Wrinkles in Time and Space

Ok, I know this is two in a row for me--sorry. So, this is a bit of backstory (worldbuilding, if you'll forgive me the phrase) that I've been working on for a sci-fi thingy floating around in my head. I posted it on my other blog (click on my picture in the upper left hand corner and you can check that blog out) but I thought I'd drop it here so you can take a looksie at it.

Here she be:
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Date: 357.01 ESD
Author: Lt. Alexander Cherkesov, FIA
To: Fleet Media Distribution Command (FMDC)
Subject: Information Packet regarding ISI-1 (Enigma)
Authorization: Interim Congress (IM) and Rear Admiral James Turner (UFMCOM)

The discovery of ISI-1 (Imperial Security Issue 1) or Enigma as those associated with the project termed the alien spacecraft, will surely be noted in the future as the genesis of Earth's nearly total destruction and the beginning of humanity's struggle for survival. However, in the grand scheme of a galactic history millions of years old, the discovery of ISI-1 is nothing more than the light dusting of snow on an iceberg hundreds of meters thick. The complex plans and chaotic chances that shaped the the emergence of the so-called '10,000' would fill more books than the former Library of Congress in Old Washington ever held. This brief essay will only attempt a general outline of the creation of the 10,000 and the long path that brought them to the icy margins of our solar system.

After the Battle of Graemarijii, only 3.5 petabytes of data were salvaged from the ruined Blade Ship that had been escorting the former Grand Imperial Fleet. For obvious reasons, the data could not be analyzed until sometime later, after the Battle of Nezpael XIII, when the Interim Congress of the United Fleet of Mankind created the Fleet Intelligence Agency (FIA). Using data collected from the Blade Ship and military installations on Graemarijii and Nezpael XIII, the FIA managed to piece together a tiny (~20 gigabyte) data collection concerning the 10,000 and their pre-Earth history. This brief outline is an extremely abbreviated summary of the Official Historical Report 1 that was submitted to the Interim Congress on 348.01 ESD.

All reliable records obtained from the Blade Ship and the military installations on Graemarijii and Nexpael XIII indicate that 540 Ma ±15 Ma, or roughly around the time the fossil record began on Earth, a revolution began that overthrew a pangalactic empire that had ruled nearly 95% of the galaxy. The revolution was headed by a mysterious race referred to only as the Architects, who--after achieving victory--took over the rule of the galaxy they had just freed. All of our records from this extremely remote age come from the Architects themselves (a purge of all non-Architect data seems to have taken place roughly 15 years after they had pulled down the former empire), and nowhere in those records is the name of their former rulers mentioned. Additionally, it is unclear whether the previous rulers practiced a harsh and violent, or a more enlightened form imperialism. It is even possible, according to some FIA analysts, that the previous empire had been some type of republic or democratic-analog. Nor do the scant data indicate whether or not the Architects were tyrants or popularly elected leaders. The tone and changing content of the preserved records do suggest that while the original government headed by the Architects was an open organization made up of thousands of different species, as time progressed, the government became closed to all but the Architects, who became the exclusive overseers of the galaxy.

Best estimates by the FIA suggest the Architects ruled their empire--albeit, a steadily diminishing empire--for nearly 100 million years. The records collected by the FIA cover only .5%, or 5,000 years of that time-span (in Old Earth dates, the period of the Architect's rule spanned from the middle of the Cambrian Period to sometime near the end of the Ordovician Period). And the 5,000 years of history the FIA has managed to reconstruct are not continuous. 80% of the records have to do with a low-level bureaucratic squabble between to interior government departments that somehow lasted 2,000 years. Yet, as luck would have it, the largest continuous record deals directly with the history of the 10,000; or rather, their creation.

Two thousand years before the Architect Empire collapsed, a single-star system with an O-class white giant at its heart was converted into a research facility. The seven terrestrial planets and fifteen Neptune-sized gas giants that orbited the star were decomposed down to the nano-scale and then rebuilt into nine laboratory worlds and an energy-collecting array reminiscent of a Dyson Swarm. The nine planets were equidistant from their star, and orbited along 9 different routes, all of which described an orbital sphere around the sun. The research system was staffed exclusively by Architects--an oddity even at so late a date in their empire.

For 1900 years the Architect scientists labored in secret, cut off from the rest of the galaxy. At the time, even priority communications were restricted to tight-beam bursts to currier ships that jumped to within 100 AUs of the system, recorded the scientists' communications, and then jumped away again. Additionally, records indicate that no less than seven civilizations whose homesystems were within 20 light-years of the research system were forcibly transplanted to new colony worlds, or--in the case of one species that refused to be moved--eradicated. The Architects kept such tight control of the research project that it is only through piecing together later events that we know the research system was in any way connected with the 10,000.

In the end, the lengths to which the Architects went to cover up their project proved futile. The scientists at the research system found that--cut off from their families and leaders for so long--their priorities and the aims of their government no longer aligned. A revolution ignited in the research system. The arriving government currier ships were destroyed, and the scientists converted their lab-worlds into vast military production lines. Desperate to maintain control of a project it had invested two millennia in, the Architect Empire dispatched an entire fleet to quell the researchers. The fleet jumped into the system and split into a dozen task forces. In less than twenty-four hours, the Dyson Swarm had been knocked off-line, and 8 of the 9 lab-worlds were effectively shut down.

The most fierce resistance, however, was concentrated around a single world, where the shoddy, rag-tag fleet the researchers had scraped together was huddled, waiting to engage the Architect fleet. The revolutionary fleet was destroyed, to a being, during fierce sub-orbital fighting over the next 48-hours. Then, with their fleet gone, the dirt-side scientists played their last card: a kit-bashed planet-buster that cracked the lab-world into a billion pieces. The titanic explosion killed the surviving scientists and destroyed 95% of the Architect fleet. In the ensuing chaos, a single starship that had been idling in the darkness of inter-system space, powered up its systems and rushed towards the edge of the system.

Somehow--the surviving records are vague on this point--the ship was damaged before it could clear the debris field that was all that remained of the Dyson Swarm and jump to safety. The jump should have put the starship en route to the relative safety of the galactic core--a section of the galaxy that the Architects had lost control of several million years earlier; however, the damaged ship only made it 400 light-years before before its jump-drives failed and it experienced a catastrophic reversion into real-space.

There the Ship remained--its drive systems destroyed, its computer mind slowly decaying into insanity, and its secret cargo locked in stasis--stranded in deep space 300 light-years from the nearest inhabited system, for 200 million years.

Around the time the first dinosaurs were evolving in Triassic South America, the Ship--and its cargo--was discovered by an amphibian-analog species who called themselves the Yar'eeg. The group of amphibiloids that stumbed onto the Ship were members of an exploratory team--the first ever to leave the Yar'eegs' home system. The exploratory team towed the Ship back to their homeworld--no mean feat, when one considers that the Yar'eeg had yet to develop FTL capabilities. (the data is suspiciously silent regarding the physiology of the Yar'eeg and the nature/location of their system).

It took five centuries for the Yar'eeg to reach their homeworld, but upon arrival, the species immediately opened the Ship, and begun to first study, and then experiment on, the cargo they found within.

Records of the Yar'eeg experiments give us our first glimpse into the nature of the Architect's secret creation--a creation that very likely triggered the end of the Architect Empire, for--after the destruction of the research system--the Architects are never mentioned again.

The surviving Yar'eeg records have been heavily processed by the Great Ones--a blessing for humanity, as it turns out, because the Yar'eeg seem to have communicated primarily by color changes in their skin. The records appear to have been translated some 5,000 years ago by a Great One client-race--possibly the Bo'orami--into a text-based language that the FIA was able to render more or less completely into Standard English.

The Yar'eeg described the cargo they recovered from the Ship as a "quantum node". Apparently, the object wasn't an object at all, but a--for lack of a better word--'kink' in the fabric of the universe, a flaw in the space time continuum that the Architect scientists had somehow managed to isolate and sustain inside a [original = ich'thariim] stasis chamber. The Yar'eeg saw the quantum node as a means of achieving FTL travel, and once they had managed to link into the surviving Architect machinery, all of their efforts were directed at turning the quantum node into some sort of propulsion drive.

2,000 years after the node arrived on the Yar'eeg homeworld, the scientists made a break through: the quantum node was divided. At first, the scientists merely divided the node into two identical nodes that inhabited discrete locations in space. The scientists continued to refine the process, and eventually managed to divide the original node into 10,000 identical nodes. From the information pieced together by the Great Ones, it would seem the Yar'eeg were attempting to produce enough quantum nodes to power thousands of ships. Indeed, there is some indication that they did succeed in integrating a handful of the nodes into propulsion drives . . . thought whether the drives were ever actually tested, and whether the ships powered by those drives were for peaceful or military uses, is unknown.

Shortly after the 10,000 nodes were separated, the Yar'eeg were attacked by a marauding, spacefaring race. The nature of the attackers is unknown, but the end result of the attack was extinction for the Yar'eeg and destruction of their homesystem. Their homeworld was sacked, and the special orbital facility that housed the nodes was carried off by the marauders.

For 7,000 years the marauders carried the nodes with them, positioning it in the center of their fleet and worshiping it like a pagan god. Like the Yar'eeg, the marauders did not possess any methods of FTL travel. Instead, they traveled from one star system to its nearest neighbor, harvesting elements and supplies from uninhabited systems, destroying and plundering the homeworlds of inhabited systems. Dozens of generations passed while the fleet moved between the stars, and all the while, they carried the nodes with them. Little else is known about the marauders; apparently, even the technology that carried them through interstellar space was not their own. How and when they came by it is not known.

After 7,000 years, the marauders could no longer sustain themselves, and their society began to fragment. Intermittent fighting burned through the fleet, destroying one ship after another. As the population fell, vessels were scuttled and abandoned. Eventually, even the propulsion drives guttered out, leaving the fleet powerless and drifting. By the time the fleet drifted into the system it had been aiming for, it had become a veritable tomb--the marauders were dead.

The fleet had, by sheer luck, entered into an inhabited system only 78 lightyears from Earth. The denizens of the binary system were a reef-dwelling species semi-analogous to terrestrial crinoids. Because they communicate by passing complex pheromones through water, the species was never named. FIA has designated the species (now extinct) as Crin-1.

At the time the drifting fleet entered their system, the Crin-1 had barely reached a sentient state. 75% of the fleet burned up in the atmosphere of the Crin-1 homworld as its orbit decayed. The (by that time) ancient Yar'eeg vessel that still housed the nodes somehow settled into a stable orbit, circling above the dark world for hundreds of thousands of years as the Crin-1 continued to develop. When the Crin-1 finally began colonizing the low orbit of their world (a period of time techonologically equivalent to the Earth era called the Space Race), they quickly discovered, and began exploring, the wreckage of the marauder fleet.

The physiology of the Crin-1 forced them to build space habitats that could maintain an inner aqueous environment. The difficulties involved with lifting something as weighty as water into orbit proved a challenge to the Crin-1, and it took them several hundreds of years longer than the average species to develop a truly sytem-wide civilization. But, some 300,000 years after the Yar'eeg vessel had settled into orbit over their world, the Crin-1 were sufficiently advanced to begin experimenting on the vessel, and eventually on the nodes themselves.

Crin-1 technology was completely organic--a rarity in galactic civilization, and another factor in the unusually long time it took them to develop a spacefaring culture--and they altered the nodes in a fundamental way. Apparently, by the time they began studying the nodes, the Crin-1 had also made first contact with an alien race. A hostile, alien race. Naturally, the Crin-1 looked to use the nodes as a weapon and a means of defending themselves.

In some way that not even the Great Ones seem to have understood, the Crin-1 linked the nodes to organic matter. The tissue the nodes were linked to, while wholly non-human, seems to have most resembled, at least in function, placental tissue. While the data is scarce, the FIA assumes the Crin-1s' intent was to create living organisms that somehow incorporated the quantum nodes into their neural network. Recent history has given ample demonstration to why such a creature would be of military interest.

However, war broke out between the Crin-1 and their alien aggressors before whatever process the Crin-1 had begun could be completed. Desperate to protect their research from the aliens, the Crin-1 moved the 'nodanisms' to an organic vessel that functioned both as a transport and a sentient laboratory that could continue the Crin-1s' experiments. The living ship was launched from their system back towards the galactic core--once again at sublight speeds.

Damaged as it fled the system, the Crin-1 vessel drifted through space for roughly 240 million years. The organic drives that powered the ship died after only 1,000 years. The creature-vessel was, however, completely sealed, and though its surface froze over, its critical systems and--more importantly--the storage zone, remained intact and semi-insulated. The nodanisms survived.

8,000 years ago, while mankind was busy inventing the wheel and colonizing the Western Hemisphere, the rest of the galaxy was divided by war. The Great Ones were 2,000 years into their conquest of the galaxy, and the only species that offered any real resistance to the Dark Conquerers were the Cham Nar.

The Cham Nar were an ancient race that had developed a far-flung theocratic society comprising some 10,000 star systems and 15,000 sentient species. At the time the Great Ones began spreading out from Tyrion, the Cham Nar were the dominant species in the galaxy.

Inevitably, war broke out between the Great Ones and the Cham Nar. Initially, the two species were evenly matched, and Great One expansion in the Cham Nar area of the galaxy was initially stymied. But as more and more systems fell to the Dark Conquerers, their power swelled, and Cham Nar controlled space slowly became an island in a galaxy dominated by the Great Ones. As their civilization fell about them, the Cham Nar began to search for a means by which they could oppose the Great Ones.

It was during this time that a slave-ship captained by a group of Ruus stumbled upon the dead and frozen Crin-1 vessel. By this time, the Great Ones had already discovered Earth and begun developing the human race as a secret weapon. The Great Ones collected thousands of men, women and children to conduct experiments on, and hundreds of these humans found their way onto the galactic slave market. The Ruus that found the Crin-1 vessel were transporting vat-grown human embryos that were bound for the flesh markets on Daragthar.

The slaveship was large enough to store the Crin-1 vessel within its hold. Logs recovered from the Ruus vessel indicate that the slaver-captain believed the Crin-1 vessel would fetch a high price on the black market. However, the Ruus did not have a chance to make a profit.

The curious Ruus, lured by the treasure they believed to be hidden inside the organic vessel, thawed the Crin-1 vessel out. The ship's neural systems woke up, and--finding itself inside an alien vessel--it initiated a series of defensive protocols. Neural tentacles sprouted from the organic ship and began working their way into the mechanical ship's electrical and computer networks, effectively rendering the Ruus vessel under direct control of the living ship. A biotoxin was released into the air, and within fifty minutes--the time it took for the toxin to permeate the entire vessel--the Ruus crew was incapacitated. The Chin-1 vessel then released a cloud of microscopic spores which, after falling on the comatose Ruus, worked their way into the beings' neural center, where they began to multiply. When the Ruus finally awoke, they had become nothing more than three hundred pairs of eyes, ears, and hands for the Chin-1 vessel.

Having secured its surroundings, the living ship set about fulfilling--as best it could--its secondary mandate: finish the process of transforming the nodanisms into living creatures. The human embryos the Ruus had been transporting made ready subjects into which the nodanisms could be implanted.

Surrounded by lightyears of empty space, the living ship happily went about its work, unaware of the galactic war raging all around it. It was there, hanging in the void of interstellar space, that the 10,000 were finally created.

2,000 years passed, and the failing systems of the Chin-1 ship finally died completely. The Ruus vessel--a shoddy thing of metal and wires--had gone dark centuries earlier. Slowly, both vessels succumbed to the freezing cold of space--only the embryonic chamber that housed the 10,000 remained sealed against the vacuum.

That it was the Cham Nar that found the Ruus slave ship and the Crin-1 vessel inside, and not the Great Ones, is a stroke of blinding luck that simply cannot be ignored. The power of the 10,000 wielded in the hands of the Allmind is too terrible to contemplate.

The Cham Nar, recognizing the power that lay dormant in the embryos, immediately brought the dead Ruus ship and its precious cargo back to their original homeworld, which was at that point, the only remaining world under their control.

It is at this point that the data retrieved from the Blade Ship, and the military installations on Graemarijii and Nexpael XIII, fail us. Circumstantial evidence found in the data (method of recording, timing, language, etc.) suggests that even before the 10,000 were discovered, the Cham Nar homeworld was under siege, surrounded by the full might of the Great Ones. What the Cham Nar intended to do with the 10,000 is a matter of pure speculation.

It is known that the Cham Nar enclosed the Ruus ship--and the Crin-1 vessel it still held-- inside a gigantic craft . . . the alien vessel termed Enigma by its discoverers. Evidence recovered from Enigma indicates that the enormous vessel left the Cham Nar homeworld roughly 6,000 years before the present. The ship sustained damage to its navigation and drive systems that is characteristic of a Blade Ship attack. Carbon samples collected from the damaged areas have been dated at 5987±5 years before the present. The ships' log--crippled at some point--suggests the ship jumped to no less than twenty random star systems before settling down in one undisclosed location for more than four millenia.

Critical systems affected by the final Blade Ship attack began to fail almost as soon as the ship made its first jump. The cursory research conducted on the ship indicates that the ship attempted to repair itself . . . some of the blast damage on the drive units has been repaired on the atomic scale. But the repair systems themselves seem to have been among the first systems to crash.

One thousand years ago the ship had become, for all intents and purposes, a ghost ship. Somehow, the critical systems that protected the Ruus and Crin-1 vessels had remained intact. At that time, the Cham Nar ship was infiltrated by an unknown group of beings who repaired the drive units and jumped the ship into our own system's outermost regions.

The jump signature was detected by a Blade Ship that was monitoring our solar system. Briefly, the two vessels engaged; however, the battle proved to be mutually destructive. The larger, but derelict, Cham Nar vessel was all but destroyed, and the Blade Ship was completely destroyed. The unidentified crew that had piloted the Cham Nar vessel was wiped out in the action, but--again--the quantum nodes, housed in their human bodies, survived.

For a thousand years the Cham Nar vessel orbited our sun, until it was discovered by naval forces of the former United Empire of America.

The subsequent discovery of Enigma and the 10,000, along with the actions of the most notable of the 10,000 during the past few months, are the subject of continued study by the FIA and the Interim Congress.

As more information regarding Enigma and the 10,000 become available, the FIA will submit a revised report to the Interim Congress.

-End of Packet-

Authorized by Rear Admiral James Turner (UFMCOM)