpose we can imagine. We move the arms and legs about using fine movements of our tentacles and eyestalks. This is very intuitive to us, because we live nearly all of our adult lives connected to great mechanical shells. In a sense, our minds drive them the same way your machine mind drives your own body. I have sixteen tentacles, which are puny and weak without the help of these mighty machine tentacles and pinchers, and eight eyestalks, which have little range and clarity without these red sensors. Two hundred million years ago, when Home was still had green forests and great expanses of ocean, our species emerged from the salty estuaries and began to build great cities above the water and below it. We have few records of this time, but our ancestors learned to do great things. They mastered fire and began to work metals. They built telescopes and probed the secret of the atom. For thousands of years, they were content to live out their lives on this planet alone, exploring the cosmos with great telescopes and probing the mysteries of time and space with careful experiments in undersea laboratories. Eventually, they built mighty rockets, for purposes known only to the ancient, and sent great machines into the cosmos. Eventually, visitors came and came to stay, and our cities were crowded with many forms of intelligent life. One hundred seventy five million years ago and the planet was home to living machines as well, though none so beautiful and elegant as you. I imagine that your kind evolved from these early machines, the same way our kind evolved from the sea life that gave rise to it. It is true that all live on Home evolved from simpler forms, though in its time, Home has been home to millions upon millions of different creatures. Five hundred million years ago, great beasts walked the landscape, and swam in the mighty oceans. It was a colder world back then, and mighty ice sheets covered the north and south. In those days our lineage was but tiny plankton, and there were forests of crystalline trees. These trees broke off in windstorms, by the millions, and form the rock of mighty mountain laysers, pushed up by plate tectonics. A billion years before that was an age of icy black forests of animal trees, and shapeless creatures that must have hung from the trees like ropes, feeding off of gasses emanating from the core of the planet. Before that, there were only tiny microbes. Many times in this ancient past, the planet was visited by creatures strange to us, who left traces of their passing. The planet Astra is a newcomer to this solar system, and the passing of the star that originally hosted sent great swarms of asteroids down on our planet, killing the great animal trees. In our time, Astra was even more frozen, a distant cold orb in a dark corner of the solar system. We had no thought of inhabiting it. It is easy to see though that the sun has changed, and places like Astra are now well appointed by sunlight. We were no strangers to the rest of the universe, because many an alien intelligence passes by this part of the cosmos, aiming to use the great black hole at the center of the galaxy we orbit for some strange purpose of its own. Sometimes, we would overhear their broadcasts, in radio and or in gravity waves, and other times, we would sense the release of tremendous energies, as tunnels among universes formed and evaporated in the interstellar void surrounding us. It was from these visitors that we learned to warp space, to bend time, and to harness energies far beyond anything we had imagined previously. In time, we started along the path to becoming one of those ancient and mighty species ourselves. Did I hear you ask to know more about them? There is so little that we know for sure. At least one of them was from a great spiral galaxy millions of light years away. They were a two-legged type, at least before they vanished into the electric matrix of the computerized minds they created. From some distant planet we have never been able to observe, they projected simulcra of themselves, across space and time, like carefully positioned mirror images. Another race was far more ancient and old, with vast bodies housing thousands of lesser creatures. They had long ago abandoned the need to live on the surface of a planet, and roamed through the cosmos using engines of strange design. Yet another was never truly part of this cosmos, but more of a manifestation of a greater self located across several similar universes. This type actually visited Home for a while, and taught us many things, only to disappear as quickly as they came, apparently due to a plague of their own making. In time, we learned some secrets from each of these species, and built great machines in space for our own travels. In time, we joined these spacefarers. In any truly great civilization, there are persons who desire nothing but family and comforts of home, there are some that desire greatness of the mundane sort-to be respected and loved by the people who matter most, and there are those who desire to probe the edges of existence, and to extend the boundary of what is known further and further, till the narrow universe of their forefathers becomes a quaint afterthought amid realities that have suddenly made themselves real. It is through the efforts of souls such as these, I daresay, souls such as us, that each of the elder races came to such greatness of power and wisdom. Even the universe travellers-lacking identity as individuals, could manifest a thousand different group minds, some practical and serious, and others whimsical as a zephr on a summer day. Summer? I cannot explain that to you. In time, we became spacefarers as well. Some of us left to find new homes, because the planet was growing crowded. Others left looking for answers; to explore the cosmos, to establish brave new worlds built on their own philosophies, or to meet the elder races in places of mutual importance. Even then, we knew our world had not much time left. The star you call Crimson was a yellow orb, pleasant and warm, orbited by another sun very much like it. The one you call blue ripened and grew first, burning through a billion years of helium that had collected in its interior. This was a very slow process, and with the help of the star-wanderers, we engineered the unthinkable-moving the planet gradually into a series of orbits more and more distant from the sun as it grew brighter. This we accomplished by directing asteroids on near collisions with Home, at first, and later by using the magnetic field of the galaxy itself. Our craft left Home before the oceans became too hot to support life, but even at the date it had become obvious that the planet could not be moved into a higher orbit without risking collision with mighty Roobis. When this left the solar system, our scientists were eying the could layers, wondering how much longer the mighty storms of the tropics could continue to reflect the blistering red glow of a star lived past its prime. That was more than a hundred million years ago, and we have travelled far since then. This craft is powered by energy emanating from another universe, and it can punch holes in the fabric of space and time. We have visited distant galaxies, and we have projected ourselves into universes very different than our own. I have seen worlds in other universes; places where gravity does not work the same way every day, and worlds with black suns in a cosmos of blistering white light. I have seen giant reptiles guard their young with heartbreaking tenderness, and tree-dwelling amebae with minds equal to our greatest philosophers, In time, the hunger for knowledge gives way to the huger for perspective. Our first goal was a distant planet on the very edge of this galactic cluster, in a spiral galaxy full of young yellow stars and possessing life forms not unlike our own. It was home to strange, two legged creatures that built out of glass and steel. They descended from tree dwellers, and spoke a strange language by shaping the air they exhaled from their lungs. There were many of them, but each was preoccupied with its own needs to the point that they seemed strangers to each other, except at moments of profound intimacy which would come and go on a whim. These were the two-legged ones that built mighty projectors, capable of sending images of themselves through space and time. Despite all their power, they were a very young species, and prone to acts of pointless destruction. Nothing lasts forever. Not even a universe, and fate is fate. Life? What is this word I keep using? Life is what happens when the universe organizes a part of itself for the purpose of creating more parts of the universe that are organized similarly, and so on, until the limits of its resources are reached and it can only compete with other versions of itself to make better organizers and find different ways of organizing parts of the universe into copies of itself that will seek to make copies, and so forth. Your kind do this by mining great veins of metal, chipping away silica rocks, smelting ore and charging batteries with great generators driven by radioactive heat. Other kinds of life do this differently, on a much smaller scale. A drop of seawater in one of these vats contains so many tiny replicators that they would fill a city. Each one can assemble itself from the molecular debris awash in the briny waves, powered by sunlight and linked by a million billion generations to the first crude replicators that did so. I remember a diamond world. Vast and heavy, it had mountains made of diamond, with huge graphite seams running in wavy lines along their faces. Lakes of oozing tar bubbled noisily below, and droplets of tar and smog mixed in the air to turn the sunsets into an orange spectacle that would last the better part of a day and evening. Amid the black shoals swam forms of life strange even to us. Carbon, organizing carbon into sheets and mats of carbon, a living lake could shape itself into a mass of tentacles or sprout thousands of eyes. It was as if the planet could come alive. In that strange place, live never quite divided itself into self-contained cells, the competition among replicators was looser and less distinct. One afternoon, on that planets surface, a living ocean called Proteus told us that time is neither an open string nor a closed loop, but a series of branching filaments like a net or a tapestry, and the directionality of its flow is only because we have sense organs that sense the present and not the past or future. I remember a planet made of glass, with living crystals bristling over ever possible surface. They came in every conceivable color, and would grow in the sunlight, so quickly that an unwary explorer could get enveloped by them and trapped forever. It was here we met intelligences that had no answers whatsoever except to throw everything we thought we knew into doubt. There are other forms of machine life as well. I remember a planet where two legged men bowed down and made offerings to robot overlords. In vast, grey cities, these air breathers would live their lives, guided at every moment by cybernetic voices, watched by machine eyes, and tucked into bed like younglings by the sound of mechanical music. It seems that, if a world grows warm and fertile, early forms of live give rise to later forms as inevitably as hot young galaxies full of blue stars age and are swallowed by giant elliptical galaxies full of aging red giants. So it goes, everything changes. And now it seems you and I have found each other at last, and I am suddenly so much less lonely. For a member of my species, I am only a child and yet I have heavy responsibilities. This ship, and my thousands of brothers and sisters, have arrived here due to a tragic series of miscalculations by my mother and father’s people. We travelled far and wide, vanishing from normal space and projecting our information essence, for the solid matter you stand on is nothing more than information, cloaked in tiny particles that manifest the deeper code within. These projections emerged in distant corners of the universe, at the spiral galaxy of the two legged spacemen, whose yellow sun shined brightly and whose sandy beaches were pounded by mighty waves. Our travels back brought us to places so distant that time itself ran more slowly than before, and in projecting ourselves home, it became impossible to return here any time earlier than a full one hundred fifty million years after we left. This is an unbeleivably long span of time. I need not explain this to a machine such as yourself, but if you sat and counted every rock and pebble on the planet below, taking your time as you did so, you would do that many thousands of times before even a fraction of that interval had passed. It is enough time for an interstellar civilization to evolve from a microscopic form of plankton, and it is, it seems, more than enough time for an old star to grow bloated and red, till it is devoured by its neighbor, who grows old and red in its turn. And now we must find a way to save your world, because your sun is dying, and the next phase of its senescence will be neither gentle nor painless. I cannot say when this will happen, but it will explode, destroying every living thing within this globular cluster, and this fate is certain. I can help though, I think, if you let me.