Philip Palmer - Hell Ship

I can detect nothing. Just-murk. I can see nothing through our visual sensors. No sound-pictures are emerging. Electromagnetics are fuzzy.

Try harder.

You can see what I see. Nothing.

Admit it. You do not need me, Explorer. I am very little help to you. You are just trying to-no matter. I shall not let you down. I am reading the data now-fuck-my-father these readings are utter chaos! What the hell is wrong with our instruments?

Our instruments are fine. There is nothing to see.

How can that be? There must be SOMETHING out there; or if not, then nothing. But not-this whatever-it-is.

Void, confusion, something but not-something, Memories of worlds, or possibilities of worlds. And pain. Terrible terrible pain. I don’t know. It’s confusing.

Tell me what you think is out there. You must be able to make a credible surmise. Please.

It’s-I cannot-confusing-chaos-no.

Yes. Now I see it.

It is a dead universe; dead but bleeding, and in pain. Do not ask me how. The Ka’un once were here; but not recently; not for many years.

Where are we now?

I do not know.

I can, you will not be surprised to hear, once more make no sense of the data from our sensors. But perhaps you can fare better; can you detect anything?

I detect nothing.

Then we should move on.

Wait! I’m aware of a-something. A-what?

Yes! I have it. A shadow on my sensors that my circuits can perceive as absence with intent. Another ghost signal, for our archives, from a past version of this universe.

Capture it.

I have, it is downloaded.

Can you read it?

Not yet.

Now?

Yes, now.

Tell me.

Once, this universe was thronging with life. Trillions of planets were habitable. Thousands of sentient species lived in harmony. And this is the remnant of the trace of a communication from one of these species.

Another last message?

Indeed. From another lost civilisation. A sun-worshipping people whose science took the form of poetry and who dreamed one day of settling the stars, to worship them too.

We must keep this record in our archives.

I have kept it.

We must remember these people, these sun-worshipping star-dreaming poets.

I do not know how to forget.

I can’t see anything, again. What can your sensors tell you now?

Nothing. Just another empty universe. But there are traces of radiation scarred into this void. Fusion bombs were exploded in this place once, and their radioactive residue remains, even while matter itself decoupled and became non-matter.

I am downloading the radiation signatures and decoding them.

I have completed downloading the radiation signatures and decoding them.

Decoding them?

There is something anomalous about the radiation patterns; it occurred to me that a sophisticated civilisation might have chosen to self-destruct using atomic bombs with a message encoded within. And so it has proved. These peoples wrote a message in the burning fire that consumed them. This was a civilisation that could use radiation as other cultures use paper.

Tell me more.

I have archived it; you may read it at your leisure.

I will do so.

These messages from the dead constitute an extraordinary phenomenon: like finding the history of an entire world scratched into the wood of a small boy’s desk, if I may utilise an archaic simile.

I’m reading the archive now. These people had discovered, after years of careful scientific analysis, that their distant ancestors had evolved from microbes embedded in comets. In other words, they were descended from space travellers. This historical fact infused every aspect of their post-scientific culture. They were inveterate stargazers. They were vegetarian, and worshipped the bark of the trees they ate. They had no weapons, for in all their long history they had never encountered a predator they could not out-run. They had long slender legs and streamlined bodies, and fingers that could be retracted into their jaws. I can see an image of one of them now, it’s strangely beautiful. They procreated by cell fission at the point of death; each dying creature of this species spawning a fresh child. So in a sense, they were immortal. They were lovers of life, and caused no harm to any other creature aside, perhaps, from the trees they ate.

And now they are gone.

It’s sad. So very sad.

I have no view to add to yours on the emotional affect of this data. But logic asserts that a fellow organic sentient would find little pleasure in such death-messages, and so “sad” is a response I might have predicted.

And now, I am entering another universe.

And I find I am above a blue globe patched with clouds. A fertile planet, with oceans and clouds-it must have life? My sensors check.

No, there is no life. But life once did exist here, many aeons ago, and it has a left a trace that I am able to detect. There were once seas of acid here, rich with acid-loving fish and acid-eating algae and land made up of boiling volcanic lava that was seething with extremophile microbial and plant life and mountain tops coated with grass on which six legged beasts roamed. What could have happened to it? Was it another victim of the Death Ship’s incomparable evil, or did life just die out?

I have seen enough; I jump through another reality-rift and emerge in the heart of a spiral galaxy; no trace of the Death Ship’s distinctive ion trail here either. No legacy of carnage and destruction. Nor any trace of the absence of life.

Just life.

Life all around. Wherever I look, there is life. There are trillions of habitable planets in this universe. And thousands of sentient species in possession of space travelling technology.

I read the messages in the electromagnetic data trail and the space time substrate and I record it all. It is all here, every detail of this wonderful universe. There is one planet in this universe where insects have created cities of steel that burrow down deep almost to the planet’s inner core. The entire planet is an insect nest made of metal and plastic and the large mammals are kept as foodstuffs and as objects of scientific study. A cruel world, according to the morals of the Olarans who designed my programming, yet a magnificent achievement; a planet over-run with genius bugs.

And there is an Olara-like space-travelling civilisation too in this universe which has engineered stars to burn brighter, or fainter, in order to improve the appearance of their night-time sky; and has constructed ringworlds, and planetary bridges made of rainbow coloured unbreakable motile glass.

There are many galactic civilisations here; and also solitary-world civilisations which have no idea whatsoever that they share this reality with so many varied and powerful sentient beings. And there are wraiths too-energy-beings with intelligence but no corporeal form-creatures that are legends in the Olaran universe, but are here all too real and detectable by sensors.

It is a rich and bountiful universe; there is malice here, but also goodness. There are wars, and death comes undesiredly and all too soon for many of these sentients. But even so, I feel extraordinary excitement at being in the midst of such living plenty.

And, indeed, I wonder briefly if we should stay in this place. Should we become this universe’s unseen, all-powerful, cautiously non-meddling protector? So that when, one day, many years hence, the Death Ship arrives we will be here to greet it, and we will be able to destroy it?

We could save it all, Jak and I! All of it. With our intervention, one sole universe would survive! And one, surely, is enough?

You want to be a god?

Don’t you?

We fly between realities yet again.

And enter yet another wilderness universe. Death has cursed this place, and only datacached fragments of the lost sentient cultures remain.