The Reefs of Time by Jeffrey A. Carver

Author:Jeffrey A. Carver [Carver, Jeffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Carver, novels, science fiction, space opera, hard science fiction
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2019-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Contact: Plato

JEAVES SITUATIONAL JOURNAL, PERSONAL FOOTNOTE

Entering the starstream aboard The Long View was an event of surprising emotional impact for me. Layered deep in my archives is the personal memory of having helped to create this thing, more than one hundred and fifty years ago.2 “Helped” may be overstating matters; I was there to guard against certain unwanted possibilities coming to pass. I was, I guess, partially successful. What with amnesia on the part of one player, assassination on the mind of another, and barely controlled stellar engineering unfolding before us all, it was something of a miracle that anything useful at all came out of it.

Still, it feels to me a little like a phantom limb to an amputee. Kind of hollow, strangely real, and weirdly absent all at the same time. I only remember part of it. I was there, and my main self was destroyed in the supernova along with the other founders and would-be counter-founders: Ruskin, Ganz, people you wouldn’t know. And even the star itself, which we realized, in the moment of its death, was sentient. I caught a little glimpse of all of that, partly from the final transmission from my body consumed in the explosion to my secondary cache aboard the protected station. More of it came from the strange moments that followed: a kind of cosmo-telepathic event not unlike the linkage we on The Long View felt with certain sentient stars in the Starmaker Nebula.

I wonder now, with the starstream wrapped all around us, if I will feel any echo of that here. I wait, sensory channels open.

Is it crazy to think I might feel my own presence here, or the presence of the other founders?

____________________

2 My experiences were recounted in the document, if you can find it, entitled From a Changeling Star.

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