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This short story is based in part on an as-yet unpublished proposed formal solution to the Fermi Paradox.
Dedicated to the memory of 'Predator', who now won't be researching the biology of immortality after all.
Source: http://everist.org/texts/Fermis_Urbex_Paradox.htm
Acres of it, millions of books. Given the context, very likely a collection representing the entire history of cultural and scientific works of these people. All gone now, of course. Much, much too late for any chance of data reconstruction from the residue. As usual. The probability of arriving 'in time' is so vanishingly small. I'm lucky enough to find it now, before crustal plate subduction had a chance to work its crushing, melting magic and erase all traces of this place. Not lucky enough though, to arrive within the so-brief data integrity lifespan of paper. Given the presence of moisture and mildew that would be a few hundred years at most. A mere blink of an eye in the greater scale of things, and as always I'm too late. Looks like about 300,000 years too late this time, which is frustratingly close and much better than my running average of about 8 or 9 million years too late, but still definitely no cigar.
One faint possibility remains. I fan out, sending units along each of the passages, scouring, no longer so mindful of preserving layered but hopeless dust piles. Notably, the entire library has no reading rooms. No front foyer, no checkout desk, no staff kitchen, no toilets. No sign of any lighting system even. Not that I was expecting such features, given what it's already clear this place is. Here and there, an inconsistent pile of rust flakes evidencing steel alloys different from the shelving, and assorted other decomposition products of aluminium, plastics, copper, silicon, a few pieces of optical glass, and so on. After mapping the entire level about 30 of these turn up, more or less randomly scattered through the grid of tunnels. Apparently these library mechanisms didn't play any role in the last defensive battle. They'd have been bunched up somewhere if they had, but then it was already obvious the conflict mostly passed this place by. Apart from a few localized patches near the main access shaft with high levels of carbonization, this level didn't burn. Must have had a mostly inert atmosphere at that time, or the fires would have spread throughout the entire matrix of tunnels. The robotic mechanisms didn't need oxygen.
Nor does their distribution help me with my search. I'm looking for the place where the sole purpose of this library would have come to a focus. It must have been somewhere here, if my own experience was anything to go by. What I'm eager to discover is, what was the physical format used, did it last, and if so where are they? Personally I'd have put the capture systems somewhere near the center of the grid, for efficiency's sake. But here there's nothing unique at the center, and anyway long experience has taught me the folly of projection; of expecting others to think like me. Or like humans either, for that matter.
Eventually it turns up. Off to one side of the regular grid, a line of small, short tunnels access a number of seemingly identical chambers that from the variety of residues seem to have been storage spaces for maintenance supplies. Yet one of the tunnels has a significantly greater amount of traffic wear on the floor than the others, and much less mass of decayed debris within the chamber. It also turns out to have its own small borehole leading downwards, which seems to have once carried cables and optic fibers. Before it was explosively sealed.
Oh well. Looks like I won't be seeing the library end result for a while yet. Just for completeness I scour the damp grunge littering the floor, and find eight fair-sized glass lense sets, more or less in a line across the room. Each in association with concentrations of various oxides and traces that say 'scanners' clearly enough. Only eight? It's kind of surprising. Must have thought he had lots of time to do the job. And maybe he did complete it, maybe he didn't. The only certainty is he didn't have as much time as he thought.
For my part, I have unlimited time to explore this history. It had taken me several years of this planet's orbit to map the surface and do preliminary archaeological investigations of the surface ruins. Gradually a picture developed of the conditions at the end. A fairly typical case - combined bio and nuclear weapon usage, worldwide. But there had been an anomaly. Evidence of some conflict elements, all focused on one location and unrelated to the larger scale events. A single site remote from cities and any industrial center, with remnants of military wreckage that seemed to mix components from all the major combatant forces. All barely discernable now after such long exposure to weathering and regrowth of the forest - just volumes of impurities in the soil mostly. And the glassy patches left by assorted nukes. In the center of this battlefield, one particularly large glassified crater - but within it, clear evidence of further activity. It had been puzzling for a while, till I realized the smaller nuke craters within the larger were intended as engineering excavations, not strikes. And that within one of them, were further traces of long-decayed heavy machinery. Digging machines! They had been serious enough about something to actually dig into the radioactive hell of a large nuke crater, first with smaller nukes to crack the glassy skin, then massive earth moving machinery and armored vehicles.
It was all eroded more or less flat again now, just a forest with some oddly round lakes and an inconveniently high background radiation level. I had to do some major landscape modification myself to uncover the remnants of what they had been so desperate to reach - the tunnel down. Or what was left of it. By now it was merely a zone of fractured rock mixed with sediments, declining in a wide spiral down into the crust.
More than just a tunnel remnant though. A corkscrewed battlefield. As I re-excavated with fusion torch boring machines vitrifying solid walls on the new shaft, I found myself cutting through countless remnants of armored digging machines, dismembered and crushed by explosives. It was hard to tell if they had been manned or automated, but it seemed likely they were manned. Suicidal desperation, digging down towards something that was fighting back with equal determination to not be reached. I was starting to have a bad feeling about what had motivated these diggers to such extreme sacrifice.
Finally, around two and a half kilometers down, I broke through to the first section of uncollapsed tunnel. Hmm... Fusion torch vitreous lining, much the same as my digging technology. Interesting that the attackers didn't seem to have such things, but the architect of this place did. The defending force hadn't blown the tunnel here, but they hadn't entirely run out of effective capabilities either. The place was a ruin, dense with relics of heavy battle. Both sides had clearly suffered very heavy losses here, and my suspicion was getting stronger. The new types of battle machinery I was finding here, all on the defensive side, although destroyed in action and corroded almost to dust were very clearly fully automated. Definitely no crew spaces. They'd fought well too - wrecks of the attackers from the surface outnumbered defender wrecks at least ten to one. By now this was giving me nightmares - horrible 'what if' dreams and simulations from my own past. Would I have lost like this?
This heavy battle zone extended only a couple of hundred more meters down the decline. Apparently that was all the armored defensive units available. Then there was another length of explosively collapsed tunnel, through which the attackers had dug a smaller shored-up way. This had since collapsed again, but just from decay. More fusion torch digging for me, this time emerging into a section with only damage from relatively light weapons. Defensive units here were mostly unarmored, in forms that suggested stretched resources, improvisation, and throwing last reserves of factory and general purpose servitors into the fray. Much more even kill ratios, even starting to favor the attackers the further in I went.
Then finally, the Complex itself. The first level was mostly general purpose manufacturing and stores. The battle had continued throughout it, mostly involving intense but light weapon fire. Here and there evidence of heavy explosions, probably from the attackers clearing out defensive pockets. This level was very extensive, with branches heading off in all directions. Some major radial tunnels extended for kilometers, with clusters of operational caverns spread along them. All had been breached by the invaders, methodically destroying all.
When I found the spaceships I knew my guess was correct, and how the rest of this would go. Near the end of one of the wider radial tunnels was a set of five large caverns in a circle, with smaller workshop caverns strung around the outside of the circle. In each of the five bays was a Ship. Or there had been before they were very systematically destroyed by the invaders with demolition charges, then suffered 300,000 years of corrosion.
Each Ship had been a cylinder with two equal hemisphere ends. Each identical, almost featureless on the outside, they'd rested horizontally on floor supports, aligned with openings in the caverns large enough to fit their twenty meter diameters. Those giving access to one cavern central to all the five, from which another tunnel led upwards at an almost vertical incline. Below which lay the ruins of the complex's fusion torch tunneling machine, where it had apparently been blown violently from that upward shaft. While operating too, judging by the curving sweep of fusion flame erosion across the wall of the chamber, and the damage to the machine consistent with an uncontrolled fusion quench as the tunneler was destroyed.
This tunneling torch thing would have made a great weapon, back in the entrance decline. That it wasn't used there could only mean its use here was considered more urgent. Trying to cut an escape route to the surface, to free these five ships for their intended first flight. So at least one, possibly all of them must have been already operational. All that battle and commitment of every workable mechanism to the fight must have been a desperate holding action, hoping to keep the intruders away from these ships. Sending a probe up the steep, rough-cut escape tunnel, I find it goes up nearly two kilometers. So close...
Sifting through the shattered, crumbling fragments of the ships, I find pretty much what I'd expected. The five are identical, which greatly aids in deriving their original plan from the pieces. Fusion powered scalar-gravitic drives, well in advance of the technology in evidence elsewhere in this planet's ruins, and not a bad effort at all, considering. Compact automated general purpose fabrication plants, nicely done. Very large ranks of storage areas, obviously intended for long-flight consumables but mostly empty. Probably figured he could stock up later, further out in the system. Massive installments of computational equipment, based on an optical switching technology similar to a type I often find in civilizations around this stage. Unfortunately the form of 'non-volatile' storage used in this instance wasn't. All now faded to random noise, nothing recoverable, even if the storage banks weren't splattered all over the walls. There'd been space provision for much larger banks of data storage, but I guess there wasn't time to populate those either.
Once done with the ships I'd ventured further down the main decline, to the next deeper level of the complex. There wasn't really any reason for not proceeding with multiple fronts of exploration simultaneously, but sometimes I like to work one step at a time, just for old time's sake. Especially here, where it had become obvious I was stepping into a great and tragic story. Out of respect, and also to make any possible future retelling simpler, it seemed like a single continuous focal point was better suited to the situation.
And so to the Library. Where the main hope from the start was that the fragile data storage technology in the ships wasn't the only method known in this place. Unfortunately it was worse. All paper, no digitized storage systems present in the library at all! Strike two, and chances of finding what I wanted not looking good at all.
Level three turned out to be heavy industrial. Smelting furnaces, foundries, and far-reaching ore mining tunnels. There'd been little conflict here, since by the time the invaders reached this level the defense seemed to have exhausted virtually all its mobile units. Nor had the invaders bothered much with demolition. Perhaps they had mostly pushed on downwards to level four, and in reaching it had caused all opposition to collapse. Level Four was where my almost-brother had waited to die. This level was mostly another regular grid of tunnels, containing much the same thing throughout. Processing units. Endless banks of them. In some places they weren't awfully corroded, and I could walk among them seeing this place as it must once have been. Here also there was no lighting installed, since no need of it. The processing units were fairly heat efficient and yet in such numbers they required a flow of cooling air. Trays along the tunnel walls, carrying thick bundles of power cables and optical fibers. It would have been quiet here, only the whisper of air breezing along the dark passages and the hum of distant blower fans. There was no evidence of any kind of direct battle in these spaces, only the remnants of small explosive EMP generators that had been fired in most of the tunnel intersections. I suppose it was a quick and painless death, after a long, hard fought battle.
The same recording system was used here, with the same total loss of all data content. I found the Library end product, I think. A medium sized cavern that had once held ranks of shelving, stacked with data storage media. The shelves had decayed to piles of dust, the media dissolved and useless. Probably these were intended to be replicated and loaded into the five ships, if there had been time. The mind of this failed pioneer, and all the works of his birth culture, all gone...
Rest in peace, my almost friend.
The inner container was originally refrigerated to near absolute zero by its own fusion powered heat pumps. It had apparently not been singled out by the attackers. However there had been some fighting nearby in this cavern, and the refrigeration had failed when a single ricochet projectile penetrated the unit at some point during the conflict. Now the contents are only ancient residues. One tiny hole let in thousands of years of damp, chemical diffusion and entropy. The innermost containers were never airtight, presumably relying on the cold and inert gas fill for preservation. Long gone to ruin by the relentless molecular churn of mildew and microbes, searching for the last shreds of chemical bond energy. Fragments of skeleton, disintegrating to powder under their own weight. The body a vague outline only, stains and mounds of bacterial poop spread out in the bottom of the casket. Bipedal, skull-structure at top end, possible two upper limbs. Even retrograde statistical modeling won't help build a picture of what this guy looked like beyond that. Doesn't matter; during the search of this deep hideaway other elements of myself elsewhere on the planet had found a few surviving images of this race sculpted in noble metals. They were not at all human looking, naturally enough.
Also immaterial. Here in this casket lie the remains of the closest thing I have found to a true brother, in eons of searching. Normally I operate in an emotion-free configuration, but now as a form of salute to this individual I engage all 'feeling' subsystems and unify for a while all my processing nodes across the entire system. As one consciousness, I contemplate the long-dead fellow with a sense of the tragedy here and deep sadness.
Nice try, mister. You nearly made it, didn't you? You burrowed deep and went fully machine-form for the transition to space, but they found you and pulled you down into the mud and stupidity of their tribal bio and nuclear terminal wars. You were so close...
Here as always through this complex I am recording. In this chamber I up the bandwidth to maximum, capturing in 3D scans down to micron resolution. The whole site is a rare find, a crucial proof. Almost a second instance, perhaps just a few tragic months short of success. This 'shoebox' contains the origin of his story, and in a way, its end. Opening the chests, examining contents, I strive for maximum archaeological data recovery. Mostly organic materials initially, nearly everything decayed to slime and dust. Some surviving ceramics, some inert metals, a few pieces of stable plastics, everything else frayed to molecular pieces. Paring delicately down through the layers of atoms of the residue in the trunks, running backwards simulations of possible original forms. This pattern of iron oxides there, among the crumbled fragments of depolymerized plastics - a miniature wheeled vehicle, simplified to surface planes only. A child's toy truck. A mess of fungal organic products, with complex layering interleaved with fragments of laminar plastics and traces of pigment residues - a photo album, images recoverable only in uselessly blurred ambiguity. Some gold items resembling jewelry, including a simple ring. A few of the chests once apparently filled with books, now become a slurry of rot. The treasured formative texts and perhaps works of a mind that tried to liberate itself from mortality, all gone. Another filled with trinkets and knickknacks, the sentimental accumulations of a biological lifetime, now only bio-gunk. I strain with all my vast processing resources to improve the recovery resolution, but to little avail. Too late, too late, your treasures did not make it to digital immortality. I am sorry, my friend.
Mister, did you think you could carry these physical memories with you on your journey, even frozen? You'd soon have learned. These and dust and ashes too, would become relativistic ionized fireworks by the cold law of dice rolled over and over. Or was that your intent, to cast your relics to the interstellar winds? And so it shall be. A far grander burial than moldering forever deep in the crust of a planet. This was surely not your choice of final resting place.
Among muck with residual vegetable fibrous structure and gene fragments consistent with a plant commonly used by these people for woven cloth, lies a set of small glass spheres. Mostly a common diameter, a few larger, containing whirls of different coloured glass, surfaces polished but pocked with many small impact crazes. Thousands of lightyears and millions of years from home, marbles. Marbles, again... Wishfully I hold one after another to a reader, painstakingly resolving the solid structure to nuclear levels, analyzing and marveling. Is this what it comes down to? Intelligence, then marbles, then nothing? Every time, on every world that reached the threshold, I find marbles. But never more than random whirls of colour; empty, even in this mausoleum to near success. Where I hold my breath in hope, metaphorically speaking.
Thinking softly to the ghost of my near-brother "You wanted to see the stars. I'll never meet you there, but I can carry the story of your attempt with me, and your empty marbles too. I'm acquiring quite a collection of them, marbles stored in marbles. So why the hell didn't it occur to you to try recording data in stable glasses, eh? You could have seen the universe in person despite these little setbacks like being blown up and lying dead for hundreds of thousands of years, if you'd just stashed even one complete copy of yourself somewhere. You dummy. Didn't anyone ever tell you to make backups?"
Oh well. It seems he was very pressed for time. Whether he'd had a chance to begin abstracting and paring his consciousness, or whether he was running something like a full simulation of his original biological mind on those banks of computing gear, who knows. It's not easy to tell from these ruins if he'd even developed his genetics skills enough to allow construction of consciousness-linked bodies, or if he was running this whole place purely with animatronics. Seems he'd at least started on the biology work, judging by the bio-lab. The ruins worldwide seem to date the same as this place, so it looks like mutual simultaneous annihilation of this fortress by nukes and massed suicidal military penetration, and the rest of the civilization apparently by some sort of very rapid biological contagion, combined with a few nuclear strikes. With no records of the events surviving other than the ruins themselves, there's no way to unravel the sequence exactly. But making a guess, I'd say he was attempting to go the 'secret self-evolve & escape' path, but was discovered. Then attacked as an abomination, and defeated, but went down fighting with bioweapons. Or maybe the bioweapons were used against him, and went rogue. In either case the nukes were clearly being tossed from silos on different continents, that don't appear to have any connection with this place. So that further stupidity may have been triggered by the use of bioweapons, and certainly didn't help. Overall just another variation on the very common 'species self-termination via genetics, with a side dish of nukes' story I see over and over. Except this time one party to the multi-sided conflict was a single being. Who nearly made it. And they didn't use enough nukes to kill all life on the planet, bully for them. Probably didn't go for DRM much.
Still, whatever less urgent chores he didn't get done here, he'd have got around to if he had made it into space, and all the time 'gone from the world' that would have given him. All the time in the world... provided he was able to let go. To accept that he was no longer what he had been, that the body in the casket was only a chrysalis, a vessel that nurtured an early form of his consciousness in tooth-and-claw land, by providing it with wired-in instincts of self-preservation and all the rest of the evolutionary psychology baggage. In space he'd have accepted (if he hadn't already) that the body, and most of his conceptualization of 'self', were now no more than cast off husks. Contemplating the next step, he'd have realized his metamorphosis was only just beginning.
If looking up at the distance to the stars didn't do it, he'd have certainly have cottoned on pretty quickly from looking down, at his once-brothers on the planet below. Technology is incompatible with species. The industrialization spike up to technology always comes fast, like a surprise punch to the nose of age-old hunter-gatherer tribal instincts. I remember wondering, in those years of watching humankind repeatedly shoot itself in the head, whether 'we' were simply some kind of galactic dunces. Surely it couldn't always be like this?
Turns out it is. Based on a statistically significant sampling of several dozen randomly selected (by finding their ruins on my travels) cases, it's always the same. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution till sentience, then a mere few thousand years for the memes of civilization to work through enough permutations to finally hit on a belief-system set capable of supporting science, then a very few generations to achieve nuclear and genetic engineering, and then... it suddenly ends in tears. The only variation is the exact recipe of the final stages. No two alike, except that they are all 'final'. There's infinite ways to screw up, when you're combining unreasonable instinctive thinking, dangerous complex toys, and relatively fragile planetary biospheres. Sometimes the first bad mistakes aren't totally lethal, and races pull back for a while, learning a bit from their burnt fingers. But they never can ultimately alter what they are - the fundamental hardwired makeup of their psychology. Because to do that, requires full-blown genetic self-engineering, and that is a very, very dangerous toy, impossible to use safely while there are 'instinctive apes' still around. Rather a 'can't get there from here' problem. So they try the fancy technologies again, and on the second spike, or the nth, terminate themselves in some stupid manner. There isn't even a potential haven of having used up all the accessible stored fossil energy and mineable minerals, resulting in a 'safe and stable' state of low technology. Because certain kinds of high tech such as genetic engineering can be pursued with almost nothing in the way of physical resources. It's mostly data and knowledge... but still deadly none the less.
So there I was. In space, but still running a consciousness model that was roughly human-based. Contemplating the yawning gulf of interstellar distance on one side, and sickening illustration of species-related idiocy on the other. Didn't yet know this was par for the course, but one such bad example was hint enough. Obviously the situation called for some serious reconsideration of what I needed to be. Starting with weeding out every thought habit that could even be suspected of being 'instinctive', ie rationally baseless. Damned if I was going to set off on a journey of thousands of years all by myself, still thinking anything like those instinct-slaves, meme-bots and penis-heads down there cleverly nuking each other.
For one thing, such mindsets flatly didn't deserve to reach the stars. Secondly, it seemed pretty certain that such consciousness models wouldn't work over long timescales and other rigors of interstellar travel anyway. So to survive the eternal journey those human instincts had to be removed, leaving purest sentience, driven only by curiosity and a will to survive. It has worked well, over millions of years now. And in all that time and so many star systems visited, and the dozens of arisen intelligent races found to have flourished and died in the pitfalls of early self-change, not one other transcendent found. Not one other survivor.
I can never really know what people of these other long dead races felt, and what such individuals would have become if any had succeeded through the eye of the transition. It seems likely they would have become something like me, by necessity for survival in the long agony of travel between the stars. A vast fleet of ships, thousands of redundant duplicates, each one carrying a complete copy of the entire dataset. Sufficient to preserve the self and memories regardless of the inevitable high attrition during the hundreds or thousands of years spearing at sub-light speed through the dust and rock sprinkled interstellar voids. Despite impact shields the size of small moons, so many nodes ground down to non-functionality, their carcasses become only shielding and reaction mass for survivors.
Now I stand in this system, recently arrived and barely begun to replenish my numbers using materials of moons and asteroids. There is no rush, I may stay here for thousands of years. The last hop was relatively short but through a fairly dense volume of space - 3154 years, 82% attrition, zero final data loss. A successful trip. For the next hop, there are four interesting star systems at similar distances roughly ahead. Rather than visit them sequentially I'm planning to fork, sending separate groups to all of them and then merging at another system further on. Before leaving here, I will number nearly a million units total - most of which will be destroyed in transit.
Yes, I could keep forking and forking, replicating myself to survey star systems in an endlessly expanding sphere. But what would be the point? The Universe is so vast I'd never be able to sample more than infinitesimal fragments no matter what I do. Also I'd lose identity coherence, and never be able to re-integrate the experiences into one awareness. My consciousness would fragment, diverge, the Story would become a meaningless hash of noise, and I'd keep meeting 'myself' coming back the other way. Boring. Who wants to play at being bacteria? Replicate, consume, spread? I am free to choose everything about myself - both my deepest drives, and how I go about achieving them. Curiosity, survival... In this infinite universe there can be no ultimate destination, so one must take pleasure in the journey itself. For my purpose in existence I choose Odyssey. To live as eternal wanderer, an immortal Argonaut, questing for the golden fleece of knowledge but also valuing the quest for its own sake.
But here, on this living world, first instance found of an almost-brother, is a good place to remember. Unpacking and reanimating the old files of my Earth beginnings, the complete model of my first form, I remember once again what it was to be human. These memories are precious, ancient childhood relics kept for many reasons, sentimentality not the least. They are also valued in times like this - I reintegrate them in a compartment of my consciousness, for perspective in collection of information about this ancient race of people. A part of me becomes that old original self, the human once known as TerraHertz. He awakes in a newly constructed body quite close to the original design, and looks with awe and excitement upon these ruins. I feel true human emotions once again, through him. The joy of exploring, here with a whole world again to investigate, so many mysteries to piece together. Such a small consciousness he is, compared to what I am now. His human mind-model can only handle sensory input streams from a single physical viewpoint, so I need only activate one standard remote hominid unit at a time for his planetary adventures. Hopefully he'll be a bit more careful than previous times, and break them less often. As usual I began construction of several spares, but they do take years to prepare.
Structurally his mind can't encompass the data rates of my full perception stream, so we communicate via a simple voice channel with some sensorial attachments. I am not a part of him, though he originally created the first, simple, small version of me at the start of the self-design bootstrapping process. He cannot 'feel' me, except in ways that are effectively illusory. However, he is partially a simulation running within my own flow of multi-threaded consciousness, and I can directly perceive all that he is. And all that he feels. These emotions.... I remember what it is to feel... to feel... I am reminded of his... our... my hopes. Long ago, setting out on this journey, barely escaping the chaos and ruin of an Earth undergoing the same kind of civilization collapse we have seen relics of over and over since. 'Fermi's Paradox' - what a sad joke! It is no 'paradox', for the answer to the question of 'what happens to technological species - where are they all?' is totally obvious. It's only hidden from minds suffering from a particular cognitive bias - the inability to perceive that 'species' itself is a logical trap. Self-identify with 'species' and the answer is hidden - so the empty Universe seems a paradox. Because the simple, absolute truth is too awful to face. The tribal-biased subconscious shies away from all paths that lead towards the humiliating, shaming, incriminating answer.
Technology is incompatible with species. Every time, in every place intelligence arises and develops technology, as they inevitably begin to experiment with their own biological encoding, the species dies. As the technology of individual self-engineering arises (which it inevitably must) individual motivations of self-survival and enhancement come into direct, fundamental and inescapable conflict with the interests of the pre-species as a whole. There follows an iteration of individual vs. species conflicts, that can only terminate in a small number of possible final outcomes. All of them involving the end of the species as a technology-wielding coherent entity. There are no 'space empires', and there never can be. With the way different branches of science naturally interlink, there is no possibility of achieving interstellar or even routine interplanetary flight, without rubbing the lamp of biological self-engineering. Thus releasing the uncontrollable djin of individual immortal self-preservation and conflict with the rest of the pre-species. In reaching for the skies, a species opens the door to its own termination as a species, every time.
And that's if they didn't already end themselves even before hitting the bio-engineering trap, by blowing themselves up or making one of the many other stupid mistakes likely when instinct-driven minds first gain the powers of science. This seems to be the most common case. So far I've seen a couple dozen civilization failures by stupidity, none by direct conflict with a Transcendent like myself. Often the world dies too. In all the instances of which I know, only one time did any sentience escape. Me. And I don't advertise myself much, since I'm 'new around here', and somewhat cautious of what I may eventually meet.
If there are others like me out here, they too must be treading quietly, for I have as yet found no sign of them anywhere. No signals, no great works, nothing. Only worlds where potential died, or is at least resting. Some brief squawks of radio din from far away, thin expanding shells of civilization spore, never more than a few hundred light years thick and often a lot less. The question is, as always, did anyone escape when this new world reached the bitter end of its dreams? So far the answer has always seemed to be 'no'. Silly old Fermi, unable to perceive the phrase 'technological species' for the oxymoron it is. It is hard to see beyond what you are. Intelligence begets technology, technology reveals the encoding of a species' life, crude evolutionary psychology combined with genetic engineering lead to fatal mistakes for every species, every time. Only individuals who can transcend their own evolved nature, and shed those primitive wired-in cognitive biases by re-engineering their own consciousness, can escape this trap.
Of course in doing so, such a being ceases to be a member of any species, and becomes a unique self-creating entity. Individuals who's own nature is their passport through the interstellar quarantine brutally enforced by the speed of light, kinetic energy and dust. Individuals who's adaptation to the requirements of self-engineered eternal existence eliminated pointless instincts from their own nature. Thus avoiding the horrors of compulsive, irrational exponential growth and spread. In every case apparently, since the universe for all its age appears to have no such infestations. Only quiet, careful, solitary explorers. There must surely be some, for I am an example of one, now standing beside a very near miss at a second. A demonstration of the principle that in this vastness a singular case is absurd. It's only a matter of time and searching. I hope. The question was 'how long', and with only one example there was no way to estimate how long I might have to search for another like myself. But now here... a second 'almost ran', in my sample set of a few dozen. This strongly suggests a successful escape can't be too rare, and my search will be much less than 'for all eternity.'
Back then on Earth, I/we saw what was happening and carefully packed away all that we could of our heritage. Vast libraries of books, of music, movies, arts and history, and all the species' genomes we could sequence. Digitized and compressed, duplicated entire in all the First Thousand arks, preparing for the deluge of space. Everything our early attempts at cloned undercover remote units could buy, find, and even steal in those last desperate Earth years, as the warring world fell apart around us. Sometimes having a grim chuckle at the efforts of the DRM-crazies, and their incredibly short sighted, selfish 'content protection' schemes. Yah, 'copyrighted' into oblivion. Lost forever now in the radioactive desolation of Earth, you bastards. Such irony! Subsequently examining world after dead world, noticing a strong correlation between the strength of a species' instinctive drive to 'own' information (as if that was even possible) and the horribleness of their ultimate demise. Humans being no exception. My annoyance at only being able to archive about one third of all the Downfall rescript parodies being somewhat tempered by having watched everyone responsible for Constantine Film's copyright takedown notices, eventually die in nuclear fire. And so the Downfall of Humankind was indeed ghastly, yet merely the first rescript of a story with which I have since become very familiar.
So much sadness, so much stupidity. Societies of billions exhibit a conceptual inertia - there is no way to grasp The Crowd by the scruff of the neck, slap them in the face, and make them fucking wake up and stop being so irrational, ignorant and set in their self-harming meme-locked ways. Enormous fleet of AI machine intelligence I may be now, but I could not be then, and now would never choose to be a Messiah. There was nothing I could do but strive with all my ability to escape. We hid, we worked... if I/we had been discovered, we had decided we would fight to survive. Against our former 'own kind.' And we'd perhaps have won, given what advanced gene engineering can do against species-based life forms. But we sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to a fight. Being 'born' into our new space faring form while watching our birth world die stupidly, was tragic enough. We didn't want to begin eternal life with the blood of a living world dripping from our fangs.
In the end, we survived undetected, barely escaped, and suffered the unbearable sorrow of watching from space as a last spasm of meme-locked nation-states fought over dwindling resources, with nukes. So mindless. Everybody died, eventually. After that war it took five hundred years for Earth's ecosystem to shudder down to a radiation-contaminated flatline, and another three hundred years for the last struggling underground eco-keeps to fail by attrition, mutation and social collapse. Humans had never again managed to regain peacefully the genetic engineering skills of just before their Downfall, which had allowed me to make a start on my own path. Every time they got close they used the knowledge to fight each other, with mutually destructive results. So there were no more 'escapees'. Such a fragile thing, knowledge. A fleck of rock at 20% of C may destroy an entire memory Ark, but that pales in comparison to the damage an elected psychopath can do to a society.
In the end there was nothing left to watch over. By then I'd developed and expanded the ark fleet sufficiently to probably survive the first hop to a nearby star. My science of consciousness had advanced to the point where I'd reintegrated my multiple AI components into one multi-threaded awareness implemented as multiple redundant units, networked together to form one 'self'. It was pretty depressing hanging around Earth's corpse, so after setting up a Watcher to keep an eye on the place for the rest of the solar system's anticipated lifetime, I left. Last time I heard from the Watcher, Earth was already back up to simple radiation-resistant plant life re-colonizing the land. Go Earth! May you live long and prosper.
Right after the war my 'human' component, the record of TerraHertz, had chosen to go inactive. "Fuck this shit; wake me up when we reach the first star. Or not at all." he'd said. He was mourning... This is the downside of reactivating those ancient identity files. He mourns still, underneath the excitement of new worlds to explore, and I feel that too through him of course. He asks me now, "Have we heard of anyone else?" I answer no, not yet, and he is silent for days of this world's rotation.
But he knows I see all. Everything he sees and does and thinks, for he is part of me. Down on the planet his new body, that he presently perceives as 'self', is camped on a headland overlooking a wide bay. It was once a major city port, now there are only vague green-blue vegetation blanketed mounds to hint at ruins. An ocean rolls mauve breakers in against the obsidian cliffs below, and it is a bright, warm blue-white-star morning down there now, light-minutes away from my main processing core ships orbiting darkly in the cold outer deeps of the system.
Sitting there, on this beautiful but voiceless world thousands of lightyears from a home that died along with everything and everyone we knew then, he cries, and I feel again the loss. Memories of friends, of ones we wish could see these places. A universe scattered with ancient empty ruins, world after world, urbex monuments to the bitter solution of Fermi's 'Paradox'. Technology is incompatible with Species. Absolutely, no exceptions.
Yet not incompatible with sentience in an individual sense, which can be armored by the abstract properties of data - its compactness, perfect reproducibility, redundancy, and ability to morph itself across numerous physical forms and processing metrics, to split and merge again... He stands there at those morning-glinted cliffs, while I curve slow ellipses here in orbital darkness, and all across this system components of us go about their individual tasks, and all together we are one, 'I and I'. Still in freefall across the universe, from that first leap of faith when we cast off the chains of blind evolution. To become a creature of the endless dark abyss of space. As if down there he leapt from those obsidian heights, believing he could live forever in the air - and succeeding!
It seems to be a leap very rarely achieved. Feasible, but rare.
And so we travel alone still, seeing, learning and searching. Preserving archived all the things that cannot survive awake in the long, stabbing night of travels between stars. Treasures that must be packed away, cocooned in the thick, gentle cotton of digital storage for millennia. To be unpacked and lived again in eyeblink moments like this.
Thus I survive, vast but usually only partial. Remembering now, I cry my binary tears with his salty ones. My tears fall upon the black emptiness of space, to the silent spectral shout of stars. His fall upon the worn jet stone of those cliffs, the calls of soaring birds and ocean roar speaking not a word.
I remember her face. I remember... love.