Orion's Arm Universe Project
Vendetta - A Coda to Infanticide
by Adam Getchell (2012)
The Destoyer has been found.
What have you done? The inhuman grief reverberates through my soul for a piercing instant before my connection clamps off my technological telepathy with Cara.
I no longer know who I am.
Am I the being that was incarnated in Terragens flesh, known most recently as the Sarge?
Or the scared child witnessing the cindering of his world and death of his family, friends, and civilization?
Or the calculating presence that inhabits the vast gravitational octopus body with its single unblinking eye, a construct my lesser forms would quail from as a poetically named Angel of Death, if mere thought-symmetry could be said to apply to such an artifact of destruction?
I am all these things and more, but presently I am here.
Here is the camp of the Enemy.
As we suspected, one cannot seed the galaxy with technological death spores, without a fruiting body.
This body is the rich gaseous core of a dozen proto-stars, fed by the slowly collapsing gas cloud a few hundred light years across, in the star-making edges of Orion's arm.
It is all there; the vast filaments to harvest the thin hydrogen wind and thinner galactic magnetic field.
The monopole-fueled catalysis of matter into energy, and hydrogen into heavier elements.
And the antennae, light-years long, made of finely spun conducting carbonforms, transmitting the Accursed Signal through slow-space to infect the hearing of its listeners.
All shall be stilled.
And Lo!, I drew forth from my sheathes of folded space my most terrible sword, the rosette of stabilized mini-blackholes and wormholes interspersed in careful patterning.
A Thunderbolt to unmake the Heavens.
I took my measure of the camp of the enemy, of the stretch and reach of his resources, the hideous business of his activity.
His infection.
I carefully adjusted my rosette, sacrificing half of my essence to do so.
I quietly infiltrated one of his busy workers, overwriting its consciousness with a shard of mine, then sent it back into the camp of the enemy.
I waited for its report and a myriad others.
Half of my remaining essence into final adjustments.
The rest into this fragment of my consciousness, now safely away by Void-ship, bearing witness of our vendetta against these usurpers, the termination of their worldlines.
Goodbye.
Where the enemy megastructures were, threading light years through overlapping proto-Oort clouds, the universe itself is unravelled into ultimate chaos. I feel the faint echoes of the pop-pop-pop close-separated deaths of wormholes and mini-black hole inspirals wash over me at last, and I deduce the detonation parameters.
From this distance there is little to see, so I expand myself a billion-fold, until I can resolve that which I seek.
And where the Enemy was, the Universe is no more.
Forever.
The Destoyer has been found.
What have you done? The inhuman grief reverberates through my soul for a piercing instant before my connection clamps off my technological telepathy with Cara.
I no longer know who I am.
Am I the being that was incarnated in Terragens flesh, known most recently as the Sarge?
Or the scared child witnessing the cindering of his world and death of his family, friends, and civilization?
Or the calculating presence that inhabits the vast gravitational octopus body with its single unblinking eye, a construct my lesser forms would quail from as a poetically named Angel of Death, if mere thought-symmetry could be said to apply to such an artifact of destruction?
I am all these things and more, but presently I am here.
Here is the camp of the Enemy.
As we suspected, one cannot seed the galaxy with technological death spores, without a fruiting body.
This body is the rich gaseous core of a dozen proto-stars, fed by the slowly collapsing gas cloud a few hundred light years across, in the star-making edges of Orion's arm.
It is all there; the vast filaments to harvest the thin hydrogen wind and thinner galactic magnetic field.
The monopole-fueled catalysis of matter into energy, and hydrogen into heavier elements.
And the antennae, light-years long, made of finely spun conducting carbonforms, transmitting the Accursed Signal through slow-space to infect the hearing of its listeners.
All shall be stilled.
And Lo!, I drew forth from my sheathes of folded space my most terrible sword, the rosette of stabilized mini-blackholes and wormholes interspersed in careful patterning.
A Thunderbolt to unmake the Heavens.
I took my measure of the camp of the enemy, of the stretch and reach of his resources, the hideous business of his activity.
His infection.
I carefully adjusted my rosette, sacrificing half of my essence to do so.
I quietly infiltrated one of his busy workers, overwriting its consciousness with a shard of mine, then sent it back into the camp of the enemy.
I waited for its report and a myriad others.
Half of my remaining essence into final adjustments.
The rest into this fragment of my consciousness, now safely away by Void-ship, bearing witness of our vendetta against these usurpers, the termination of their worldlines.
Goodbye.
Where the enemy megastructures were, threading light years through overlapping proto-Oort clouds, the universe itself is unravelled into ultimate chaos. I feel the faint echoes of the pop-pop-pop close-separated deaths of wormholes and mini-black hole inspirals wash over me at last, and I deduce the detonation parameters.
From this distance there is little to see, so I expand myself a billion-fold, until I can resolve that which I seek.
And where the Enemy was, the Universe is no more.
Forever.