Ivan Kal - Onslaught

Adrian now had room to breathe, and pursue other projects while he waited to see what happened with the Shara Daim. The thing he was most looking forward to was a breakthrough in genetics that would now allow Seo-yun to give him more of the upgrades for his Sha, and he now had time to leave for Sanctuary. He left Gotu in charge of Olympus Mons, with Aileen going back to Tarabat, and five fleets were still in Sol under Johanna’s command.

Adrian looked at Axull Darr, debating whether to ask him a question that had been on his mind for a long time. He knew that Seo-yun had tried to ask him the same thing but Axull Darr wouldn’t speak of it. Finally, he decided that he could lose nothing by asking.

“You told us once that you created us to fix the mistake you made, but you never told us what that mistake is,” Adrian said.

“Because you can do nothing as you are now,” Axull Darr said.

“But what harm can there be for us to know if we can’t do anything about it?” Adrian asked.

“You are young and rash; my people were old and far wiser than you, and still we made a mistake. I do not want you to fall into temptation and start experimenting with the same things we did. Already you are too close for my comfort.”

Adrian frowned. “We are? Why not tell us then so that we know what to avoid?”

“I… It is not that simple, the temptation is great, and already your knowledge is approaching the level where you can abuse it,” Axull Darr said.

“You have seen the history of Earth; we know about temptation and the price of succumbing to it,” Adrian said.

“Yes, and it is the one thing that gives me hope that you might not follow my people’s footsteps. You are not like us. We didn’t have any obstacles; we pushed sciences in all directions unopposed, never thinking about the consequences because we had never suffered because of them,” Axull Darr said.

“So why not trust us?” Adrian asked.

Axull Darr remained silent for a while. “Perhaps you are right, perhaps I see too much of myself in you. Very well. I will tell you the story about what we did.”

Adrian leaned forward attentively as Axull Darr started to speak.

“You know that my people were dying. We didn’t know why, but we believed that it had to do with the Sha and our use of it. To understand why we thought that, you need to understand what the Sha truly is,” Axull Darr said, his blank eyes somehow focusing on Adrian. “And that is hard to explain to someone like you who doesn’t have billions of years’ worth of knowledge; your people don’t even have terms for most of what my people knew. Imagine a force that binds the entire Universe together, something that makes it all real, that keeps it from falling apart. What allows stars to exist, and what allows for gravity, and all the other things that exist in the Universe, the background on which the Universe resides. That is the Sha. The mind is a vessel that allows a being to influence that force. And like anything in the Universe, it requires energy to be used. Most lifeforms evolve the interface that allows control of the Sha naturally, each slightly different. Your friends there, for example.” Axull Darr pointed at the sleeping forms of Akash and Sora.

“They have evolved a way to feel and influence emotions, to bend this force just a little to achieve that. We evolved it naturally as well, and we added to it, pushing our abilities further artificially. And for several billions of years, everything was fine—until we started dying. We didn’t age, much like your people don’t, but suddenly our bodies started to deteriorate; bonds that held our body fell apart and we died. For a long time, we couldn’t find the cause, and nothing we did could help us. Then there were only eight of us left, and we were desperate. We didn’t want to die, so we tried to find a cure. One of our suspicions was that we had somehow grown dependent on the Sha, but that our bodies and minds couldn’t process enough of it. We had different ideas and projects, and three of my closest friends ran one of our more promising ones. They made a base in a system at the edge of the galaxy, and there they created a completely new lifeform using both our technology and the Sha, something we had never done before. The life wasn’t intelligent. It was an organism that could evolve rapidly; we thought that if we introduce our DNA into it, it might evolve and cure whatever it was that was ailing us. Show us how to allow our bodies more access to the Sha.” Axull Darr paused, his face dropping.

“But life was never meant to evolve so fast. It takes millions, billions of years for the Universe to create life. And when we did it in a matter of a couple of years, it turned out wrong. Our DNA gave it access to the Sha and a sort of primal intelligence. It got loose, infecting the three that had created it, merging its DNA with theirs. DNA that had evolved far beyond what we’d designed it to be. The three became something else; the infusion of the artificial life cured them, making them a new lifeform, one with the experiences and knowledge of what they once were. They were more evolved, smarter, stronger with the Sha, and driven to consume and grow more. Our goal of resurrecting our people was corrupted in their minds, and they used that life that we created as a blueprint to create a servant race of highly intelligent beings that answered only to them. This race they created used life and matter as fuel to reproduce, to build a kind of hybrid biological and technological ships and weapons under the guidance of the three. Before we realized what was happening, the three had dismantled the system they were in and built an army and fleets of ships. The rest of us weren’t all there; we had different projects all over the galaxy, and by the time we noticed what was happening, it was too late. The three had left that system and found an intelligent race that lived in a system nearby. They killed them all, using their biological matter to grow their army even more and to build more ships,” Axull Darr said, and grew quiet.

Adrian swallowed, hard. “What happened then? Did you try to stop them?” he asked.

Axull Darr nodded. “Of course. We had ships still, powerful ships, but there were only five of us left. There was nothing we could do against armies and fleets that had the same technology we did, more advanced even, as it was augmented with biotech that we had never really used. The three had perfected it. We went to younger races and asked for help, uplifting several of them to fight our war. We did what we could. The armies and ships of the three relied on biological matter for food and fuel, so we destroyed planets, vaporized entire star systems, but we only slowed them down. The races we uplifted were losing; every soldier that fell was food for our enemy. In the end, we were forced to build machine armies to fight our enemy, but we knew that they couldn’t defeat them; they had no Sha and were at a disadvantage, as every enemy soldier could use it. Eventually, four of my people decided that it was a lost cause; they wanted to change the parameters of the AIs fighting the enemy from destruction to containment. I disagreed with the methods they wanted to use to enforce it and split from them.”

“What did they want to do? How did they contain them?” Adrian asked.

“The enemy grew by feeding on biological matter, on life. They denied them that. They purged all life for ten thousand lightyears in all directions around the enemy, denying them the fuel they needed to grow. That did not stop their growth—there was still materials for them to use—but it did slow it down considerably, allowing the machine armies a chance of slowing their advances through the galaxy significantly. The AIs were programmed to never allow any life inside that ten-thousand-lightyear border. Each time the enemy pushed the machines back, the machines would expand the border, even if there was intelligent life in their way.”