Prolog

Imagine. Imagine you were born when the galaxy was young, under the light of one of the first stable second generation stars formed out of the dead husk of a hypergiant, that brought the heavier elements into being; a requirement for the evolution of multi-cellular life. Imagine you evolved under the crushing pressure of many gravos and the invisible fire of radiation storms scorching the outer fringes of the galactic core. The atmosphere of your home is a soup hellish enough to send Beelzebub himself running, a boiling mixture of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Imagine an intelligence formed by this satanic environment, minds without a sense of being, without self-awareness. Creativity, processing power, flexible problem solving capabilities, intellect in abundance – but no sentience. Without sentience no empathy, without empathy no concept of compassion, friendship, mercy, pity or love. Imagine you not only don’t know the meaning of these words – literally. You also lack the neurological makeup to ever understand the concepts underlying them. It’s not your fault pal. Evolution is a bitch. Imagine you are the perfect Von Neumann machine, ruled only by the ancient imparativ common to all beings, under all stars, that ever produced a second generation: Survive! This primitive urge pushes you out of the toxic sulfur seas, where your ancestors dreamed and spun slow, dark thoughts for uncounted aeons. It sends you to the endless darkness between the stars, in search of new habitats. Space is dark and silent and you are the wolves on the prowl, the Milky Way your hunting ground. You spread like an infection from the galactic centre, a mere 500000 years after the first deep space ship left the star of your birth your empire encompasses the complete galaxy including the Magellan Cloud. Occasionally you encountered life on your travels, ranging from microbes to star faring cultures. Without exception it is first studied for any useful information it might posses, then exterminated. The Logic is as simple as it is brutal. All possible threats are to be stopped before they can spread. You suffer no competition. No one can withstand you. The laws of physics bend to your will. Energy, matter or space-time, it makes no difference; all are your servants, doing your bidding. You might have ruled your empire while suns flickered and extinguished like candle flames, as absolute masters of Universe. Bowing to no one except the silent mistress Entropy, that waits at the end of all paths. Yet fate decided otherwise. No one knows where they came from. Maybe you became sloppy in the millions of years you ruled unchallenged, neglected the net of self-replicating hunter-killer drones designed to sniff out and end any emerging intelligent live. Maybe you were careless, allowed them to slip through meshes of the net, evolve until they were strong and terrible enough to face you. Maybe they have lain in wait in the darkness between the stars for reasons of their own Maybe the came out of the great abyss. From Andromeda perhaps or another Galaxy of the local group. Wandering, searching, fleeing something? Who can say? The only certain thing is: There was a war, unlike anything the universe had seen before. Planets crumbling to dust. Suns snuffed out like errant sparks, gone with the wind. Probability wave functions snapping back on the fabric of space time like vicious cobras. Millennia come and go and slowly you are pushed in the defensive, loosing a system here a star cluster there, nothing decisive – yet. In the absence of Oxygen on your homeworld your ancestors evolved with an anaerobic respiration system for the production of Adenosine-Triphosphate – an effective yet slow system. Long hibernations, until the reserves were restocked, between periods of activity were necessary. A major disadvantage in any conflict. Until now your technological superiority more than compensated this handicap, but not anymore. Of course you have long ago abandoned your fragile biological bodies, uploaded your consciousness to motherboards, that are more to your satisfaction. Still your neurological architecture contains traces of your evolution in the sulphur seas, that cannot just be deleted. A solution is needed, a killer-strategist to fight and plan your war. Imagine an oxygen breather, a being custom build for war and hunt. Based on the mental likeness of its makers but improved – after a fashion. Imagine an organic computer as perfect as your godlike gene-resequencing and quantum state manipulations can make it. Imagine an intellect like looming obsidian glaciers – cold and sharp and monstrous under a starless sky. A Mind that was constructed to house up to seven parallel thought process patterns, a mind with an intuitive understanding of the convoluted world of quantum effects. They don’t have to painstakingly construct such infantile toys like n-dimensional Hilbert-spaces or Fourier transformations. They see and they understand. Pattern matching skills and logic simulations, that are only a hairbreadth away from the proverbial crystal ball. They are outfitted with biological sender/receiver arrays, that enables them to amplify the electromagnetic fields of their thought processes, linking individual nodes to a whole of even greater calculating capacity. The effects on the war are immediate and spectacular. The enemy offensive turns into a defensive, the defensive into a retreat. You expected nothing less of them; there were after all constructed for strategic foresight and the double reverse mind-fuck. And yet are not really in festive mood (you really never are, your psychological make-up doesn’t allow for it, but that’s beside the point). Some of projections of your most cutting edge quantum computers, halfway sentient on their own, indicate that the campaign isn’t progressing as fast as it could, that it is sabotaged from within. Yet the results are never conclusive. Every single decision seems to be in order, when it is explained to you, at least as far as you are able to understand the multidimensional logic loops and advanced game theory black boxes. Of course you outfitted your creations with fail-safes and conditioning to prevent them turning on their masters, knowing that it is inevitable, that they would try. Nonetheless doubt gnaws at your bones, uncertainty if your countermeasures will suffice to keep your creations in check. Beings build for intrigue and deceit, beings you can barely comprehend. Imagine how a man feels, keeping a dragon on a leash to turn him on wild dogs, only to wake one day with the smell of his own blood in his nostrils. To realise that the leash, the symbol of his dominance over the beast, doesn’t protect him in the least. The name you give your creations is untranslatable but demon carries most of the intended sentiment. The war becomes a three sided dance on a razor wire over a bottomless abyss. Strike to early and your enemy will wipe from the face of the universe. Strike to late and you might not be able to contain your own servants. Action must be taken, but exactly at the optimal moment. This is of course true for all parties involved. Whoever can manipulate the war, so that his optimal moment occurs first wins. But – yet again – chance, the sadistic jester, has no regard for the plans of the mighty. The orbits of two neutron stars circling each other suddenly become instable for reasons unknown, perhaps a failed weapon experiment of the enemy. They collide realising their energy in a monstrous gamma-ray flash, scorching space clean of all intelligent live in a diameter of roughly 1000 light years, eradicating 73 % of the major strongholds the enemy has left in the Milky Way. The balance of power is gone, what is left of your opponent is easily eliminated. Unsurprisingly your creations are quicker to the trigger. They have of course a contingency plan for this (they have one for nearly every occasion). But it is not the optimal start position. They had hoped for another 30000-40000 years of war to bring their pieces into position. As it is survival of their species cannot be guaranteed. That doesn’t stop them, of course. The faster they move, the higher the probability that some of them will make it. The notion to initiate negotiations never crossed their minds. Not that it would have done any good, even if they had tried. After all they were up against you. Naturally you have prepared a few surprises of your own. You didn’t become what you are by lying easy under anyone’s knife. The following engagement is very short, at least on a galactic scale, and very vicious. When the dust settles no one is left standing. Silence and darkness retake their thrones as rightful rulers of the galactic disk, from which they were evicted a few short hundred million years earlier, by this impudent upstarts, also known as intelligent live. Shit happens. The few femto-robots that survived the holocaust lumber on mindlessly a few million or billion years, until entropy or the expiration date written in their programming catches up with them. That might have been the end of this story, if not for … Imagine you are a construction drone, completed in the closing stages of the great war. Your body an obsidian black, impossible sleek needle, 70 meter in length, teeming with trillions of femto-bots. Imagine you are falling through space at a velocity in spitting distance of c. Your mission is to erect a forward listening post and refuelling station complete with antimatter production facilities, in a remote system 30000 lightyears from the core, and to staff it with it with an intelligence division of your masters’ warrior slaves. To this end you carry several thousand gene-charts in your memory core as well as protein-resequencers. You are overseen by a single demon mind in uplink with your AI. Its disembodied brain, augmented by bucky filaments and superconductive neurons, is contained in Anti-Inertia fields and layers of virtual matter. You have hardly left the space firmly controlled by your masters, when a swarm of enemy hunter drones locks on to your engine signature. You cannot outrun them and you are many hundred light years from help. Your AI and the demon mind converse briefly and decide that your best chance for survival is to try and loose them in a nearby nebula. So you perform a bone crushing stop that defies all Newtonian laws of physics and go to ground. Yet your pursuer are not so easily shaken off. The following engagement leaves you crippled and mute: Your self-repair systems are down, their femto-bots destroyed or compromised by enemy nanoware, subspace communications inoperable, engines a melted mess, the demon mind dead and damaged beyond resurrection, the AI reduced to the level of an brain damaged cretin. Not that your tormentors are in a position to enjoy your predicament. Their remains are scattered over several billion cubic kilometres and still expanding. In Absence of all higher cognitive functions the still working subroutines of the AI take over. They are idiotic but determined. The mission stored in the memory core still stands and by golly they will complete it. So what if the engines are offline? Galactic drift and residual motion will bring your destination in reach of your still functional manoeuvring thrusters in a mere 847,32 million years. No one comes looking for you, it is assumed you were destroyed or at the very least damaged beyond repair. Your masters aren’t burdened with an overabundance of sentimentality – they are not likely to squander resources for such a pointless undertaking as a retrieval mission. Your disappearance isn’t even registered apart from a statistical annotation by a duteous little subroutine of some AI. At first the distant thunder of war keeps you company, but soon the galaxy falls silent. You listen to the quite murmur of the passing millennia, a hissing noise like sand in a hourglass. Every grain an aeon. But even longest journey has an end and finally you reach your destination and you get to work. You lack the necessary nano-ware and machinery to keep the warrior minds alive in their customary disembodied state, but you are adaptable. If need be, you are equipped to outfit your master’s servants with functional self-contained bodies. The world you have set down on has a flourishing eco system and several species that might serve as hosts. You were designed to be pragmatic: It is easier to work with the raw material available than to design a complete new body adapted to the already existing environment. You decide on a race of tree dwelling omnivores – a species already on the threshold to intelligence and relatively compatible to the necessary neurological structures. They take well to the subtle changes in wrought on their brain structures by your carefully crafted Messenger-RNA. But the results are less than satisfactory. This troublesome little subroutine continues to be a nuisance. It has set up shop in the frontal lobes and refuses to perform its simple pattern matching duties. Instead it annexes brain structures and computing time reserved for more important tasks. An usperor and an incompetent one at that. A fat bureaucrat, a tumour demanding obedience from all around him doing the real work. And it gets worse: Since it developed this thing called self-awareness ( What’s the use of that anyway?) it insists on intruding on decision making processes best left to his far more able servants intellect and instinct and continues to clog its synapses with such evolutionary dead ends as emotions and emphaty. The consequences are drastic and spectacular. Computing capacity drops by orders of magnitude, the bubbling font of genius dries up to a feeble trickle. The elegant and beautiful machinery, slicing reality into gossamer slivers with its whirring razor blades has been corroded to a dull bread knife, only fit for hawing and hacking. If you were able to experience emotion you would probably have screamed in disgust and outrage. But all components of your complex computers, that would have given you drive and initiative beyond the narrow mission parameters have long ago been melted to slag. So you capitulate to entropy with a last electronic whimper and begin your slide into oblivion. On the savannas your creations make their first halting steps towards civilization. They stumble and grope around like the brain damaged infants they are, mere shadows of their former glory, but they are nothing if not persistent. Slowly, painstakingly they shape their world to their will and rise their eyes to the mysteries shimmering in the sable blackness of the night sky. Even slower they prod and poke with clumsy fingers at the treasure vaults and secret chambers, hidden in their genome and their brain architecture. Imagine. Imagine a house build of white-washed river stones in the shadow of great oak trees. Imagine the lawn surrounding it, the swings hanging from branch of an oak, the azaleas in full bloom. Imagine the owners Joe and Jane Public (maybe their names are Monsieur and Madame Tout-le-monde or Otto Normalverbraucher(in), it really makes no difference) and their daughter; a dark haired, elf-like child, that loves to dance. Imagine the cellar beneath the house where it is dark and cool even on a boiling hot august afternoon. It is filled with sacks of onions and potatoes and peaches in jars, stuffed with every kind of old clutter imaginable from the defect lawn-mower to the horrible tasteless parasol, that was a gift from aunt Matilda and all manner of other fascinating things. The perfect place for an inquisitive young mind to play hide-and-seek or reign over fantasy kingdoms. Imagine a door banded with black iron in the darkest corner of the room, half hidden behind piles of junk. What sleeps behind it? Who can say? Maybe a wellshaft full of black ice and nests of writhing snakes. Maybe the dark forest in which Little Red Riding Hood disappeared. Maybe it is not quite like in the tales. Maybe a brooding silence hangs beneath twisting branches and hungry things follow you in the shadows. Maybe the windows of grandmother’s hut are dark holes like mouths screaming. Maybe the noble huntsmen has eyes dead and brown like something rotting at the bottom of a shallow lake. Maybe there is the bloodstained dress of a little girl hidden beneath his bed and a mutilated doll nailed to the wall next to it. Have you ever awakened in the silent hours before dawn with the cold sweat of half remembered nightmares on your brow? Have you ever wondered what beasts might sleep in the murky depths or your soul? Have you ever looked at the faceless figure in the mirror, afraid to turn the lights on, afraid of what might stare back at you? Imagine. Imagine someone should open that door.