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After the Atmospheric Kugelblitz Black Hole event, Sugar had to sit down
with Liselot to understand what they lost, and why it was more important
than it sounded. Near the equator of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida once lay a
country called Eyrenland. They named it after the indigenous wildlife, or
more specifically, what they produced. The uquira and uquirapods had an
evolutionarily interesting dynamic.
They didn’t adhere to Earth’s rules of biology and taxonomy. Some were
plants, and some were animals, but only as the closest analogs to human
comprehension. Their reproductive cycle was multi-faceted, but what the
locals and consumers cared about were the eyren. They most closely resembled
eggs. They had a shell—which was iridescent and beautiful—a
white—which was actually more tan—and a black yolk. The yolk actually
kind of looked gross and rotten, but it was perfectly healthy, and
irrefutably tasty.
When the yolk was touched by a tongue, it didn’t simply taste like whatever
it tasted like. It reacted with the taste buds, providing them with whatever
they preferred and desired most. It behaved less like a food, and more like
a drug. It activated pleasure chemicals in the brain, creating a sense of
euphoria and peace without limiting the user’s faculties, or inhibiting
their judgment. It was a miracle food, and the most popular import across
the stellar neighborhood. For centuries, philosophers believed exporting and
importing would be irrelevant at interstellar levels, but people were
determined to make it make sense, and the eyren trade was the result of
those efforts.
Sugar asked why these special eggs couldn’t simply be reverse-engineered in
a lab. Technically they were, but that defeated the purpose. Everything was
composed of chemicals; nothing was made of magic. Anything that existed
could be recreated from scratch. And to be sure, there were plenty of people
who got their hands on the formula so they could do exactly that. But
transhumans could also just flip a switch in their brains and release
whatever hormones they wanted. They could literally trigger an orgasm with a
single thought. That wasn’t the problem. Consumers wanted real eyren
because they valued authenticity. The bounded source and finite supply were
precisely what gave it its value. And now that was almost all gone, thanks
to the AKBH.
Eyrenland served as the intake region for the whole world. They had a few
space elevators for redundancy purposes, but the default was to come through
here, specifically so they would be close to the uquira. They did it for the
same reasons ancient museums often placed their exits in the gift shop. The
refugees from Proxima Doma and Doma Tertia were given a patch of land to
start their new lives here, so they lost their homes for a third time, which
would be profoundly hilarious if it weren’t so sad. When they showed back up
on the ship that brought them to this planet in the first place, they were
pissed to say the least. They would have rioted had their numbers been
greater.
That wasn’t to say the non-refugees were any happier. They just lost their
homes, and they demanded to know why. The Interim Axiom of Eggs and First
Axiom had to teleport up to Sugar’s ship to keep them calm so Axiom of
Astronomy Liselot could explain what went wrong. Until today, they had no
reason to believe that a KBH would enter the atmosphere. She strongly
suggested that they be grateful for their lives. Not everyone there was
streaming their consciousness to backups, and they would not have
survived had Sugar not stepped in. Even then, some assumed that it was
somehow her fault, only because of the suspicious timing.
There was a secondary source of eyren, clear on the other side of the world.
Researchers were still trying to figure out how two separate populations of
uquira/uquirapods managed to evolve so far from each other. Sugar could find
out relatively easily with a bit of time travel, but she didn’t bring that
up because she didn’t care and had more pressing matters on her mind. The
Eyrenland farmers insisted that Sugar teleport them down to Quiratan, but
that did not seem like the right thing to do.
Farmers were already living there, and were evidently more concerned with
preserving the ecology. They harvested eyren too, and exported what they
couldn’t consume themselves, but they didn’t scale to meet demand. They
mostly stuck to themselves, and didn’t participate on the world stage. Vantu
became extraordinarily protective of the Quiratani after being asked to
basically use their immense power to kick the locals out. He took a shuttle
down to show any would-be invaders that they would do well to stay out. For
now, Axiom of Eggs Antinan and the Eyrenlanders were heeding the warning,
but Van had to remain, leaving Sugar mostly alone on the ship.
It was fine, everything was automated. It wasn’t like Sugar had to babysit
all the equipment. The KBHs were still arriving, but they were incrementally
improving warning times, and none so far had appeared as close to the planet
as the AKBH. They did not believe it would likely happen again. There was
just too much other space, and while a pattern had not yet presented itself,
lightning proverbially never struck twice. Fending them off had become
routine to the point of monotonous, which was not good. That was why it was
so important to complete that modified defense grid. Their ship was the only
one capable of reaching the source, and it was now time to do just that.
While they were predicting and deflecting the onslaught, Sugar was also
trying to track where they were coming from. She thought, with enough data,
she would be able to determine the answer, but it wasn’t there. There was no
interstellar signature, or anything. She had come to realize that the
only way to locate it would be to push one back through its portal, like she
did with the AKBH, but this time, follow it through.
“That’s suicide,” Liselot warned. “And don’t argue that you’re backed up
like everyone else; it probably doesn’t work like that. We were recently
discussing the signal interference that it was causing. You will not likely
beam back here. You will simply die.”
Liselot did not know about the afterlife simulation, which could capture
one’s consciousness from anywhere in the galaxy, and Sugar didn’t think it
was wise to tell her. There was a reason the architects kept it a secret.
People were only meant to go there if all else failed. Still, it meant Sugar
couldn’t explain why she wasn’t worried about the mission. She would have to
make her case another way. “I’ll be fine.” Oh, how clever.
“I’m going with you,” Liselot insisted, “and I will not be arguing with you.
I know you have the power to magically send me back down to the surface, but
that would violate my autonomy. I’m still upset that you tried to convince
me that Van was a hologram when we first met. I want to go, and I want you
to respect that.”
“I don’t want to argue with you either,” Sugar began, “but you literally
just said that I was gonna die. So am I the fool for going, or are you for
coming with me?”
“Both,” Liselot answered. “Where I’m from, we believe that every day past
120 years is a gift. Our ancestors could only dream of reaching such ages,
and for the vast
majority of human history, that was close to the hard limit. If I die
now...” She shrugged. “Well, I’ve surpassed it many times over, so it’s
nothing to cry over. If it’s my time, I’m ready.”
Sugar shook her head. “I won’t violate your autonomy, even though as captain
of this ship, it is well within my rights to decide who boards and who
doesn’t.” She looked over at the screen showing a KBH’s pending arrival.
“You have a couple minutes to change your mind, though.” She tapped a
button, causing a bridge escape pod to open. “This will teleport you clear
of the event horizon through burst mode until it makes it back to the space
station. The ship, meanwhile, will be so close to the singularity, that even
when I push it back, the gravity will be too strong for me to escape.”
Liselot nodded and stepped towards the pod before turning around to face
Sugar. “I made up my mind before you told me what you were gonna do. I knew
you would do it eventually. Don’t think I came to this decision on a whim.”
“Very well.” Sugar teleported the whole ship to the next arrival point.
While they were waiting, she walked around the console holding her new
device. “It’s preprogrammed, but if you’re coming, you need to get in here
too. It’ll be a tight fit.”
“What is it?” Liselot asked, looking at the unfamiliar gizmo.
“Personal equilibrium generator.” Sugar attached it to her arm, activated
it, then hugged Liselot tightly. The small egg-shaped energy field began to
emanate from it. She held Liselot even tighter once they saw quite how small
it was. They held onto each other and watched as the KBH appeared out of
nowhere, and the ship began to shake around them. They couldn’t feel a
single thing; it was like they weren’t even really there.
Sparks flew as inessential systems crashed under the weight of the
gravitational disturbance. The ship lurched forward as it fell towards the
center. Attitude control worked overtime to make sure the particle beam
continued to focus on its target, with a little bit of leeway compensated
with a gyroscope. The black hole fell back into its portal, dragging the
ship along with it. Within seconds, they were in the wormhole. It took a
surprisingly long time. Wormholes weren’t instant—they both obviously knew
that—it was just taking longer than expected.
At last, they flew out of the tunnel, back into normal space. The ship
stopped shaking, so Sugar deactivated the equilibrium generator. Sensors
which had been gathering data the whole time were blinded for a moment while
they recalibrated. Once they determined that it was safe, the viewscreen
turned itself back on, and showed them where they were. They were entering
orbit around a planet. The sensors still didn’t know where it was, or how
far they had traveled from Tau Ceti. That was odd too, because a simple star
chart reference should have come up with an answer rather quickly. It
was picking up infrastructure, though. Whatever world this was, it
was clearly inhabited.
An unknown vessel came up and matched the ship’s vector. The strangers
opened their weapons...and fired.
