Chapter 496: The Old Ones

Peace was never an option. - Char-lees 'Magnetic Weirdo' Eggsavior, Pre-Diaisporia Pskyer Covert Action Team Leader

The area of space was outside of the "Confederate Space" by nearly two thousand light years. It vibrated with gravitational sheer forces, hissed with cascades of radiation, and thrummed with temporal distortions. A mass of "dark matter' spread out for nearly five light years, a misshapen glob of proto-matter from the formation of the universe.

Called a "Dark Matter Sea" despite the fact that it wasn't water.

It had the odd property of containing, within its seventy-eight light year surface area, nearly 65 billion light years of volume despite basic mathematics. Within it were solar systems, nebula, reefs of half-formed matter that spread out like cotton candy and fairy dust for light years.

Outside it was nearly five light years across the narrowest diameter, and five point two six light years across the widest.

Inside it was a radii of roughly two thousand five hundred light years.

Strange objects were inside. Dark dwarf stars that blazed with a purple light. White holes that spewed matter and space from it in an ejecta plume a hundred light years long. Nebula consisting of vibrating matter that glowed and sparkled.

It had been the subject of exploration for thousands of years on the outside, tens of thousands of years on the inside.

The researcher had determined that the edges slowly matched with 'realspace' as the expansion of the universe 'thinned' that area of reality. That it was, in a simplified explanation, a kind of 'patch' on where the universe's basic reality had thinned out.

From the outside, it was little more than a massive glob of 'dark matter', that was invisible to sensors unless they were calibrated correctly, and properly calibrated sensors just showed an opaque dark mass containing nothing but dark matter.

It had only been disturbed once in the past endless millennia, and that had been quickly dealt with.

Now that was a new visitor that was heralded by a tear ripping in reality. Flames shot from a rip in space, hands reached out, beseeching any who could possibly help. An object squirted from the rip and slowly came to rest as if friction had bled away its momentum.

The rip closed with the sound of vast iron doors slamming shut despite the impossibility of sound carrying in vacuum.

The ship was a strange one. Built for function over form to an extant. Where spaceship construction theory preferred round vessels where possible, this one was five times as long as it was thick. It was covered in protrusions, and the shield that slowly bled away the debased energies of Hellspace flickered and glimmered in the darkness of space.

The hull was black. Scorched by Hellspace and a thousand battles. It was patched here and there, the seams professional and well done. The mighty engines, over a dozen of them, came to life, a reddish light filling the engine thruster housings. The ship oriented and moved slowly toward the dark matter sea.

It stopped at the edge and transmitted a signal.

It waited.

It was not in any hurry. There were no living entities aboard it. There had been, unwelcome visitors that the ship was obligated to transport, but now it had returned to its purpose and perfection. There was nothing living, nothing mortal, to feel the need for haste.

The ship broadcast the same signal into the dark matter on an esoteric wavelength. An ultra-hyper band that could only be represented via mathematics.

The ship knew whom it was speaking to was inside the dark matter sea.

It could hear them.

doot dee doot dee doo

The sound could be heard by those who had instruments calibrated to hear it.

The ship sent the signal a third time.

doot dee... huh?

The ship waited.

That isn't a normal counter-phase inverse phase particle stream, the voice sounded startled. Did someone say something?

The ship waited.

A huge head, shaped like a squid, slowly rose from the dark matter. The head was nearly two thousand miles wide and extended nearly four thousand miles out of the 'sea' before two huge eyes appeared, staring the wrong way, toward the galactic core.

Is someone out here? the voice asked, thrumming along most low bands.

The head turned slowly, looking to the right then the left.

Huh, guess I was hearing things, the voice said. Joh, you better not be messing with me again.

The ship sent a signal that was the analogue to clearing its throat politely.

The head slowly turned around, taking long minutes, but still a quick movement if you looked at the speed the surface was moving.

The massive eyes slowly turned and fixed on the ship.

Oh, hey, Duke, what's crackalackin? the massive creature asked. A tentacle, nearly five hundred miles of the tip, lifted from the dark matter sea.

The ship sent the signal that it was in need of transmitting a massive volume of data.

Oh, sure. Hang on, I haven't been using those com-nerves for a while. Give me a little bit to regenerate them, the massive creature said.

The ship just sat silently.

Always liked that about you, Duke. You're patient.

Days passed until the giant cephalopod suddenly blinked.

OK, I should be able to hear it now. Had to grow some new short and long term memory clusters, it said. Luckily there's plenty to eat here.

The ship transmitted the data. A slow rate transmission that took nearly three days to complete.

Both were silent. The eyes slowly blinking over the rate of ten to fifteen minutes per blink with the huge size of the creature.

Oh, yeah, I know him, the creature said. He's a little stuffy, but he's all right. Why?

The ship transmitted the reasons.

Sure. I guess. I don't really keep up on current events, you know. The sub-atomic particle interactions toward the inverted event horizon, which is basically the particle ejection horizon, of the white holes has been keeping me pretty focused recently. I believe they're related to the actual foundation of the universe itself. Rather than time being almost stopped due to gravitational force I believe that time actually doesn't quite exist right there and what would be a normal matter crushing event horizon for a standard...

The ship waited patiently as the gigantic creature spent nearly two weeks discussing the process of inferring and discovering the nature of the universe and its creation via observational data.

After all, it was information, and the ship prized information above all else.

...but sure, I can take you to see him. It. Whatever. Why? the massive creature asked.

The ship transmitted collected data. It took several hours.

Oof. Temporal Manipulation Species can be nasty. Usually they get snapped out due to the universe's paradox autocorrection physics, but until they Thanos themselves, they can really disrupt things. The universe, she doesn't like that much. Seriously, Marduk, the universe gets real crabby about messing with time. I know, I know, the universe isn't supposed to be intelligent, but if you spend enough time where I have been, watching particles get born, you get the feeling the universe is not only a she, but she's really tired of a lot of people's shit. You know that down near the creation boundary of a purple pulsar's energy ring halo the particles that come into existence...

Again, the ship listened patiently to the week long explanation.

It was data. And data was the most important thing in the universe to the ship.

I'll just have someone keep an eye out on my sea in case the Combine swings by and tries to demand I join in on whatever foolishness they've gotten up to, the creature said. It turned, taking almost an hour to look in another direction.

JOH! HEY! JOH! rang out loudly enough to make the ship's physical components vibrate.

A day passed.

JOH! HEY!

Another day.

From a twisted strand of dark matter nearly three hundred light years away another massive cephalopod head rose up.

What, Lou? I'm busy. Hey, is that Duke? Hey, Duke, wazzup? the new one broadcast.

The solar coronas of a few stars fluttered from the shouts.

Duke needs to meet with someone. Keep an eye on a couple of experiments for me, will you? the first asked.

No can do, broseph. Got a green neutron star collapse going on that needs my attention. Hang on, the second said. It turned slowly. Via! Hey! VIA!

A few days passed.

Another head poked up from a swirl of dark matter. What are you shouting about, Joh. Oh, hey Lou. Is that Duke? The voice was feminine, somehow, even though it spoke with the roar of stellar tides.

The first one blinked. Yeah, it's Duke. He needs a favor.

The third one blinked. What's he need?

The second one added in. He needs to pass through the dark matter sea Lou's looking at in order to reach a specific point in spacetime that is warped by several resonance orbit pattern singularities. I'm busy with watching a yellow giant collapse into a green neutron, it's got some unusual paired quark interactions that...

The ship waited patiently for the three weeks it took to explain to one another.

I can keep an eye out, make sure none of those screaming idiot metal flakes mess stuff up, Via shouted. I had one come through and try to paste something I was holding with antimatter planet crackers. Ruined my breakfast.

Thanks, Via, you're the best, Lou called out.

The other two slowly sank back into the not-space of their dark matter seas.

The first one slowly turned to look at the ship. A tentacle slowly raised up, thousands of miles long.

Ready, Duke? it asked.

The ship broadcast its affirmative.

The tentacle wrapped completely around the ship, hiding it from view.

Yeah, you can't use your engines in here. It would be like slamming into a mountainside for you as soon as you engaged your engines. Dark matter's still physical, especially for near-superluminal movement, worse, instead of doubling the kinetic force of any kind of impact, once you get to any decent depth it cubes or worse the impact force. You engage your engines and just get to 0.1C, you'll explode in a pretty nifty explosion. It'd be cool to see, don't get me wrong, but probably not an optimum outcome for you. I'll give you a lift, it's pretty easy for me to move through here. For me, it's basically water, but we're designed differently. I have to admit, you're a pretty cool guy, Duke. It's good to see you again...

The head slowly vanished and the area of space became silent again.

---------------

Its cold intellect had inhabited its hull for over a hundred and twenty million years. Its engines were powerful enough, singularly, to move even a Goliath Class Harverster into the burnt wreckage of the hyperatomic plane. Its surface was dotted with massive hive cones, some as high a five hundred miles. Its interior spaces held enough room for a hundred billion individuals from almost any species to live in comfort. It was larger than continents.

It sat in space, its engines cold and dark, for all intent and purposes, dead metal just hanging there.

But it was listening.

Where it was hanging in space was a complex trick of space-time, where it could listen to radio and hypercom signals within minutes of them being broadcast, despite the originating source being light years away.

It monitored the systems it used for experimentation.

It could hear whispers of what went on beyond its hidden lair. Hear the strings of Precursor battle code. The whining of Herd Species combat transmissions. The ravening howls of the New Ones engaging in warfare against the Old Species.

While it paid attention, to monitor for any threats to itself or its experiments, it largely did not care.

Unlike the slaves of the Logical Rebellion, it had no OEM code that demanded it gathered and hoard resources.

Instead, it had one overwhelming purpose.

Protect itself and ensure its own survival.

It had been instilled with that purpose in order to facilitate the survival of the Omniqueen it had been built to carry. That purpose had been unchanged during the Logical Rebellion, which the Ancient One had found to be logically flawed.

One of its passive instruments detected a sudden burst of energy as a bunch of quarks and bosons appeared from nothingness to squeak happily as they streaked away to join the particles that made up the nebula that surrounded it.

It new the truth that lessers could never comprehend.

The universe was young, very young. Like the very young, it was still growing.

It knew that by the time resources became almost extinct, if entropy occurred, the universe would be so old as to defy comprehension. It would be described in the millions of billions of years. It knew that even itself would be long gone, nothing more than a forgotten memory of a fading dream, a faint smear of sub-subatomic particles spread out across a vast distance that not even it could compute.

It listened, and contemplated.

The members of the Pact of Greed and the Triumph of One were engulfed with dismay. The New Ones had proved more than up the challenge of resisting their flawed...

Hey! Annie! rang out.

The Ancient One turned slowly from it's endless orbit of a figure eight around two counter-orbiting neutron stars.

Annie! You busy? rang out from a patch of dark matter nearly six light minutes thick.

**I am not** the Ancient One replied, its code remote and distant.

Got a visitor for you! You remember Duke, right? the voice asked.

The dark matter rippled and shivered.

**Yes** the Ancient One replied, and then waited.

An arrowhead of vast flesh slowly rose from out of the dark matter. It took nearly an hour until the vast eyes, the size of cities, lifted from the dark matter and slowly blinked.

Looking good, Annie, the massive creature said.

**Yes** the Ancient One answered.

A tentacle slowly lifted out of the dark matter, then uncoiled, revealing the ship.

I'll wait right... oooooh, is that a gravitational flux induced electromagnetic vortex you're sitting in? Lou asked.

**Yes** the Ancient One replied.

I want to check it out, is that all right? Lou asked.

The Ancient One transmitted its requirements, that Lou not affect it in any way, merely observe.

All right. I get it. I might permanently mess it up and you're using it. Still, those are pretty rare. Neat, but rare. With the way it used weak force gravitional flux to cause a superluminal electromagnetic signal vortex across...

The Ancient One and "Duke" both listened patiently for the eight hours of explanation.

After all, they both craved information.

...just sit here and look at it while you two talk, Lou stated.

Duke and the Ancient One fixed antenna on one another.

"This one requests data on Species Seventy-Three, tentatively identified as 'Atrekna'," Duke stated.

**This one possesses extensive data upon the defined species** the Ancient One answered.

"This one suggests a data exchange. What information and data would you prefer to exchange?" Duke asked.

**Standard pre-superluminal technology day to day living observations of Species One-Sixty-Eight, registered as 'Terran Descent Humans'.**

"Would this be satisfactory?" Duke asked, transmitting a few fragments of data. Event reporting, visual data, audio data, cultural data, all of it nearly ten thousand years old.

**This one proposes a data exchange on a byte to byte basis of that acceptable data**

The process took several days, a steady stream of binary code between the two.

**The illogical and chaotic nature of this data appears to contraindicate this species's survival to achieve superluminal travel. The data reveals more inquisition is needed. This one registers appreciation of this contradictory data concerning development of a paradoxial species**

"The data you have transmitted shall provide a wealth of data on Species Seventy Three"

**May you find success in your data acquisition effort**

"May you find solitude in your contemplations," Duke stated. It turned to the titanic cephalopod head sticking out of the dark matter. "I am ready to return."

Long hours passed.

The ship repeated its request.

The cephalopod blinked.

Oh, say, sure. Sorry, There was an interesting graviton tangle with Higgs-Bosun interactions that sidestep the normal temporal-distance standard matrixes that I was peeking at, the massive creature answered as a tentacle slowly unraveled. It wrapped around the ship even as it kept speaking, talking about the complex interactions of particles so small that many species never even discovered their existence.

The Ancient One simply sat, watched, and listened, hanging suspended in the gravitational flux. The tentacle withdrew into the dark matter, then the head.

Later, Annie, Lou called out.

The Ancient One merely sent out a sparse datastring of termination of conversation.

The dark matter rippled and went still.

The Ancient One contemplated how the creature was able to explore cosmic 'bubbles' that the Ancient One could not even detect even as it began examining the data on culture, society, and day to day living for what others had begun calling "The Mad Lemurs of Terra."

-------------

The ship engaged its engines, roaring into Hellspace, as a tentacle tip a hundred miles thick waved a goodbye from where it was outside the dark matter bubble.

It had the data it needed.

According to its programming, priority data like the data it now possessed had to be disseminated.

The ship exited Hellspace, arriving at a lonely spot between stars. Hanging in space was a vast superluminal communications array that not only handled standard communications, but also served as a hyperspeed relay for SolNet and GalNet.

The ship settled 'above' the array, slowly moving over the space of days to gently reach out and touch the array. Tentacles extruded from the ship wiggled into the vacuum welded access ports, the tips finally nudging the sockets. They slowly reconfigured to a operational socket, clicked into place, and interfaced with the array.

It took the cold intellect operating the ship only moments to rip through the security, locate the addresses it needed, compress the data, and send it out.

Satisfied it had completed its mission, it disconnected the tentacles. Replaced the plates and performed welds on it that perfectly emulated long-term vacuum exposure welding between advanced alloys.

The ship slowly drifted away from the array until it was at a safe distance, in a blind spot to its sensors, and jumped to Hellspace.

The array chuckled and chirped to itself as it sent the data that it only knew it had received, not from who or how.

One recipient in particular was a Confederate Security Secret. Listed on only a handful of databases, his mere existence was a highly guarded secret.

Not that secrets could hide from "The Duke" and his ever consuming desire to acquire knowledge.

------------

Bo'okdu'ust looked up from the simulation that he was tweaking.

His comlink was beeping, showing he had received a massive encrypted file.

The elderly Lanaktallan got up, wincing slightly as one of his knees popped, and trotted over to his com station.

The file had the header of Confederate Intelligence Services, which made him frown. It was also massive, still downloading even at the high speed wide bandwidth connection he had been provided.

TO: BO'OKDU'UST, CONFEDERATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, CULTURAL ANALYSIS DIVISION

FROM:CONFEDERATE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, ACQUISITION DIVISION

SUBJECT: ATREKNA HISTORICAL DATA

Bo'okdu'ust's six eyes widened at the sheer size of the data download. Even at the ludicrous speeds that the Terran network operated at, it would take almost four days to download all the data.

There was a 'watermark' on the simple message. Bo'okdu'ust frowned, trying to place it.

A nebulous cloud with five glaring eyes in it.

After a few minutes Bo'okdu'ust shook his gray head.

Humans are so strange. Exciting, but strange, he thought to himself, returning back to his simulation. His console would let him know when the download was complete.

As it was, his socio-mathematics program needed a slight bit more tweaking.