One Million A.D. by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Stories
Published: 2005-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

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I was wrong. Many things are the same.

Seliku has been unable to convince the galaxy of her theory. She has won a few adherents among cosmologists, but for most people, the idea that QUENTIAM might be decaying, might be unreliable, is impossible to even consider. It’s like saying gravity is unreliable. Which, I suppose, might happen next. That would convince everybody, or at least everybody who survived it.

Meanwhile, some do not survive. There have been mistakes in vat nanos, creating bodies other than ordered, or killing the bodies before they were done. No one knows how many mistakes; I no longer trust QUENTIAM’s records.

A new quasar has appeared in the sky, and six supernovas, all outside our galaxy. They filled the sky, night after night, with brilliant light. Seliku says that is too many supernovas to be statistically random, but not even her colleagues all believe her. She works night and day to find the evidence, physical or experimental or mathematical, that may convince them. Her big question is this: Is the unseen other universe just brushing ours in passing, creating supernovas and quasars and small reconfigurations of spacetime that also change and reconfigure QUENTIAM? Or are the two universes set for a full collision, from which neither will emerge without changes so fundamental that basic particles themselves are affected, and all life ceases?

The Arlbenists were wrong, in ways they could never have foreseen when Arlbeni created his Divine Mission over a hundred thousand years ago. We were never alone in the galaxy, and not only because spores have drifted in from beyond its edges and seeded non-DNA-based life here. Even without that panspermia, we were not alone. Humans were already everywhere because QUENTIAM, our collective and historical selves, filled spacetime. And we weren’t alone in a much more profound sense.

I have suggested another question to Seliku, as well. Is it possible that the other universe, too, has a membrane like QUENTIAM, but more advanced? And that It knows what It’s doing in probing ours? On ˄17843, Seliku likened our brushes with the other universe to stones dropping in a pond. Dropped stones sometimes have droppers. Seliku dismisses this question, not because it’s completely stupid but because for that there really is no evidence. But I know she can imagine it. She is my sister-self, still, and sister-self to artists as well. She can imagine a Dropper of stones into the cosmic well between universes.

What is It, or Them, like? Do they guess what effects their experiments have on us?

None of this speculation reaches the Arlbenists, who still blithely seed worlds in the egocentric belief that only humans can create life. I, however, no longer correct and adjust Arlbenist seedings on other worlds. I won’t risk the vat rooms necessary for that. And I have my own work here, now, both in aiding Seliku in her all-important fight and in caring for her. Her nanomeds keep her healthy, but her body is not meant for this planet and is not doing well here.

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