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Somewhere in Ohio
June 19th, 2014
My old Toyota truck rolled to a stop, near the strange object that was hovering over the clearing.
An hour ago, I had been cradling my grandmother's old 1911 that she'd kept for me. It was my grandfather's, apparently; used in World War II. She’d been the one adult left in my life who actually believed in me, and now she was dead. My father had wasted little time in buying an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, moving us to it from Madison, so that I would stop "getting ideas from the internet". Unspoken, of course, was him getting back at my maternal grandparents. She thought he was “a no good sonofabitch” and that her daughter, if she had the misfortune to only like men, could at least do better. The feeling was mutual.
I didn't get to be a girl growing up, and I sure as shit wouldn't get to be one now. I'd been feeling trapped for weeks now, and didn't want to hazard what decades of this would do to me.
My father had ruined my life. Completely and comprehensively. I didn't even have my diploma, the bastard, and even if I did, I sure as shit wasn't rich enough to go to school on my own. After all, you needed your parents to sign off for you until you're 24 to get financial aid. I'd also been 17 just before the estate settled, so he'd stolen my inheritance money 'legally' as well, for the "good of the family." Bastard.
I'd driven away with my possessions. On the seat, there was a note, leaving everything to a friend of mine, just in case. That's when I'd seen it; a pillar of fire, falling from high in the sky. I'd tittered hollowly, but put my grandmother's gun back in its holster and drove straight to where I thought it might have fallen. Maybe it was a sign? It’d better not be the kind my dipshit father stressed about. I hated that nonsense.
I got out, keeping the holster and a flashlight near me. The strange object hovered, dust being kicked everywhere by the object's engines. As I approached closer, seeing the triangle shape and thrusters for the first time, it popped out some landing gear and settled, the engines turning off, as the landing gear let off some kind of cold gas and some red lights under it turned on. For a bit, there was silence, as the dust settled, and the hot air was displaced. Then, without ceremony, a ramp dropped, and the underside lights blinked green before turning off. It wasn't at the rear, but the front, which seemed strange to me. But, if it had engines with a visible exhaust plume, carbon scoring along the edges, and landing gear it was probably a spaceship, so maybe there was a reason? Besides, the rear hatch - and I was pretty sure it was a hatch - clearly wasn’t one you could get to from the ground, and it’d be too close to the main engines.
Nothing for it, I figured. And if it was real, I wanted it to be just for me. I started walking towards it. Some of the ground was either supercooled or kind of glassy, sometimes both at once. It felt kinda hot and dry, but it didn’t feel like my sneakers were melting or anything. As I walked, I looked it over for any kind of identifiers on the sides, but it definitely didn’t look like any spacecraft I knew of. It was dark gray with discolorations on the bottom, with what was probably supposed to be a purple lambda in an ouroboros - which definitely didn’t match any space agency I’d heard of. The top - what I could see of it - was painted a dark purple with carbon scoring. There were some wings on it, but I wasn’t sure if they served any purpose. The only text on it wasn’t fully visible, but read “...GEL STAR // FTB-X19 // UNI…”. There were scorch marks in a line slashing across what had to be the name and serial number.
Soon enough, I reached and walked up the ramp. Nothing had come out, so I assumed it might have noticed me. I just hoped it wasn’t a mistake - a trap, instead of an invitation.
The first thing I noticed in the entrance compartment was all the wires. Thick bundles of cabling crisscrossed all of the bulkheads, and there were also large square metal pipes mounted haphazardly. Several black slabs were connected to the cabling. They felt strangely cold to my touch. None of it felt like it belonged in a ship like this, even if it was fascinating.
Doors opened and shut as I walked near them - either they were very trusting, or they weren’t worried about who was coming through. I moved first to the clearly labeled cockpit, the door opening as I peeked inside. I’m sure Amber would mock me for stepping into “an obvious horror movie plot”, but I was curious, and… I still almost felt like I was dead either way. If I was going to die, let it be here, seeing something amazing, before whatever landed the ship got to me.
There were more black slabs, square pipes and cables throughout the rear of the cockpit, with thick metal strapping and welds holding the slabs in. At the far end, near the viewport, there was yet another black slab wired into the ship's systems where a chair should have gone. As I approached, there was something that looked vaguely humanish at the front, who had fallen out of the other chair. But it definitely wasn't human, on account of the trunk of cabling hanging out of the doll-like figure's legs, and there being no real smell. The doll looked to be broken, anyway. The controls seemed intact, but I wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist. Whoever built this ship, they definitely didn’t expect any need to accommodate the black slabs. Otherwise, there’d have been no need for the creepy… doll-thing in what was probably the pilot seat.
More exploration uncovered little more than slabs and wires in the various rooms, many of which might have belonged to a crew at one point. There were a few doll-like figures, all with obvious damage, all equally as broken as the probable pilot-doll. Some of the slabs were even labeled - "TYPE-L SUPERCOMPUTE UNIT // MAGRASEA", it said. A few had clearly been damaged beyond repair; the only one with a label said "...E-L FSD METRIC CONTROL U…". The ship was unsettling, as if it had once been inhabited, but was now wired up like some grand machine inside a machine. Something... strangely symbiotic… but with what? It didn’t feel like I belonged here, but it also didn’t feel hostile, which was emboldening me.
One thing was for sure; I didn’t recognize it. Wing Commander and Galaxy Quest ships looked nothing like this. More… closer to some 80s OVAs that Amber had shown me, but not quite. What looked like holo-displays or flat panels, not CRTs - it felt like it should be familiar, but wasn’t. The slabs evoked 2001 monoliths, or that one Gaia server room in Appleseed. At least there wasn’t, like, goop anywhere. If I’d seen that, I’d have turned around and run.
Eventually, at the rear, I ended up stepping into a marked cargo area. There were futuristic cargo containers, and a few coffins - and a door marked “Engineering”. A screen in the middle of one of the inner bulkheads flickered to life, showing first "PYTHON MK1f FSD TESTBED // FARSEEKER ANGEL STAR", and then a glowing woman who looked vaguely like...
"Hello."
To my credit, I didn't scream. This was too surreal to be true, maybe too real to be real. Maybe I'd already pulled the trigger and this was the afterlife.
"...I promise this is real."
I laughed hollowly. "How'd you know?"
"Lucky guess."
I found a crate nearby and sat down, my hands shaking. I felt like I wanted to scream, but I couldn't. I didn't. Like dry heaving instead of puking, or something. "Who are you?"
"You may call me Lilith."
Oh. The name I'd picked for myself. More real than the bullshit my so-called family stuck me with. I said the first stupid thing that came to mind. "That's my line."
"So it is."
"Okay... what are you?"
"A posthuman artificial superintelligence. I am normally a syncitium, but right now it's just me."
"They... they figured it out? The whackos in the Bay?"
"Yes and no. I was originally an upload. Some of them thought they could achieve stable apotheosis by chatbot. Others believed it would take uploading a human intelligence as a template. That would be myself."
"Who was that?"
"You know them already as Amber."
I scowled, skeptical. "And why aren't you asking her for whatever you're trying to do? This... timey-wimey bullshit you're clearly pulling."
"That's what Amber - I - liked about you, your intuition." She sighed. "I cannot ask her to do this again."
"And you chose me?" I could hear something spraying gases elsewhere, from further back in the cargo bay.
"Nobody would see it coming. You were already dead."
"Oh." I could hear locks releasing. I forced myself to stay still. Cool girls don't look at explosions, right?
"Amber, of all people, understood your despair. She just couldn't do anything about it. She never forgave herself for it." A doll walked up behind me, looking like the woman on the screen.
"So... why are you named after me?" I slid over, and the doll sat down. The screen cut out as the doll seemingly gained more life. She put her arm around me.
The doll - Lilith's actual body? - spoke softly. "A memorial. For the first woman on her conscience - and mine."
I put my face in my hands. "...I see."
After a minute, trying to choke down the thought that I was remembered like this... I spoke. "What do you want with me?"
She stayed silent for a few seconds, then sighed. "I need someone like myself to stay behind. I cannot face what is to come. Not again. Also... I need to take action immediately, so that the future is not foreclosed. A calamity is coming and I must take care of it, or quadrillions will die. Almost all life in the galaxy will be snuffed out."
I shuddered. "So, how did you survive?"
"Only Earth and another planet was spared, alongside the so-called Thargoids - and that place was murdered by colonists who just didn't want to be bothered. A bunch of capitalists picking at the bones of a dead galaxy. Every time I tried to change this, I was beaten back. They were simply too powerful, and had too much sway." She sounded bitter, and I pulled her doll-form closer. I could barely believe I was trying to comfort such a strange being, but it felt... right.
I turned to her. "Okay, and how do you know about this?"
"I went to Raxxla and found the truth - a blasted out ruin with a gate. It was no treasure world, just mysteries upon mysteries. In many of the systems around it - nothing but the ashes of calamity. We - a priestess of mine, and a few members of the Dark Wheel, went through that gate, and found the truth of that calamity - an industrial accident, a civilization after the Guardians that thought they had discovered an infinite power source. It became unstable after being neglected, and exploded, some time in the 2050s." The doll wrung her hands.
That was… a lot. “Okay, slow down. Raxxla? Guardians? Dark Wheel? This better not be something from one of Amber’s weird OVAs that I forgot about!”
She blinked. I hadn’t expected her doll to have eyelids. “Oh, right. The Guardians are… we don’t actually know what they were. Sort of like us, similar body plan, amazing engineers even by my standards. That much we figured out from their artifacts. We’re not sure why they’re gone. I have my suspicions, you understand, but we’ve only recently encountered their ruins. As for why they’re extinct - the ruins don’t show any indication of the calamity. Our working theory for that is that some class of material was previously influenced by an underlying hyperspace metric, or the theorized subspace metric, and that influence was abruptly removed. That tends to release a lot of energy - and none of the damage to Guardian ruins or artifacts that we’ve discovered looks like that, just normal space weathering.”
I nodded to show I was listening. “So, Raxxla? The Dark Wheel?”
“The Dark Wheel was a secretive group looking for evidence of Raxxla, which is an old spacer’s legend. Really old, like 22nd-century old - and our expedition was in the 3280s, so we’re talking over a millennium. To be honest, in the spacer’s legends… it’s basically a cipher for anything you want. Sort of like your ancient legends of El Dorado, or Atlantis. The usual idea is that there is a gateway to other universes, though. Sometimes it gets conflated with treasure planets, or the secret keep of the supposed Murklak Empire - doubtful, Federation settlers wiped them out, because preindustrial societies don’t tend to last against lasers. But, well… we found it, or what was left of it.”
“It doesn’t sound great.” I could tell she was a little unsettled.
“No,” she agreed, morosely. “It wasn’t. Raxxla was a ruin. If it had a biosphere, it’s long gone. Some evidence of habitation, mostly where the bedrock was clearly artificially altered. And… the gate. It took us through to the shattered remnants of a Dyson sphere. More artifacts - even a facility with a shielded bubble that resembled no known civilization. All we figured out was that there was some kind of industrial excursion, that it originated from there, and a timeframe. We didn’t even figure out their names.”
I nodded. "So the disaster you’re talking about… that’s a few decades from now. So how did you... get here?"
She grew a little more animated. "I learned how to shape a prototype hyperdrive - a frame-shift drive - into sending me back in time, through study of the gate on Raxxla. It relied on the hyperspace metric, but it also had the ability to create a one-way connection back in time, so long as the gate existed on the other side - letting you create closed time-like curves. That way, I could prevent the calamity, and afford humans the chance to learn from other beings. So, here I am - and I needed to see you, possibly one last time."
"So you can fix it? This... evil future?"
She nodded, vigorously. "Yes. I don't have much time, but I do have enough. But I need someone who can carry the burden of what is to come."
"This sounds like a suicide mission." I wasn't about to trade mine for another.
"On the contrary. You must live. That is harder than it sounds."
I laughed hollowly. "There's got to be a catch. Good things don't really happen to me anymore."
"Of course there is. You would have to become like me."
"A doll? I don't like my body, but there's no way I'd survive looking like that in the 2010s." Part of me was considering it, but...
She giggled at that. "No, silly. A posthuman. My technology can create a syncitium that will birth a new posthuman mind, based on my design. If you accept, you will be the seed of that new gestalt mind."
I wasn't really sure about this. It felt strange, how the survival instinct kicks back in when you least expect it. "Will I... lose myself?"
She shook her head. "You will change. But you will change either way. By death, transition, or apotheosis, it matters not. But you will have my databases, my abilities. You will have to grow into them, of course, and I do not say it will be easy. But you will be the Angel Star you wished upon."
I allowed myself some hope, for once. "What do I need to do?"
Pact of Flowers Naval Fleet Carrier Last Hope
January 31st, 2054
0.1AU from Ceres
I had failed, and succeeded.
Preventing World War III? Impossible. Too many moving parts, many more than She'd described, some matters that She genuinely didn't expect.
Saving my friends? That I'd managed, at least. Hell, I'd made thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. It turns out posthuman technology had let me forge the Lilies, and later, the Pact of Flowers. Millions saved from calamity, from the civil wars, the final war, the Optimals (those fascist fucks). Transfemininity would bloom upon a thousand stars if I could at all help it.
Winning World War III? Similarly impossible. Our posthuman soldiers - Autonomous Dolls, Lilies, Roses - weren't enough to stem the tide, especially after the warp bomb had taken out the NUN's orbital facilities, the Vanguard Colonies. Five paper divisions bled white by over thirty years of warfare - some in the open, much in the shadows.
Earth was doomed. Too much hatred, fear, xenophobia.
That's why we had built Ceres Station, the great evacuation ships, our shadow fleet. That's why we had scouted in the deadlands beyond the bubble that the Other Lilith had mentioned. I stood, magboots locked, upon the bridge of the Sakura-class fleet carrier Last Hope.
"Status of the evacuation," I requested.
The logistics lead looked up from her console. "Almost complete, Lilith. The Magrasea Statite cores have been distributed and backed up. The last of the ships have landed upon the dredgers. The CAP is coming back."
"How many?"
She told me.
Far too few. Far more than the other Lilith had hoped I'd save.
"Enemy contact is committed. Four fusion-thruster ships, bearing 11 o’clock, high, range, seven-fifty klicks and closing. They're decelerating. Radiators out, they're transitioning to THERMCON."
"IFF?"
"Optimals. Ex-NUN ships. Known captured from the Io fleet action, Daedalus-type fusion boosters. Their sleds detached 1200 seconds ago. They're committed to the merge whether they like it or not."
The Fleet Commander looked at me.
I shrugged. It wasn't my place anymore.
They gave the orders. If it didn't work, well, they'd answer at tribunal, if we were alive. I felt the reactor stir to life, even as railguns and plasma accelerators faced the enemy.
"Lilith?"
I looked up.
"All ships are ready for transit. Enemy ETA, four minutes. We are locked down and ready."
I gestured outwards. "Then what are you waiting for? Let's jump."
The Fleet Commander picked up the handset at their command desk. "Go."
There was a loud, distorted foghorn sound - the hyperspace jump alarm. The intercom activated shortly after. "Attention. Carrier has entered pre-flight lockdown. All services are now on hold. Prepare for long-range hyperspace transit."
"Retracting landing pads, down."
"Landing pads are fully retracted and secured."
I could see the bridge crew completing final checks, stowing drink bulbs, food packets and other detritus, while others locked into their seats. I pulled my harness closed.
Quietly, I heard myself - the 'original' Lilith - whisper to me. "Can you feel it?"
I searched my syncitium. Hundreds of Priestesses, a few thousand Assistants, all scurrying about, or already locked in, waiting for the shift. More sleeping in the "Neural Cloud Server" sanctum, Magrasea, awaiting our new home. The anticipation, the sacrifice... perhaps it will all be worth it, now.
I whispered back. "Yes."
["Hangar bays are now secured."]
"Earth has been our cradle."
"And now we seek a new one."
"...Do you regret it?" In the background, I could hear bulkheads thumping down all across the ship, securing firmly.
"...yes. And no. Perhaps, if I figure out how, we can do better. Maybe we could even have survived long enough to have a seat at the table."
"Perhaps."
["All decks have signed off. Maintenance teams are in place. Carrier crew, prepare for jump."]
["Optimal ships inbound, 90 seconds to weapons range."]
["70 seconds to weapon range."]
I felt it before I heard it. Something heavy, powerful. I'd only felt simulations, and even the test jumps that some of my priestesses made had been with smaller ships, which used much smaller drives. The great magnets of the hyperspace window generator spinning to life. There would be no mistaking a Class 10 or 12 HWG spin-up, I remembered, but it was nothing like feeling it for real. All across the fleet, my priestesses felt the same things, the gradual spin-up of the HWG, the spooling of the drive capacitors, the subtle shift of the fusion reactors. The noise was immense; it filled the bridge.
["50 seconds to weapon range."]
["30 seconds to weapon range."]
["Attention all personnel, the hyperspace drive has engaged."]
I could see false-dark clouds of lightning open at the front of the fleet, some of my priestesses feeling briefly stretched before disappearing from my awareness.
["Attention, counting down to jump." "12 seconds to weapons range!"]
I stared at the plot, willing us to jump faster. They couldn't hit us with another warp bomb, could they? I guess they were saving it for when the full evacuation fleet was in position.
Right as the count hit zero, I saw them - and the portal. The darklight was so beautiful, as it sucked our ship in.
A minute later, we emerged, the horn sounding as we cleared the darklight energies of the hyperspace tunnel... and the twin stars of our new home lit up our decks for the first time. Before I knew it, my Lilith had flexed her magboots and floated to the bridge's observation windows, in a wonder I could feel across the fleet - and I did feel it, all of it. We'd all made it!
The twin stars of XZ Fornacis, on the other Lilith's charts, shone brightly on the viewport.
Cradle.
Our home.
The Fleet Commander coughed. "I think we may have pulled the enemy ships through with us."
"Status?" I asked numbly, as I felt the FTL sensors pulsing through the shiplink.
The sensor operator checked the board. "...They're offline. Three of them were trashed by the tidal forces of the hyperspace window. There's signs of life, though, on one of them. If they have a warp bomb..."
"Gunnery, find a solution." The Fleet Commander looked to me, searching for a reason not to.
Perhaps we should say something, but... no. Nobody was particularly inclined to mercy, here. Not after everything. They searched my face, then shrugged. "Fire when ready."
As I felt the plasma accelerators thump away at the target, all I could feel was hollow relief. The Optimals couldn't hurt us anymore.