This is the first in a series of short stories taking place in the near future of ~2080, after a great calamity befalls earth, 1 thousand ‘Seedships’ (semi-inspired by an underrated text based mobile game called Seedship, it’s free go get it) are sent in all directions, each housing 1 million colonists frozen in stasis as well as the ingredients to build a new civilisation, the technology aboard the ships is sophisticated but fallible, rushed, prone to error- leading to some successes, but very much more failure. All compounded by a cartoonish about of human suffering told from varying points of view.
So without further a-due;
Lightyears alone -prologue: rouge deconstructors
The date was January 4th, it was seemingly an unremarkable day like any other, it was not this of course but the only people in any sense of panic were astronomers, but it all happened too fast to inform the public, by the time anyone knew what was going on the sky was already blanketed with the leering, ominous view of jet black voidships hanging over our planet.
The mothership was stomach churningly enormous, nearly as big as earth itself, and swarming around it were tens of thousands of support ships, from armoured battleships to tiny ripper drones, all had shown up to the feast.
From the second space unfolded to give way to the invasion fleet, the sky began blaring a message down to us, encoded in binary, translated it read something adjacent to;
“The Cerbrex Collective has claimed this world.
This world will be dismantled and rendered.
All organics on this world will undergo grid amalgamation.
Primitives and pre-sapients hold no right to worlds within pre-established boarders.”
The message repeated on the hour, every hour as drones swarmed the surface, pulling it apart in chunks where it would be hauled up by curriers to the awaiting maw of the mothership.
As desperate, and utterly futile defences took place, the scientists and engineers behind the scenes toiled to answer questions and build the first of the Seedships. It was discovered that the mothership would respond to certain questions beamed back to it in binary;
“Who are the Cerbrex Collective?”
“Fleet designation for automated planetary deconstruction and prospecting fleet #771258332”
“Why have you come here?”
“This planet has been marked for deconstruction- scans indicate: plentiful organics, sodium water oceans, combustible aged organics, radioactive materials, pre-refined minerals, liquid peridotite mantle.”
“What is grid amalgamation?”
“The process of chemically reducing organics in order to harvest electrical charge through cellular breakdown”
“Who are your creators?”
“-(unintelligible)-“
And perhaps the most enlightening of all- “where is your homeworld?”
This prompted a string of coordinates that, when zoomed in on, revealed the dead home of these ancient mining drones. A large planet hangs around a blue star, dimmed by a surrounding Dyson swarm, the planet itself only reveals itself as pale grey blotches briefly visible past the surrounding swarm of ancient technology and asteroid fields of perfectly rectangular chunks of refined planet. ancient automations unknowingly harvesting a random world for a civilisation, long dead. unceremoniously dumping the spoils of there crusade upon a world, long broken.
Beyond weakening morale, the knowledge of our invaders nature did little to effect the war, any hope of diplomacy was dashed by the AIs unfeeling, uncaring, unsympathising logic, we are primitives of course, unable to overcome the perils of space travel, at least according to the date of the machines starmaps, and of course, we hold no right to the planet we evolved on, it being within the ancient borders of buried bones, trapped at the mercy of laws that no mortal being had spoken for perhaps thousands of years, with no chance of appeal.
Every day our planet lost mass our armies lost people, for every thousand men dead a lucky few would perhaps manage to bring down one of the colossal harvesting units, the corpses of these titans would have to be hauled off quick to avoid being recycled by the fleet, but if successful the scientific benefits of such godlike technologies were untold, the AI cores especially, through analysis, it was discovered that these enigmatic creators stopped pinging updates to the automated swarm around 3400 years ago, weaker received radio signals continued for some 700 years after the assumed extension of the creators, suggesting one or more other galactic civilisations perhaps being in play at the time.
The dismantling of the drones and unlocking of the secrets of the AI cores lead to the completion of the seedships and the invention of the PC, the personality construct, it’s purpose was to sit at the helm, making decisions for the frozen colonists mid flight as well as to be a calm voice of reason and understanding to gently guide the colonists in reconstructing civilisation in the best possible way, or at least something resembling that…
And at last the seedships were finalised and 1 billion of us, a good fraction of what was left, we’re corralled like cattle into 1 thousand colossal, city sized ships, 1 million frozen body’s each, scientists, engineers, leaders, fighters, farmers and the every day folk all sealed away in dreamless sleep.
The space on the ships that did not accommodate our icy selves was instead filled with scanners and sensors, a cultural and scientific database containing all of humanity’s knowledge, armour and weapons, deciphered from the drones of course as well as scores of small specialised service drones knows as ‘limpets’, prospector, medic, attack, construction, ect.
And in the bowels of the ship the power centre is housed, far away biological tissue, it’s known as the ‘Blue heart’ due to its blinding glow, and with the salvaged magic of entropy inhibitors, they can make for a near infinite power source for the ship and early colonies, with regular maintenance from the limpets of course.
On the day known as ‘The Rapture’ as our world lay dismantled beneath, 1 billion frozen souls left earth surface for the last time, stretching out into the cosmos like dandelions in the wind, preying to happen upon some fertile soil, on another world in another time.
With the ruins of our once great world behind us and all systems nominal our 1 thousand seedships spread out into random directions and enter transition, the lights wind down as the ship lowers its power usage, by the time it wakes up, the ruins of earth will be long gone and proceed, presumably dumped upon the heaping rectangular asteroid swarm, with all the other innocent worlds that happened upon the fleets warpath.
The fleet of spores, now long in slumber, wait upon there first destination to scan, slowly drifting as time and the universe passes them by
And these are some of there more interesting tales:
(Refer to any of the soon to come short stories)
