Thursday, July 8, 2021

Microstory 1664: Private Network

When the immortal man created life on a multitude of planets, across thousands of galaxies, in the Composite Universe, he didn’t have many plans to interact with his creations. He figured they could be left to their own devices, and they would rise or fall upon their own merits and mistakes. He didn’t completely abandon most of them, though. For nearly every world, he designed a way to allow his people to reach out to him, if they so wished. Most of them could be found in space, which meant that the people would have to develop enough to actually reach it, but others were near the surface of the world of origin. They would still generally require some level of intelligence, as well as the ability to work together in a team. Still, there were a few planets he chose to ignore, not out of spite or anything, but just to see whether they could find him on their own. They were meant to progress in their own way, and if they eventually became sufficiently advanced—and chose to explore outer space—they could figure it out. It might take them a few thousand years, or more, but neither he nor they were on some kind of time limit. He was destined to live for billions of years, and he had so many other things to worry about, that the outcome of any one race didn’t matter too terribly much. One world discovered how heavily populated the universe was shockingly quickly. Instead of gradually traveling farther and farther from home, they decided to stay on the ground, and focus on finding a way to jump anywhere they wanted instantaneously. This was already possible by way of the Nexus network, but this civilization didn’t have access to that. They had to come up with it all on their own.

They devised a method of sending a vessel to anywhere in the observable universe within a matter of minutes, significantly cutting down travel time, though it was still not quite as fast as a Meganexus, which can do it in seconds. They equipped their vessels with recall mechanisms, allowing it to spontaneously open a new node, and send it back home. They would always have to go back to home base first, but that wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Given enough time, they could construct a new relay point, but they only did that if they felt there was any need, like if they found any other lifeforms at the second location. That was what they were doing; going out in search of friends and allies, but also for those who might threaten them. That was another reason not to build a relay point, because if they maintained control over the technology, a nefarious force was less likely to be able to find them. Of course, they started out at shorter distances, covering their galaxy, before moving onto neighboring galaxies, and beyond. Their creator deliberately spread out his people, so each would have room to grow without worrying about running into diplomatic issues for a while. The intergalactic hoppers were pretty upset to learn that they were alone, even though they weren’t. They created a formula long before that predicted how many worlds should be inhabited, and refined it as variables came in through their travels. Not a single evolved and intelligent soul across millions of light years? The reality was that naturally evolved life was even rarer than that, as this was several  hundred million years before humans evolved on Earth. They came this close to going extinct, and while it’s rather complicated, it was pretty much due to profound loneliness. The few survivors kept going, though, and would later find themselves assimilated into the general population.

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