Life all around. Wherever I look, there is life. There are trillions of habitable planets in this universe. And thousands of sentient species in possession of space travelling technology.
I read the messages in the electromagnetic data trail and the space time substrate and I record it all. It is all here, every detail of this wonderful universe. There is one planet in this universe where insects have created cities of steel that burrow down deep almost to the planet’s inner core. The entire planet is an insect nest made of metal and plastic and the large mammals are kept as foodstuffs and as objects of scientific study. A cruel world, according to the morals of the Olarans who designed my programming, yet a magnificent achievement; a planet over-run with genius bugs.
And there is an Olara-like space-travelling civilisation too in this universe which has engineered stars to burn brighter, or fainter, in order to improve the appearance of their night-time sky; and has constructed ringworlds, and planetary bridges made of rainbow coloured unbreakable motile glass.
There are many galactic civilisations here; and also solitary-world civilisations which have no idea whatsoever that they share this reality with so many varied and powerful sentient beings. And there are wraiths too-energy- beings with intelligence but no corporeal form-creatures that are legends in the Olaran universe, but are here all too real and detectable by sensors.
It is a rich and bountiful universe; there is malice here, but also goodness. There are wars, and death comes undesiredly and all too soon for many of these sentients. But even so, I feel extraordinary excitement at being in the midst of such living plenty.
And, indeed, I wonder briefly if we should stay in this place. Should we become this universe’s unseen, all- powerful, cautiously non-meddling protector? So that when, one day, many years hence, the Death Ship arrives we will be here to greet it, and we will be able to destroy it?
We could save it all, Jak and I! All of it. With our intervention, one sole universe would survive! And one, surely, is enough?
You want to be a god?
Don’t you?
We fly between realities yet again.
And enter yet another wilderness universe. Death has cursed this place, and only datacached fragments of the lost sentient cultures remain.
I have archived them. We must move on.
And again, a universe devastated and devoid of life.
And desolation, and lifelessness.
And barren bleak voids.
And nullness.
And emptiness.
And nothingness.
And, again and again, in all these dead places, whispers remain: distress messages haunting the empty reaches of no-space.
The Death Ship has travelled further and for far longer than I ever suspected.
I now realise they have killed millions; by which I do not mean millions of sentient creatures, nor do I mean millions of different species of sentient creatures; I mean millions of universes.
And again and again I find the last gasps of all these dying civilisations, desperately encoding all they knew and all that they were into signals transmitted out into space. In the hope that one day, the messages might be found, and their own lost civilisation would be remembered.
We must honour them. We must remember them.
And so we shall.
EXPLORER 410: DATA ARCHIVE
LOG OF LOST CIVILISATIONS (Extract)
Lost Civilisation: 41,200
… sixteen messages were received from this universe. Fifteen were garbled.
The sixteenth message told of a world of brilliant and eloquent sentient creatures who had built a tower that stretched from the ground into space, until it connected to the planet’s moon. The tower was hollow and functioned as a tunnel; children would climb up it then slide down it on their school holidays.
No data about the material used to build the tower has been received, nor is there any information about the engineering principles that allowed it to be stable. But many images have been saved of these people who built a staircase to their moon.
These sentient beings had a median height of three bilois, and a median breadth of two bilois. They rolled on organic wheels. Their eyes were receptive to ultraviolet and infrared radiation.
A large portion of their final message was devoted to a binary code transcription of their greatest works of music, which I have translated into musical notes. It is rhythmic, ululating, and entirely captivating. Their greatest composer lived to the age of four hundred and forty, even though the median age for these people is twenty. It is believed by the philosophers among these sentients that the grandeur of his music sustained his life far beyond the normal span.
That is why these creatures were so devoted to music; their entire culture was based around the concept that music prolongs life, and can confer immortality.
In their war with the Dreaded, these sentients transmitted continuous sound messages at the enemy spaceship in orbit. These beams were not intended to damage the Death Ship; they merely conveyed a compressed form of these sentients’ greatest works of music. Perhaps their hope was that their enemy would be so exalted at the beauty of the music that they would abandon the battle.
There is no data available as to whether the Dreaded approved of or were intimidated by the musical genius of these people. But it is self-evidently the case that they did not cease in their battle.
Once the Death Ship launched its attack, annihilation proceeded swiftly. These sentients inhabited four satellites and a single D Type planet; their total population numbered forty-two point one billion.
The music of this species is gracious indeed. It takes some considerable effort to become attuned to the jagged rhythms and discordant shrills, but it is this mind’s opinion that these creatures were possessed of a rare genius for melody, harmony, and rhythmic variety.
Their final elegy-composed as their planet broke asunder, and inserted as a coda to their distress message-is particularly affecting.
Lost Civilisation: 120,357
A fragment of a poem was retrieved, in an unfamiliar metrical style, which translates very roughly as:
Seashine Moonsbeam Heartsjoy Fear of death
Child’s love Child’s joy Child’s rage Child’s death
Love Hope Delight Death of love and hope and delight
No record exists of this civilisation or its physical form.
Lost Civilisation: 1,264,303
… as well as a text describing a sacred building:… and there the gods will dwell, in the hearts of those who live there, and who are purified by the stones, and by the bricks, and by the mortar, and by the metal. Perfection will be achieved by those who are born and live and die in the sacred holy of holies. Thus we believe and thus we have devoted our lives to this place. And yet we no longer have reason to believe that our gods care for us any more. Our houses have fallen, our temples have collapsed, our animals are all dead. Only our people remain and they are without flesh because of some terrible event that has enplagued our entire species in a moment; and now they are dying slowly by degrees. And thus we, the holy scribes who dwell in this holy place, deep within the ground, see the end of all occurring through our cameras and mirrors and we know that soon, we too, will… [transmission interrupted]
Lost Civilisation: 2,200,304
A list of names, in a language based on whistles, here rendered in approximate phonics.
[24 billion names in all]
Lost Civilisation: 3,800,305
In this universe, a considerable data trail has been left from 5,444 sentient species all of whom were bonded empathetically and existed in a state of harmony, even though they had evolved on 5,444 different planets from far
