They would fly straight into the gnawing center of all this gaudy, swirling chaos. On an impossible voyage. Looking for something, with no clear idea of what it might be.
Killeen grinned broadly.—C’mon, son, this is what we were born to do. We’ll go onward. Inward. There’s all our Family’s past here, somewhere. We’ll find out what happened, who we are.—
—Crew doesn’t like that kind of talk, Dad.—
He frowned.—How come?—
—This is a scary place.—
—So? They haven’t seen the glory of it, haven’t really thought it through. When the time comes, they’ll follow me.—
—We’re running for our lives, Dad.—
—So?—Killeen grinned, a jaunty human gesture amid the wash of galactic light.—We always have been.—
PARTICLE STORM
The carapace glides like a hunting hornet.
Its thorax is of high-impact matte ceramic. Bone-white lattices mimic ribs. Storage balloons inflate like lungs as it exchanges plasma charge. Slow rises, fluttering exhales.
This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight, remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent of the substrate, whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings now encased in habit. Function converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible tension, struts like statements.
Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines blend, uniting skewed axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of gravity.
It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary when what truly stirs is data.
It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are racing patterns flung between the shifting sands of stars and lives.
Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless as the rain of protons.
Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells. But it does not sense the particle torrent that flails uselessly at massive shields: layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.
Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding mechanical torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.
Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient supernovas. Codes race in fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons pinch and snake, bearing luminescent ideas.
From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly revolving planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and scratches cross the massive shanks. These tell strange stories, unreadable now.
Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic needles through prey light-minutes away.
For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to think long. Within them, data dances.
The anthology intelligence speaks to others far distributed along the galactic plane—though the separation into (self, here) and (other, there) is a convention, a brute simplification for this slowly revolving angularity.
Something like an argument congeals. Sliding perspectives of digital nuance. Binary oppositions are illusory here—you/I, point/counter—but they do shape issues, in the way that a frame defines a painting.
It begins. Language lances across the storming masses that intervene, the vagrant passing weather. Cuts. Penetrates.
Semi-sentients should not preoccupy us.
They must. They are an unresolved issue.
You term them “primates”?
Of the class of dreaming vertebrates.
I/You consider them irrelevant.
The underlying issues still vex.
They are nothing! Debris, motes.
They approach. Little time remains before they will near the Center.
We/You have eradicated humans virtually everywhere. Only small bands remain. Our protracted deliberations, well recorded in history, demand completion of this ancient task.
This policy is e>/~*~\< old. We/You should reinspect it.
They are nearly extinct. Press on.
Their extinction seems difficult to achieve. They persist. This suggests we\you reconsider our\my assumptions.
They are vermin. Carbon-based evolution brings only low skills. They still communicate with each other linearly!
Some would say that evolution works as equally upon you\us as upon them.
Nonsense. We\You direct our changes. They cannot. This is the deep deficiency of chemical life.
