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The Butterfly Mysteries of the ICH-31120 Cluster Part 2
“We used to be Xitian hive, a hive-based civilization. We originated on a planet your ship visited during the first landing. That was our home. We had space flight for over 2000 years and we were the apex of the civilization in this sector of the galaxy. However, our hive-minded appearance scared many newer and fledgling civilizations. We are now in a technological singularity, merged with the machines and became a single entity,” said the insectoid.The first contact with the Xitian hive, the butterfly and the pre-FTL civilization taught the entire task force that natural biological lives could not go on forever. A sufficiently advanced organic civilization would create advanced machines that would do the jobs for them. As time goes by, the organics will incorporate some of the technologies into their own which results in cybernetics. Cybernetics are the final frontiers; it was also a pandora’s box.“When we started our first cybernetics program, it created some massive problems,” sa
The Butterfly New Neighborhood
Captain Cohen started to talk about Graham’s number, an exuberantly large number. The number was so large, that it could not be contained in the observable universe. “Connect each pair of geometric vertices of an n-dimensional hypercube to obtain a complete graph on 2n vertices. Colour each of the edges of this graph either red or blue. What is the smallest value of n for which every such colouring contains at least one single-coloured complete subgraph on four coplanar vertices?” asked Cohen. “Huh?” Theo looked at him like an idiot. He was overwhelmed, “Let me get a pen and paper…” Theo tried to find it. “Won’t work. You cannot write the number on a piece of paper,” Cohen said, “In our observable universe, there is not enough space to write the number on.” While the UEC Expeditionary members finished exploring 500 cubic light years area of space, they had to settle down. There were not enough supplies with them to go on like that forever. Soon, they had to find a new planet, meet
The Butterfly From the Other's Perspective.
“Merchant Ela, logging. My ship has been released from the ‘Orbius Planetary Port.’ I am setting up the navigational system for warping to my next destination, ‘Twin Sisters,’ an outpost planet of our system, 24 lightyears away. My ship’s new warping space drive would take me around 7 of our days to reach there,”Ela finished her log and strapped on her ship’s char for the launch. She took a joystick and used a thruster control to accelerate the ship. Once the orbital velocity of 9.1 km per second of the planet, she contacted the orbital platform of the planet, “Mother.”“Mother, this is the merchant ship, ‘Wrobring’ requesting permission to depart.”The space traffic controller checked its database and saw the ship was carrying 700 tons of food to the “Twin Sisters” outpost.“Wrobring, this is Mother. You are clear to depart,” with that, Ela manoeuvred her ship and pointed towards the binary star, 24 lightyears away, and started accelerating. After passing 4 moons of the planet, she
The Butterfly Form the Other's Perspective.
Ela woke up to the sound of the alarm. It was the proximity sensor for a star system nearby. She jumped out of her bed and looked at her watch. Already 9 hours had passed. She changed her dress and went upstairs, to the bridge and stopped the alarm. If the ship passed near 50 light seconds of the Oort cloud of a star system, it gave the alarm. In that case, the star system was the second to last star system. Although not very far, the warp drive of the ship would take around 6 more days to reach the station. There was nothing she could do. So, she started tinkering with a Tachyonic Antenna or TA. Tachyonic Antennas used tachyon, a particle that travelled faster than light, so they used it to communicate with other FTL ships.She was very bored and had nothing to do, so she opened one of her supply boxes to see what was in there. Those supply boxes were gifted by the port authorities every time she brought cargo shipments.The box contained 25 packs of processed food, 35 packs of compr
The Butterfly From the Other's Perspective.
“I can do this! I can do this! I can do this!” Ela was screaming and trying to break free from the gigantic ship. Finally, her sense of flight instinct kicked in. She accepted defeat and finally curled up in her seat. She was ready to accept whatever the massive beasts would impose upon her.She leaned to the left of her seat while being curled up. She touched a switch and it shut down the light.She could sense that her ship was moving. It was vibrating and having a very strange motion. She however had nothing to do. She became a passenger.“ClANK!” A massive metallic sound rocked the ship. She jumped out of the seat and quickly undid her straps, and moved to a window to see what was happening.There were no stars in the view, nothing. In fact, she felt like her ship was inside another ship. She slowly moved towards the consoles of her cockpit and opened a camera to see the entirety of the holding place of her ship.It was big, but from the camera, there was just so little that could
The Butterfly From the Other's Perspective.
The captain, who introduced herself as Alina Liu Zheng came forward, touched Ela’s forehead and then assured her that she wouldn’t be harmed. In the meanwhile, they prepared a gravity suit for her. Ela slowly got up and tried to sit, but she felt something very wrong with her body. She felt very dizzy and nearly fell down.“There, I’ve got you,” the captain quickly grabbed Ela and kept her on her lap. Ela knew that falling down from this height in this gravity would be fatal for her.Captain gently put her on the gravity suit, and Ela started to feel pretty fine. She was very afraid of those huge alien creatures for the first time, but when the captain took her like a mother and helped her to get on the gravity suit, she started to trust those aliens.However, when they were walking through the corridor, the problem became apparent. Ela, being evolved on a low gravity world, was smaller in size, in fact, she was half the tall of Captain Alina, and her movement through the 1g environme
The Butterfly From the Other's Perspective
Captain Alina and Ela reached the bridge. Ela was expecting another massive industrial bridge with sharp edges and smells of lubricants. In fact, she could not be more wrong. The entire bridge looked something like the Philosopher’s palace on their home planet. Even the philosopher’s palace was not that extravagant and elegant. The trim lines on the furniture of the bridge, frames of the computer screens, almost everything was covered in expensive Low-Pressure Neutronium, Gold and Platinum.Ela said, “You might be very rich,” to which the captain replied, “We don’t use wealth, we will explain it to you later.”The ship was holding position right beside the Butterfly. The machine majestic machine was slowly flapping its wing to radiate heat. Ela thought that the butterfly must’ve been another ship of the UEC. The captain asked Ela, “Where you were going? We will drop you there,” she felt it was her responsibility to drop her at the destination since she grabbed and picked her up.“Can
The Butterfly From the Other's Perspective.
Ela was desperate to reach the outpost. She accelerated her ship to 3 times the speed of light. The outpost was near an emission nebula. It used to glow dark purple and pinkish colour because there was many calcium outgassing from the nebula. From the outpost, the nebula looked like an enormous mountain. Sometimes there was lightning and thunders. Sometimes there were nebulous winds and storms, that touched the edge of the solar system, where the outpost was orbiting the 2nd star. Ela sat down on her chair and tried to understand why, after everything, she felt nervous. She tried to think the entire event through. There, she was, trying to haul a lot of cargo to a very faraway station, and she got interdicted by an alien federation who claimed to be from the other galaxy. Ela calmed down a bit. After several hours, the outpost came into view. It was majestic, rotating rings were sleeping and the habitat area and the centre was the science laboratory and a stellar observatory. She f