Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [1]
This turned out to be a cryptic and often unsatisfactory arrangement but crumbs from Sole’s table were valuable even so. And anyway, Sentient history has been built on never understanding anything fully.
NOS exported a select few of their best minds to Sole’s local area (a couple of rather inferior ones managed to squeeze past as well) but Sole, though patient in the manner of any quasi-eternal being, didn’t seem able to interact successfully with the chosen minds.
For a time a stalemate occurred, without an exchange of. . . anything. Sole and the chosen academics eyed each other from a ship-to-God distance.
The ship’s little colony of eager minds with not enough to do turned quickly to a nasty claustrophobic cauldron. The first murder occurred within three Foregone-weeks—a Geneer vac’ed ‘accidentally’ after winning the daily Minds Tournament twelve consecutive times.
Whether motivated by a desire to stop the obvious disintegration of the colony or not, Sole instigated some bridging steps to enhance the communication process between quasi-eternal and Sentient.
How Sole communicated effectively its plan to the proletarian wastrel Jo-Jo Rasterovich is a complete mystery to Sole-aphiles and it has been deemed that in their initial contact Jo-Jo had been somehow altered to make it so.
Jo-Jo Rasterovich conveyed Sole’s desire for a selection process preceded by a procedure.
Sole-chosen Sentients submitted to an event they dubbed shafting where their brains were altered so that their minds operated in distinct layers. In humanesques like the Lostols and Ceruleans (rumoured to have originated from a singularly blue planet on the far edge of Orion) the procedure occasionally resulted in psychoses. Non-humanesques like the uuli displayed no observable change.
The selected Sentients called their tutelage an apprenticeship and a graduate therefrom a tyro and once the ground rules for selection had been set, the race began in earnest.
Scientists came first, all types and species. When it became obvious that most would be rejected they were forced to look outside their fraternity. Reluctantly, they invited in professionals from other disciplines—all fine thinkers as well but, because of their place in the course of things, intransigents.
Radical thinkers from the philosophers’ city of Scolar also bid for entry but were resoundly denied a chance to meet with Sole by the multi-species organisation that had set up the whole event.
This body of bigots called themselves the Group of Higher Intelligence Affairs and rejected the applications of Scolar-based academics on the basis that their unquantifiable methods were likely to endanger the Sentient-Sole relationship.
Even the outlawed, secretive trans-humanists (indeed, that’s what they call us!) attempted to place a member using subterfuge. The member was discovered and expelled.
Jo-Jo Rasterovich the 33rd, contract minerals scout of rather dubious integrity and the original ‘discoverer’ of Sole, remains the only un-learned person to have open access to New Bubble space. He was, after all, the first contact and no one could take that away from him.
The Studium concludes that this humanesque should be the focus of further attempts (by us) to contact the Sole Entity.
NB: It should be added that, these days, Rasterovich is more entrepreneur than scout, having sold his personal recount the length and breadth of Orion’s Arm for an untidily large sum.
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MIRA
I’ve heard you are beautiful.
Insignia was whispering to her again. This time the words were lucid. It was not always that way: mostly the voice in her mind was a mere hum, punctuated by peaks and troughs of half-formed words, as though the effort required to shape them into something she could understand was too great.
Could Insignia hear her replies? She did not know really, but still she spoke to