Storyverse
It is the grand last night of celebration before the first sign of the Andromeda fleet's deceleration scatters back to the forward most planet of our galaxy.
Storyverse records the trail of an adolescent gang of three, incarnations of Anakin, Danlo and Muad'Dib, as they flit around the great ceremonial plateau of planet Lockett, visiting topics of extra galactic consequence with other incarnated souls amongst the vast assembled crowd.
How had biological individuals of the human and numerous other sentient species managed to transform their essence into persistent souls which could disperse and merge their stories around the galaxy via a ubiquitous signal beam network?
In the two and a half billion earth years since interstellar colonisation got started, why had we not seen sign of similar networks, nor even their colonising transportation-providing precursors, leaking from any other galaxy, not even from our conspicuously approaching sister Andromeda?
How lucky had humanity been to just survive its long history of illusion so easily spun from groundless language? A seemingly complete theory of cosmogenesis had only become conceivable after a series of convincing theories of the microstructure had been overturned as new mechanisms of separation and reentanglement were elicited at every scale. Yet while there was eventual confidence in the plausibility of a sufficiently stable cosmogenic process to answer "why is there something rather than nothing?" our cosmos appeared to be at least one unviable mutation away from that stable line. Would we ever know for certain whether its initial parameters had been intentionally tweaked?
Was there likely to be another twist or three in the age old quest to understand cosmogenesis? The prevailing theory was generally accepted as placing a duty on the galactic community of souls to use the coming Andromeda merger to try to guarantee a new generation of our line by fine tuning black hole bounce parameters to tolerances that could only be achieved intentionally. Could a way yet be discovered that might allow our souls to incarnate in fertile cosmogenic progeny? And if we could, what might prove to be truly eternal values?
There was an increasingly popular theory that souls from our parent cosmos may have incarnated in other galaxies with means to circumvent the colonisation phase that we had had to invent. Would we see sign of them in our explorations of the Andromeda spiral?
***
Storyverse is narrated by the merged soul of the lead boys from Second, incarnated as a plateau-tolerant sandworm to serve as Muad'Dib's transport for the celebrations around the nominal last night of galactic isolation.
The great Andromeda spiral was already close enough that there was likely insufficient time to achieve any new galactic consensus in the time it would take for the probe fleet, about to confirm the start of its approach deceleration, to respond to a new message from the designated first line of contact planets of the facing zone.
The timing of the reconnaissance fleet had been settled through a billion years of increasing focus, the challenge of guaranteeing signal and booster beam stability for a million years being traded against the benefits of the earliest possible arrival to do a detailed inventory and to deal with whatever answers were found to the mysterious invisibility of any communications technologies emitting from an otherwise entirely comparable galaxy.
While souls integrate knowledge from many incarnations, at any given time and place they most often choose to set themselves up for yet another variation on some particularly significant period from one of their early incarnations.
The narrator and Paul Muad'Dib had long negotiated their coordinated presence at the forward outpost planet Lockett for the celebrations so that they could rerun Paul's first worm ride without any direct dealings with his Atreides and Freemen fellows, nor with his traditional Harkonen enemies. For the ensuing couple of years while the celebrations peaked, he would live as a desert-smart worm rider burdened mostly by his enhanced perspective of the sweep of galactic history.
Only assemblages of tabs, the elemental lifeform from the older civilation's conservation planets, had ever managed to produce credible sandworm/sarlacc incarnations so the merged soul of two boys who consumated the first contact between civilisations had been happy to play Muad'dib's sandworm for many incarnations on many half-suitable planets.
One of the merged boys had been conceived through orphanogenesis in a probe fleet of MASER beam-riding mesh nets near a quarter through the expansion of humanity's technological spawn cloud that was then spreading at first unevenly through our galaxy. The boy had first incarnated as a cricketer so as to play his part in the greeting ceremony between the first and second galactic civilisations.
The other was a tab boy from a conservatory planet established at the end of the galaxy's earlier, truncated expansion by a technical civilisation. He had been recruited to do remote field work which was to confirm the presence of a probe metamorphosising from its mesh-net beam-sailing configruation into a Von Neumann "egg" designed to develop to a maturity where it would seed and power the next wavelet of probes, while reporting back to survey collection centres from whence it had originated.
Muad'dib had also arranged to link up with Anakin who was always happy to have an excuse to reincarnate around the midpoint of his Jedi training, just enough to make him dangerous, but to then go back to building ever better racing pods rather than again running his soul through some variation on the rest of his training. For this particularly auspicious occasion Anakin's new "pod" was closer to being a star fighter and he had hybridised his two famous robots to help fly-drive it.
Through all the many incarnations which Muad'dib and Anakin could map back to, neither had ever before encountered Danlo at a similar young age, though they had come to know his story well enough. Danlo too had decided that it was too auspicious an occasion to miss and wanted to do it without being freshly burdened by the demise of his adoptive Devaki tribe and his escape across the ice to Neverness, trials his soul did not need to reincarnate too often for them to stay with him across the ages.
So these three freshly incarnated into youthful human form found themselves together reexploring a couple of years of adolescent urges while preparing themselves for the peak of the celebrations.
Danlo did not have much need of a worm or a pod for fast transportation. He had crafted skates to function adequately on the more resistant surface of the plateau, had linked up with the soul of a bat-whale from the water planet protocivilisation who was happy to incarnate as Danlo's sled dog for the duration, and had carefully carked into a body that could almost instantly morph between his adolescent human form and that of his great snowy owl doffel Ahira.
***
While we had used the chance for increasingly ambitious rehersal runs as some of our small satelite galaxies were approaching, the 400,000 light year but closing gap to Andromeda presented challenges on another scale altogether. Launching even so vast a fleet of MASER-beam sailing mesh net probes was not significantly different to the process that had been repeated to probe each and every star system in our galaxy. But decelerating them at 400,000 rather than 4 light years was something else again, not that even 4 light years had been easily mastered in another age.
This was not quite a one shot opportunity, but at a million years between shots it would not want to take too many. At interstellar distances it was normal to just leave the booster MASER running and have the probes switch from using it to accelerate to using it to decelerate. But even going to Andromeda, running the initial boost for more than ten years offered rapidly diminishing returns, so the giant MASERs were switched off, replaced with much lower powered tracking beams while the probe nets coasted for half a million years.
But then the MASERs had to be switched back on to provide power for deceleration and timed so that their beams would catch the probe fleet just as the probes had selected their targets. Even the fact that the MASER beams would diverge much more than any previous probes had had to deal with was eventually turned to partial advantage as 10,000 beams all targeted the same narrow region of the giant spiral and the probes could be guaranteed a broad enough swathe within which they could draw power for manouvering and deceleration.
Even between close stars, it had always been more practical to allow more time for deceleration, so for the Andromeda mission the deceleration beams had been left run for 10,000 years at one tenth their original boost power. Yet even that meant they had been turned off 790,000 years before the first reflected beam would announce their successful arrival to the celebration on the plateau. It would take decades of reflected and directly beamed signals to build a picture of the fleet's arrival and likely millennia for confirmation that at least one Von Neumann egg had successfully seeded a first burst of colonisation.
Our galaxy of souls had become so used to routing their updates via thousands of hops to arrive tens of thousands of light years away for coordinated ten year incarnations, that the feat of coordinating MASER beams originating from across a ten thousand light year spread of forward edge star systems went almost unmentioned. It was even less surprising that the date and time of first reflection was known far enough ahead that updated souls from around our galaxy could gather on the planet Lockett's great plateau for the days of celebration, and at any of many many more comfortable venues if being at the very first was less important.
***
Just as at other auspicious moments in natural and civil history, much expectation was being invested in first contact with Andromeda to help resolve the latest versions of many questions that had long preoccupied any who learnt how to ask. Many believed the galaxy of souls to be on the cusp of a final theory, and that the presumed remaining necessary answers would be found quickly by the bridgehead to Andromeda. Many more were already assuming whichever set of answers they were most comfortable with and peddling the influence of whatever conclusions their answers led them to.
The widest range of opinion related to vital spirits. Even the most hard nosed reductionsists had long had to concede that there was no fundamental reason that entities other than strings could conceivable have also emerged from the microstructure, though a hard core still insisted that nothing beyond strings was needed to explain the behaviour of the cosmos at all higher levels. From the other side it was conceded that we might never be able to isolate the hypothesised spirits to the degree needed to reproducibly observe an effect that could not otherwise be explained by string theory, yet another hard core remained convinced that some great spirit assemblage pulled the strings with benevolent intent. Billions of years of historic data from billions of star systems left the question still open, the presumed nature of spirits being such that historic experiments could not be repeated because the spirits themselves were changed by the experiments. The strongest argument remained the importance of creative reentanglement between wildly diverged systems at seemingly all other levels in explaining the complexity of observed self organisation, especially seen against what many still saw as insufficient sources of low level self organisations without at least one more factor.
Certainly there was plenty of evidence from the initial wave of expansion of the second galactic civilisation that colonies could struggle fed only a diet of electromagnetically beamed information, yet prosper following the physical movement of more matter. Of course it had taken the movement of some matter, first configured as mesh nets, to ride a MASER beam, then reconfigured into a Von Neumman egg, to seed a human sourced colony. As expansion progressed, this process had become more and more efficient, at least when measured by generation time and the resources which needed to be harvested in each target system. But the fertility of those seeds had declined unpredictably, though in many ways that was seen with hindsight as a good thing as it allowed sufficient time for greater reflection while colonisation moved more by briefly flowering branches than in a homogenous wave.
The vital spirits were presumed to be patterns in the microstructure which existed outside the energy equations that emerge from string theory to explain our familar conservation law-riddled physics. Spirit patterns were presumed to continually broadcast through the microstructure at its light speed limit through a mechanism which allowed them to reform at ever increasing distances and intervals, at least in those areas of space not significantly disrupted by the flow of the microstructure from sources mostly migrated to and growing in the voids to sinks where mass had collected on various scales. That gravitational flow was hypothesised to concentrate and complexify spirit patterns near the surface of stars and planets, complex patterns in matter catalysing spiritual resonances which might in turn differentially catalyse patterns in matter. From those surfaces, novel spirit patterns might spread out at light speed, reforming at growing intervals, until losing their coherence to accumulated interference from gravitational flow differentials. Certainly historic data seemed to suggest that spirit patterns regenerated less and less effectively at each jump of scale from planetary to stellar to galactic, and that at each scale the chances of regeneration were statistical rather than predictable.
What had happened in practice during the Von Neumann diaspora was that the more vigourous branches constructed a locally powered decelerator earlier rather than later so their parent system could more efficiently project follow up materials. This would have both increased the time in which spirits could become established at each new system and increased the likelihood that spirits would sometimes be transmitted with some of the materials. One body of opinion insisted that the fractal history of galactic colonisation was strong evidence for the inability of complex material organisation to advance in a spiritual vacuum, while another body of opinion bemoaned the almost inescapable implication that would lead to: that our galaxy's spirits had become at best hopelessly cross polluted by the diaspora and at worst efficiently genocidal to whatever natural diversity may have preexisted across billions of naturally quarantined systems. Either way, the diaspora was well down its path of no return two billion years earlier, and now at least the galaxy of souls had the benefit of being able to incarnate into comfortable forms wherever their whims might take them.
Andromeda was another question. Even if the first wave had managed to set up their own decelerator, it would be the best part of a million years until any subsequenly launched material would be likely to reach it. In the interim it was presumed that the beach head would have expanded assisted only by whatever spirits might have made the journey successfully. But the intergalactic fleet had ten thousand points of origin, each of which must have been part of any galactic community of spirits well over a billion years previous. However the galaxy of souls had long given up on bothersome galaxy wide movement of matter between stellar systems, so each settled system had had a long time to diverge spiritually, yet there was no widely accepted evidence that this had occured, especially not since the electromagnetic retransmission network for soul updates had become the only rehomogenising factor.
***
Cosmogenesis and black hole populations
The great show at the centre of our galaxy
Event horizons are relative
Souls incarnating as spirits across cosmogenesis
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Diversity of biogenesis
Tab-like forms
The first stalled expansion
Had the second expansion been about to stall?
Were the first and second closer than statistically likely?
Quarantine relaxation
***
END NOTES