Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [0]
The Sentients of Orion Book 1
By Marianne De Pierre
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread—
Like memory of music fled—
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet clearer for its mystery.
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1816
* * * *
Entity
Dark space is not really dark.
Neither is it empty.
Nor lonely.
Beings roam the corridors between galaxies and the gargantuan tracts of dark energy. These creatures, though self-nourished, will on occasion merge and barter their knowledge of the universe with each other—the true nature of neutrinos for anti-quark jokes, the complete catalogue of variations in time/space rifts for amusing anecdotes about the behavioural idiosyncrasies and anomalies of their most exotic particles, the reason for the left-handedness of the universe, for... love.
They adore collecting data and keeping secrets. But more than anything they enjoy arguing over the truth about death.
Gluttoned with knowingness, they pride themselves in their comprehension of the incomprehensible. No concept is beyond their understanding. No action is beyond their ability. They attain knowledge from the exponential synergy of interaction.
Yet they are denied the knowledge of one thing. . .
* * * *
Applied history download, alternative version (including aural anecdotal evidence).
Accessed by Artificial Intelligence 339997^ Wanton.
Extropist stream to Vreal Studium via Scolar hub.
Jo-Jo Rasterovich’s verbal recount of first contact:
‘I got lost way out past the edge of Orion’s Belt on account of crap uuli navigation software. (Don’t buy it, people!) Last inhabited place I’d seen was some naff planet called Foregone that wouldn’t even give me shortcast rights.
‘I tried to mag-beam right back to Mintaka’s civilised worlds to get some new nav but my beam credit expired (lousy floating banks). I sent a SOS to the nav centre on Foregone but the naff buggers probably thought it was a local radio station.
‘I had no choice but to use res-shift. I ran a debug on the nav and it seemed to work so I charted a shift back to Hum-Uuli figuring if they paid me to keep quiet about the nav I’d have enough lucre to top up my mag credits (course, I never would have kept quiet afterwards). It was a dumb risk, I know, but without shifting I was likely to be stuck gassing around beyond Foregone so far past my next rejuve that the salvage crew’d be lucky to find my bones.
‘Turned out the nav was still bugged. I calmed way too close to unmapped space about thirty LYs from Hum-Uuli. The particle analyser went jammy on me. Told me the atom count had fallen to .04 and that I was on the edge of a gas tube that tracked way up out of the galactic plane. Last thing I remember was the infrared array playing shadow puppets. These . . . things. . . like freaking huge leeches were hanging, sucking at an area in the tube. One of them, a great bloated bastard, dropped right off and shot out at me. I only had one thought in my head as I watched it come.
‘I am so fucked.
‘It swallowed me whole. I felt like I’d been dropped down the bitch of all volcanoes. Life support died and so did I. Amazing thing was, I woke up again.’
End verbal recount.
Studium Narrative Summary:
After Jo-Jo Rasterovich returned to inhabited space, news spread through the Nations of Orion Sentients that he had encountered a new being. Governments sent envoys escorted by nuclear-armed warships to meet and greet. It was concluded that the mysterious entity—quickly given the name Sole—that had reanimated Mr Rasterovich was not only benign but of an order of intelligence greater than anything previously known or imagined.
Sole, it appeared, was God.
Better still, Sole seemed willing enough