Cover



ESCAPE

Ian Cardin
singularityinversion@gmail.com

Searing beams of coherent cobalt obliteration screamed by the cockpit of the small planet hopper I had stolen, missing the pressurization bubble by meters. The archaic control systems protested as I forced the ship into a sloppy but effective evasive maneuver, praying to gods I had never believed in to spare my life. I hadn't had much time to pick which ship to steal after I'd broken out of the small containment cell they'd thrown me in and recovered my ill-gotten gains, but the fact that this was the only one that didn't have a military grade code lock on the door had certainly influenced my decision.
One that I should have spent more time on, I reflected, as more beams speared past me into the interstellar abyss. Pushing the drive beam up to maximum, I was thrown back in my seat as the inertial dampeners strained to compensate. Hopefully my slim piloting skills could get me far away from the warship before its gunners managed to find me with the uncomfortably close probing fingers of their seemingly endless supply of particle beams.
Several hair-raising minutes later, I must have exited the maximum range of their weapons, because the beams stopped firing. It took only a few seconds for me to realize that they had likely stopped firing because the tiny ship wouldn't be able to make it to any populated worlds with the tiny amount of reaction mass onboard. It also stood to reason that they wouldn't have given up so easily if they had known I had gotten away with my theft - again.
The immediate and obvious next step was to plot a course for the nearest inhabited star system, put the drive beam on maximum, and go into stasis until I arrived. Even though a check of the ship's oxygen reserves indicated that there was sufficient air to comfortably live awake for at least the next several months, a cursory check of the food stores in the depressingly small pantry confirmed that there was less than two weeks' worth of food. I spent some time going back and forth with myself but eventually picked the closest system, which the ship's guidance submind assured me had no less than three populated planets.
Carefully tucking the item I had been imprisoned for stealing into a convenient cavity in the wall, I settled into the stasis couch, doubts orbiting in my head. Would the guidance system malfunction? What would happen if the stasis module failed? Would the system still be inhabited by the time I got there?
Realizing these thoughts led nowhere, I ordered the stasis module to engage and welcomed the cleansing curtain of nothingness as it descended.


The quickening fluid felt like burning ice in my veins, and for a time there was nothing but that searing cold bringing me slowly up through the many veils that separated stasis from waking. As I passed each veil, I could feel perceptions and thought processes materializing, building up to consciousness in a hazy sequence of perceptual reactivation.
Stasis functioned by taking the brain offline and into total particulate suspension region by region, and each of these "veils" was in fact my mind reactivating piece by piece. Knowing the theory behind the science didn't do anything to speed up my eyes opening, however. They responded slowly, still sluggish from the stasis.
Scanning the interior of the tiny ship betrayed no immediate reason for my reawakening; the celestial collision alarms were silent, and there were no alien tongues pronouncing unfamiliar phrases spilling out of the communications console. Tendrils of grayish silicate spiderwebbed across the panels covering the stasis machinery, but I had heard of stasis machinery exuding strange material before; that was nothing special.
Heading to the cockpit to get a look at the nearby stars, I was taken aback. At first glance it looked as if I was still stuck in a void - no visible stellar objects existed as far as I could see. Switching on the screens, I swore in frustration. The instrumentation must have been degraded by the passage of time - there was no way those readings were accurate. I had seen this type of problem before, usually on old equipment; long years of use gradually stripped away the ability of the sensors to function properly, resulting in data coming in at infinite values. The mass analysis module claimed the space around the ship was infinitely dense, while the gravitometer assured me of its certainty that the type of gravitational tides that normally existed only around the core of a black hole were, in fact, also surrounding us.
Aside from the fact that being close to any object that could cause what the instruments were telling me was surrounding us would cause the nearly instantaneous pulping of the ship, I just knew the instruments had to be wrong. The types of conditions they were attempting to convince me of were physically impossible.
Accessing the ship's timelock, I queried it, asking how long ago I had gone into stasis, and blinked disbelievingly at the result. According to the timelock, it had been less than a day.
Suddenly one of the cockpit screens flashed into life, throwing amber reflections against the ceiling of the ship. At first I ignored it, until an ear-shattering noise tore through the ship, causing me to reflexively cover my ears. It sounded like someone tuning a radio at excessively high volumes, and then it began to cohere into multiple tones attempting to unite into a single note, fluctuating in and out of harmony with itself. The amber light from the cockpit flickered again, then settled into a rhythmic pulsing, which the note began to match, stuttering in imperfect rhythm. Utterly confused, I strode over to the flickering display, unsure of what I would find.
I am not sure what I expected to see on that screen, but it was certainly not what was actually there.
My own face stared back at me, rendered in an eye-blinding cacophony of colors. The detail was exquisite; in a strange way this image of me looked more real than the face I knew from the mirror. And yet there was something missing.
"What are you?" a harsh, synthesized voice grated from the speakers. The face on the screen convulsed horribly in sync with the question, and it struck me that the expressions, and indeed, the image itself, were created by something that had no working knowledge of a living human face. The proportions were wrong, all the miniscule facial muscles that create and convey the microexpressions of emotion missing.
"What are you?" I asked, disbelieving. More than likely this was some type of security system built into the ship. I had heard of this before - private ship owners paying ridiculous sums to psychoanalysts and fringe coding experts to create automated routines designed to unnerve and unhinge potential thieves. Whatever it was, it was certainly working. My nerves were crawling.
The visage on the screen contorted, rapidly flowing through a sequence of improbable facial expressions. Then it disintegrated into thousands of randomly intersecting pixels, a seething concatenation of hypnotically pulsing points of light. The holoprojector built into the deck flickered into life and I watched in curiosity as the ship's database folded out into a shimmering virtual representation of its file hierarchy. Images and text files bloomed open and closed, seemingly at random; pictures of the original solar system, taken with the ancient Voyager probe over fifteen centuries ago; pages and pages of quantum mechanics and relativity equations, blurring as the archive trawl increased in speed.
Soon the holoprojection was nothing but a chaotic swarm of information, moving far too quickly for my eyes to comprehend any one item. I waited for several more minutes and finally grew impatient, realizing I'd been duped. I decided to play along one last time. "Show me what the hell you're doing already."
The holoprojection reassembled itself into the blindingly multicolored representation of my face and then broke into the same pattern of randomly intersecting pixels I'd seen before. They tumbled and spun, tessellating as they reassembled into a deep field image of the night sky. Galaxies gleamed, fixed in place against the endless abyss of deep space, the unseen gravitational influence of the supermassive black holes at their cores traceable in the structure of the star systems that surrounded them. Supernova remnants hung in frozen beauty, light years of cosmic dust arrayed in breathtaking chaotic patterns. Stars of all shapes, sizes, and ages glimmered. Then, just as the picture reached full resolution, thousands of cosmic objects filling the view, everything slammed into motion.
Galaxies hammered into one another, colliding in a titanic clash of immeasurable proportions. Trillions of tons of stellar, planetary, cometary, and asteroidal matter smashed together and through each other, the billions of objects that made up galaxies whirling in a dance of obliterating transmutation staggering in its scale. Star birthing regions formed and expelled their stellar progeny in an exponentially accelerated cycle of cosmic evolution, millions of years passing in seconds as the interstellar dust coalesced into brightly burning suns. These soon acquired their own planetary systems only to lose them as the stars met their deaths, collapsing inwards to form neutron stars and black holes or exploding outwards in massive supernovas, returning the original material to the void to begin the cycle again. The sheer range, violence, and scale of the universe's evolution was staggering, and I found myself entranced and humbled at the mind-numbing complexity of it all.
The cycle continued to increase in velocity, and as time went on, the picture began to grow darker as the larger stars burnt out their fuel supply and died. Now no new stars formed as the cosmic nurseries were exhausted one by one, the miniscule amounts of dust remaining distributed back into the interstellar medium. Soon even red dwarf stars passed out of existence, leaving the picture eerily darkened.
A bar of light swept vertically across the holograph, altering the image where it passed to reveal furiously churning black holes. Hawking radiation jetted from their cores as they committed time-lapsed disintegratory suicide, cosmic time scales unimaginably accelerated to show a process that would normally take aeons elapsing in seconds. White dwarfs swept dark matter particles into their orbits only to obliterate them in the blink of an eye, the stars themselves dissolving into pure radiation moments later that was sucked into the rapidly expanding black holes.
As the black holes expanded to fill the view, thousands upon thousands of them crowding the holograph, the ejection of Hawking radiation from their cores grew faster and faster until the holes themselves were dissipating out of existence by the handful. The images went completely black and the holoprojector shut off, leaving the tiny interior of the ship all the eerier in the low running lights.
"This still doesn't tell me what you are or where I am," I ventured, trying to reorient myself after the disturbing sequence of images.
The cold metal of one of the autosurgeon's robotic restraining limbs clamped around my skull, holding me tight as I protested vehemently. Limb after limb shot out of the autosurgeon, clamping onto the various parts of my body until I was completely immobilized. The operating tentacle snaked from its receptacle in the wall, the array of gleaming blades bursting from its tip counter-rotating in a horribly sentient display of intent. Losing control, I screamed in terror as it selected a particularly wicked-looking needle that buried itself squarely in my forehead.
The almost unimaginable pain of having a large needle punch through the frontal lobe of my brain was whisked away by the intoxicating rush of a massive dose of painkilling medication. The wallscreen above the autosurgeon blazed to life, and I realized through the drugged fog of painkillers that a realtime picture of the interior of my skull was being displayed. Injecting brain machine interface nanites, the screen flashed, as the operating tentacle bulged disturbingly. I distantly realized that the autosurgeon was about to inject a swarm of submicroscopic nanobots into my mind, but the astronomical dosage of drugs kept me from protesting.
As the nanites flowed into my mind, I watched them skitter to countless points within my brain and emit a tiny blue flash, bonding with and burrowing into the delicate structure of my mind. Sudden and overwhelming dizziness struck, followed by total blindness as the nanites completed their final bonding with the last of my brain and the nerves in my spinal column and neck. I flailed around wildly just as the autosurgeon's restraining arms released me and managed to avert full-blown cranial trauma by opting for a barely controlled fall into the floor shoulder-first.
I crawled across the floor until I could feel a wall with my fingertips and propped myself against it, breathing shallowly. The painkiller was wearing off surprisingly fast, but despite my nearly stifling terror that the pain from my punctured skull was going to come roaring in at any moment, I remained not only painless but oddly ecstatic.
This is much better

a cold, inhuman voice observed from inside my skull.
I thrashed uncontrollably, seemingly unable to stop battered limbs from flailing. I tried to call out in the hope that the ship would have a voice-response emergency system, but the words didn't just stick in my throat, they never left my thoughts. With a growing horror I realized I had lost control of my own body.
As you asked

the voice stated, what I am

.
My vision functioned again, but even though I could feel my body inside the ship I was being shown a massive expanse of space. A supermassive black hole raged, Hawking radiation spewing from both axes in accelerated time, two streams of escaped energy racing furiously away from their birthplace. But unlike the other black holes I had been shown earlier, this one stood alone, framed only by the cold dark of the abyss, with no other stellar bodies anywhere to be seen. The energy streams thinned almost to a needle point and then suddenly the black hole itself burst, flinging raging gamma rays outwards in all directions as the singularity collapsed in a stunning display of cosmic suicide.
Several of the gamma rays struck the upper and lower beams of radiation, igniting them in a fiercely burning conflagration that shimmered with an unearthly light. Then, the two beams reached for each other and fused, folding out of and back into existence over and over until an eye-blinding weavework of pure energy writhed, suspended in blackness.
The weavework glistened and flung the blinding brightness of its birthing energy into space, the underlying abyssal knotwork of its true form coiling and slithering unnaturally into and out of itself. I was made to understand that this had been the moment of awakening for the intelligence; that its neurons were the information from the black hole that had been encoded in the Hawking radiation, and that the gamma rays of its parent's death had been the activating force that brought those neurons to life.
I am aware

.
The weaveform hurtled through space, covering interstellar distances in seconds. Somehow, it was using gravity to manipulate the fabric of spacetime; propelling itself not by reacting against the interstellar medium, but by altering the local gravitational metric in order to force spacetime itself to move and riding the resulting distortion of reality. The sheer emptiness of the universe it moved through was terrifying. No planets, stars, or galaxies existed; only briefly flickering individual particles could be seen, and then only rarely.
After what seemed like decades, the weaveform had not found anything larger than a grain of dust, and I watched as a darkly gleaming bead of itself dropped away and burned a hole in the cosmos. I was made to understand that the screaming vortex of mind-melting complexity that burst forth was a wormhole, and that the weaveform had grown impatient of slower methods of travel and was seeking contact with other sentient beings.
Several indescribable seconds later I had followed the weaveform through the wormhole and out the other side, only to discover more of the same endless panorama of nothingness. Burning several more precious drops of itself, the weaveform leaped through more wormholes, finding the same bleak vision at every destination, until the final wormhole it traversed showed an object blazing with radiation suspended in the cosmic night. After the endless vistas of emptiness, the object was painfully bright, and I could feel the weaveform's curiosity at finding something aside from sparsely scattered particles. As it approached the object slowly, I realized very soon that it was my ship, although there was an unfamiliar meteorite impact crater that had not been there before.
I was unceremoniously dumped back into my own body, shaking with shock at the revelations I had just witnessed, and simply sat for several minutes, gathering my thoughts and attempting to formulate some logical explanation for what had just happened. Eventually I realized that somehow the entity had gained access to the ship's mainframe and infiltrated the autosurgeon, implanting the nanites in my mind in order to allow for more efficient communication than the holoprojector could provide.
That is correct

.
I shook my head disbelievingly, as if I could dislodge the voice from the inside of my skull. "How can you possibly understand me, much less speak to me?"
Billions of years ago, long before my quickening, the singularity that would provide the material for my creation swallowed the informational structure of galaxies. Over the aeons it ejected that information in the form of radiation. This information was evolved into sentience by the gamma bursts that resulted from the singularity's termination. One of the galaxies absorbed contained a race that spoke your language

.
My head reeled. After several more minutes of struggling to process all of this, I realized something else. Even though I had watched the weaveform travel literally astronomical distances, not once in all its travels had it ever seen a galaxy, much less a planet or a star.
They are gone

, the entity observed dispassionately.
That made no sense. How could all of the stars and galaxies in existence have disappeared in the one day I had been in stasis?
It has been far longer than a day.
That didn't make any sense either, and it also didn't match with the elapsed time of the ship's systems I had checked upon awakening. I looked at it again, just to be sure - 23 hours, give or take a few minutes.
Then my flesh prickled and I cursed myself for being so stupid. I reached up to the cavity where I had stored my stolen goods and panicked, finding it empty. The immeasurably valuable vial of nanites I had stolen was experimental technology, designed to evolve and accelerate the development of any system, whether biological or technological, at an exponential rate. Remembering the gray silicate webbing on the stasis machinery panels that I had earlier dismissed upon awakening, I examined it more closely and felt a shiver of dread as my suspicions were confirmed.
Tiny shards of the glass vial that had contained the nanites were embedded in the silicate structure. The webbing shimmered, each nanite within it gleaming like a tiny star. When I fully understood what had happened, I fought madness for hours, a battle which I would have surely lost if the entity had not come to my aid by reinforcing my mind against the stark gibbering horror of the truth.
The impact crater I had seen from outside the ship must have been from a meteorite that struck the ship with sufficient force to dislodge the vial from its hiding spot. Flung across the cabin of the ship, the vial would have burst against the stasis machinery panels and gone to work - evolving and accelerating the system it found beyond the farthest reaches of its creator's imagination and locking the entire ship, and me with it, in total stasis for trillions of years.
4,197,724,172 years

.
I did not dispute numbers with the entity. I had, by now, realized that I was the only living human left in the universe, and that knowledge was unceasingly hammering against the remaining shreds of my sanity.
I will never know if it was an act of cruelty or mercy, but as reality ended, the entire span of existence ripped apart in a relentlessly accelerating expansion as all distances diverged into the infinite, the entity took me into itself to witness the final moments of the universe.
And it was beautiful.

END

Impressum

Texte: All writing copyright Ian Cardin 2011. Cover picture is public domain obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.07.2011

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