The Butterfly

Sword of Humanity

Waking Up:

Captain’s log, supplemental: “After 3 months of long travel, H.M.S. Gauss finally reached the N1/S1 region of the Andromeda galaxy. There is a lot to unpack here. My Sagittarian 1^st officer wanted to wait for 1 more month before assigning crews for assignments. I agree. However, crew morale is at an all-time high and everyone wants to explore the galaxy. It’s an amazing engineering and scientific achievement that we finally managed to use a Dimensional displacement drive to travel to another galaxy. My science officer, Sam, is trying to solve his typical Riemann Hypothesis problem, which he started working on since we left the Sol System Outer Mooring. I’m happy that the crews are happy. Sagittarian crews and human crews were more than friendly recently, however, I have no objections here. If they can perform and meet our exceptions, their personal lives are not my things to worry about. End log.”

Captain Probir Sen ended his log. He and his crew were finally in the Andromeda galaxy. It was really a momentous occasion. So, what was their story?

Humanity started their exploration of the galaxy in 2100, but before that, they were aware of extraterrestrial life. Their “James Webb Space Telescope-II” helped them to locate 3 planets in 2 different star systems that contained life. In the Alpha Centauri system, there were insectoid lifeforms which used to burrow into deserts and there was an aquatic species which used to live in the oceans of the tidally locked planet. Although those species weren’t really sapient, the 1st intelligent lifeform was detected in the “Wolf-359” system. The species was oxygen-breathing humanoid and very similar to their own. The only difference was they were in the bronze age. Humanity reunited after discovering the 1^st space-age civilization in the Epsilon Eridani system. After unifying under the “United Earth Commonwealth,” they proceeded to build the 1^st FTL engine which was called Alcubierre drive or warp drive. It was a Natario variant which created a bubble of spacetime around the ship to go faster than the speed of light. In 2080, humanity 1^st used the warp drive test flight and reached 2400 times the speed of light. From that time, humanity had an unimaginable ambition to explore and know the universe. In 2100, they settled in Proxima Centauri-B and became an interstellar government.

The Human Government worked like this: Every planet was under the United Earth Commonwealth or UEC. Each planet had a planetary governor which was chosen by-election. The governor worked with several technical experts who themselves were elected from a panel of technical experts. Consisting of several star systems was a sector. “Core Sector” consisted of Sol System, Alpha Centauri System, Barnard’s Star, Sirius and Ross-128 system. A sector was governed by a president who was elected by the vote of the citizen. The overabundance of energy using antimatter led to necessities like food, clothing, shelters, education, healthcare and entertainment being provided for free for every human. However, the more a citizen contributed, the energy allowance was increased, which translated into a prosperous society with technological advancements.

In 2105, humanity made first contact with the Sagittarian Matriarchy, a very beautiful humanoid species with a very liberal attitude to interspecies relationships. They were also very peaceful and relatively smaller in power. Their home planet was Antares and they started to explore the galaxy for 2 human years. UEC ship H.M.S. Poincaré first detected Sagittarian single-person craft in the Gliese-880 system. The first contact marked a new era both for the Matriarchy and the UEC.

After that, the matriarch and UEC became closest allies. Although initially, the matriarch didn’t agree to leave the pre-FTL civilizations alone, because they thought they could uplift the pre-FTL civilizations, they couldn’t risk any confrontation with UEC.

UEC’s ships were very different from Sagittarian ships. UEC had 5 classes of Military and 4 classes of civilian ships. Military ships were;

Juggernaut, massive, around 10 KM in size. Half disk-shaped, brimming with weapons. They can deploy frigates.

Cruisers were smaller, about 4-5 KM in size, but very nimble. They were shaped like hexagonal cylinders. There were 2 types of cruisers. Technical cruisers were focused on heavy engineering and scientific cruisers were focused on scientific research.

Drone Carriers were massive in size, around 30km in size but operated by the Juggernauts. They were unmanned drones that were shaped like dragonflies. They had weapons around them but also had powerful claw-like organs that could land on enemy ships and tear them. Normally during a formation, drone carriers created a defence screen around the manned ships.

Frigates were small, 200-300m in size and had very powerful weapons. Normally used to swarm enemies or intercept enemies near cruisers. Most frigates were unmanned but there was a single coordinator frigate with a human pilot.

Long-range tactical reconnaissance vessels were science vessels with powerful cloaks, spatial transporters that could throw them from harm's way and extremely powerful sensors that could see everything.

In mid-2150, humanity made several contacts with some powerful slavers empires and an authoritarian empire that had a history of raiding nearby space-faring species in the “Near 3KPC arm.” UEC managed to diffuse the situation with the power of their fleet but the slave empire was not happy at all. After another battle with both sides, UEC managed to become the dominant species in the area and those 2 powers finally submitted to the UEC.

In 2165, UEC and the Sagittarian Matriarchy built the “H.M.S. Carl Friedrich Gauss'', an extragalactic exploration and research juggernaut, had a class of her own. She was larger than the other juggernauts and had 50,000 crews. The juggernaut had an experimental FTL engine, called Dimensional Displacement Drive. The Sagittarians contributed to the interior and furniture of the ship, humans built the rest of the ship, engines, tools and almost everything else. The reason for that was that Sagittarian architecture was very beautiful and artistic, just like themselves. There were Sagittarian crews as well, most of them were in hospitality, entertainment and other sectors while most command-level crews were humans. Although Sagittarians were offered command-level positions too, they refused, but Commander T’Mera accepted and was accepted as the first officer. She was a commander of the 3^rd Sagittarian exploration fleet and was a very experienced commander who served under captain Henry of the 9^th Expedition Fleet. She was also well versed in human culture and spent a considerable amount of time on Earth. So, this is how things started.

“1^st officer’s log, commander T’Mera speaking. I am exceedingly happy that the ship has finally made it to the Andromeda galaxy. My captain is Captain Probir Sen. While other captains are chosen by their military prowess, he was chosen for his mathematical and scientific aptitude. I don’t know how to work with him. My previous captain, Henry, was very methodical. He was so methodical that after 2 weeks of serving with him, I could predict his every single move. But Captain Probir is a bit different. Last night, we had dinner together in the mess hall, but instead of letting waiters handle the dishes, he himself handled everything a bit weird for a Captain level officer. He is overly obsessed with maths and science fiction. I tried to express my feelings towards him but he simply shrugged it off, saying, 'I get it, but now see, you can print out Graham's number on…' I was wondering, are all humans so intelligent? I have never seen anyone less intelligent than, let's say, a Tranam Science Officer. I am excited to work with Captain Probir. I am looking forward to it. End log."

T'Mera was trying to make sense of the situation so she could suggest something in the next meeting. But most human crews were ready to go out and see what was out there, but Sagittarians were cautious as it was in their genes. T'Mera got ready for her bridge duty and arrived, only to see a crowd, holding a human cake, some candles on top of it and a text, "Happy 30th Birthday, T'Mera." Everybody started to cheer and clap. She was shocked. Despite being well versed in human customs, she never faced a ceremony like that.

Captain Probir was in the middle of the crowd, he stood up, came to T'Mera, hugged her and said, "I wish you a long and prosperous life, Timmy. Now, take the knife and cut the cake."

Captain used to call her Timmy because in his words, "T'Mera is too alien to pronounce" and when he was asked if he had disrespected her, he simply replied, "Naah, I've made her one of our own. It's even closer than you can think."

T'Mera cut the cake and celebrated with her friends on the bridge, but only one person, Sam, was not socialising. It was not that he hated anyone, or he was jealous, but he was drowned in solving something called Riemann Zeta Function, which was a mathematical concept that was nagging humanity for a long time. Sam didn't realise that T'Yer, another Sagittarian crew, was watching him closely. T'Yer was a close friend of Sam and she was "tasked" by T'Mera to bring Sam out of his cocoon of analytic number theory and pure mathematics. She saw Sam as her younger brother, but a bit too energetic and enthusiastic. T'Yer whispered into his ear about T'Meras birthday of which he became even more uneasy. He came to T'Mera, stuttering, "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I've forgotten about… you know, I… I'm sorry" of which T'Mera just smiled and shoved a gigantic piece of cake into his mouth. The celebration ended with a helm officer, Jeremy shouting, "3 alcubierre transmissions, 083, plus 27 degrees, 10 light days away."

Everyone rushed towards their posts, the captain leaned over his railing in front of the hybrid display system, which was basically a projection of the HUD, projected over the window. There was also a 3d holographic compass, at the centre. The compass had the ship in the middle and 1 light second area around it, like a 3rd person's view of the ship and the fleet. Captain then ordered to set course to the origin of those transmissions, then fabricated a cup of tea, returned to his chair and then started playing a song. The lyrics were very different from any Sagittarian or Tranam songs. The lyrics were;

Are you just a portrait?

Simple brush strokes on a canvas, an art-writ?

There, in the galaxies, way beyond the Milky Way,

In heaven’s nest where crowd they

To travel day and night

Wayfarers of darkness carrying light

Planets, suns and stars

Are you not real as they are?

T'Mera then asked, "Captain, can I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead," replied Captain Probir while sipping his tea.

"Who wrote this poetry? This is beyond beautiful. Even a Sagittarian poet cannot write this." Asked T'Mera.

"Oh, it was an Indian poet, I think he's from around the 1940s. He was born in the same village as I was born, and our languages are the same, but what you are listening to is an English translation. Why? Do you like this? Asked Probir.

"Sir. T'Mera replied. While she was listening to this, she was somewhere else, on an alien planet of dense forest, extreme rain and sounds of distant thunder, she was feeling different. There was no pain, no sense of being lost. Rainwater washed her blue hair while her mind was in a different dimension…

"Timmy!" Captain's voice shattered her little daydream. She collected herself and said, "Yes, captain. I'm sorry, the song was making me…"

"Nostalgic? For a place where you've never been to?" Asked Captain.

"How do you know?" T'Mera was astonished. She knew humans could read the body language of other species, but this deep?

“The poet himself was a fan of rain and wrote numerous poems about rain,” Probir replied while inputting a coordinate where to stop. Sagittarians knew that humans could do some degree of multitasking. The coordinates were several degrees off, so T’Mera tied to correct him, but the captain said, “No. I don’t want to appear to them as some kind of mythical deity. I will stay at least 10 light-seconds away. Calibrate your sensors to detect biosignatures.”

After several minutes of travel, they reached a planet, orbiting a pulsar. The planet was slightly bigger than the earth and was being bombarded with radiation. T’Mera said, “I fail to see why there would be a civilization living in this hell. Radiation would simply kill everything” to which Probir replied, “Of course, for us, carbon-based lives, yes. But think of a civilization that can thrive on a radiation-rich planet. We had such an organism in an area called Chornobyl where there was radiotrophic fungus growing. We managed to genetically replicate those and used early human space flights to absorb solar radiation.” T’Yer was stunned, she could never imagine utilising something to assist space flight. These humans must’ve been some of the strangest creatures in the universe.

“Captain, there is a complex set of infrastructure, but I cannot see any movement. There is a large computer core that is transmitting these signals to somewhere I cannot detect,” said the Chief Science Officer, major Tatiana. She was trying to determine what those signals were and trying to find a way to translate those. Suddenly, Sam said, “Captain, the entire planet is full of dead bodies.”

The bridge became silent. While everyone started to scan the planet surreptitiously, a call from the infirmary came to the bridge. It was Dr Leonard, chief medical officer, “Captain, I believe I know why these people have died.” to which the captain replied, “Come to the bridge, I’ll get you a terminal to work with.” and then he prepared a terminal towards the starboard side view screen.

Dr Leonard arrived on the bridge with messy hair and holding an Antarean coffee. He opened the terminal and said, “Captain, those people had a plague that mutated their DNA.” His eyes were fixed on the monitor. As he sipped his coffee, he became even more restless while the eyes of the entire bridge crew were transfixed on him. He scratched his long and bushy beards and then dropped a bombshell, “I think we can safely land on the planet to retrieve a sample. I like to run some tests. I only need an environmental suit.”

“Are you crazy, man?” asked T’Mera, “I get it, the species died out, but you cannot simply land on the surface, we don’t know what will happen. Are you trying to die?”

“Look, Timmy, I have no intention to die. Also, our radiation suits can withstand what’s out there, right?” he looked at Probir who was smiling looking at both of them. He said, “Leonard, take a tactical team with you. We don’t know what’s there.”

“I’m on it, captain.” Dr Leonard went to his infirmary, prepared himself and took a tactical team with him to retrieve some bodies to test. A shuttle with several scientists and a tactical team finally reached the extraction site of a city. From the ground, the view of the sky was surreal. The pulsar was glowing and creating a pulse of dark and bright light surrounding the area. The whole air was full of hydrogen gas while liquids consisted of hydrogen peroxide. Aliens were biped and had silicon-based biology. They were very similar to humans, but with 2 sets of antennas on their heads and very different internal anatomy. The away team collected several bodies and loaded them into the cargo bay of the shuttle.

“It's awful weather, init?” commented Lieutenant Tony.

“It’s just the radiation, Lieutenant. The water gets radiolised by this pulsar’s radiation,” replied Dr Leonard. He was immersed in the surroundings. The entire planet was a city, an ecumenopolis. There were plenty of computers to go around and none of them had any power left. So, Dr Leonard called the ship and asked for several crates of power cells. An unmanned drone carrier approached the away team with 20 crates of power cells. Leonard took one cell and tried to power up a computer of something that looked very similar to a human shop… or a pharmacy, they didn’t know.

“C’mon Tony, help me. I’m a doctor, not an engineer.” Dr Leonard shouted at Tony who was standing idly and kept looking at a distant building.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, bent down, opened a hatch on the computer panel and started to fiddle around for some time. The Commander of the tactical team was looking at something that suspiciously looked like an artificial river of hydrogen peroxide.

Dr Leonard leaned on Commander's shoulder and said, “Lovely planet, isn’t it? The view, the grand size of it, the… death. It’s…” he paused for a bit. The Sagittarian commander knew Dr Leonard very well, she was his patient for a long time. She answered, “Doctor, I’m sure you will know what happened to these people. I promise.”

“Sir” shouted Tony, “Sir, the power is up, but I cannot make any sense with these videos.”

“What videos? Let me see.” The doctor rushed towards the computer and to his shock, he discovered lots of entries, most of them were entries of security cameras. They were inside a shop and in the video, almost everyone looked very ill and tired.

“I hate to break the reunion here, doctor, but we’ve deciphered the message here. Would you care to join us, so we can be on our way?” The transmission broke the sense of surreal moments.

“On my way, captain,” replied Dr Leonard. He was reluctant to go. After all, it was planet-wide devastation and he ought to study it.

They reluctantly returned to the ship. 

“The planet was void of life and there was no indication of decomposition. So, it was logical to assume that those guys were not native to this planet.” Shouted Dr Leonard at the dinner table. He was distressed and wanted to help, but help what? Help who? If it was in a milky way, he could’ve simply looked at the database and could’ve come up with a solution.

“We will drop a beacon at the L2 point of the planet. It will serve 2 purposes. It will be an initial point of where our survey begins and it will be a beacon to… you know, a beacon, it will… uhm” Captain Probir was stuttering.

“What a beacon does?” said T’Mera.

“Yes, exactly. Sam has calculated the trajectory of the alcubierre transmission. We are going to a part of the galactic arm, there, we are expecting a ship full of scientists and archaeologists. They were the last to survive this plague of them,” said the captain. He was ready to accept the fact that the ship should be long gone when they would arrive, however, there would be at least some clues to how they vanished. Maybe they were hoping to find a civilization that might be peaceful.

Captain Probir stepped onto the bridge and commanded to set course in the vicinity of the ships. The signal was the last farewell message to the crews of a research ship. The message was, “This is the O’linian command. I wish you a peaceful rest. From the rest of the O’linia, goodbye.” They were trying to figure out what happened to the species. In the lab, Dr Leonard was running some tests on the bodies. According to Quantum Dating Scan, they died around 700 years ago. Due to their silicon-based biology, they were not decomposed. It was a genetic mutation that caused the plague.

“My my, what a lovely species you are, but alas, your beauty couldn’t save you from the disease” mumbled the doctor. His Sagittarian nurse, T’Met said, “Doctor, are you hurt?” T’Met meant to support him emotionally. She was also emotionally attracted to the doctor.

“Nothing, really. I was just… hey T’met, look!” He had something about their death. It wasn’t just a simple genetic mutation. To T’Met’s eyes, it took nearly 15 minutes for Doctor Leonard to detect the problem, while she thought the best of Sagittarian scientists would have taken 15 years to find out. They called the Captain in the infirmary to inform him what actually happened. It was the radiation itself that caused severe cellular damage to the species. What happened was the species was adapted to live in a radiation-filled environment, however, several thousand years ago, something happened to the pulsar. Superfluid neutrons rotated by forming quantized vortices, and the spatial distribution of these vortices determined the rotation rate of the superfluid core; for example, vortices migrated away from the stellar axis of rotation when the superfluid angular velocity Ω_sf decreased whereas Ω_sf could not change if the vortices were fixed in location, that was when they were pinned. Meanwhile, normal matter (for example, in the crust) rotated at an angular velocity Ω that decreased as a result of energy loss from the stellar surface due to magnetic dipole radiation, that was, dE/dt = −βΩ⁴, where β ≈ B² R⁶ /6c³ and B and R were the neutron star magnetic field and radius, respectively. Which meant a rapid decrease of the temperature of the pulsar and rapid loss of the radiation. That caused them to receive less than the usual dose of radiation.

“They simply died from Vitamin D deficiency,” doctor Leonard sipped a cup of tea and said, “According to my sensor, there are several pulsar orbiting planets, but none of them emits the precise amount of radiation that this species needs to survive.”

“And Terraforming… sorry, Stellar-forming a star is much more difficult than let’s say terraforming” added Sam. The captain stood up and ordered every senior officer to the observation gallery. There, he gave a farewell salute to the planet, dropped a beacon and then set course to the vicinity of the signal. Sam had recorded the signal and started to play it in all tachyon frequencies. The sheer size of the UEC and Sagittarian allied fleet created a gravitational wave which distorted the transmission from the planet.

After several days of searching, they finally located the dreadnought. It had a very similar energy signature and very compatible software system, even though the looks were similar.

“Cloak!” yelled the captain. It was understandable, after all, they could not trust something that had been alive for nearly 700 years.

Sam scanned the ship, it looked like an enormous butterfly. The ship was emitting a very faint energy signal. T’Mera said, “Now what?” Captain said, “Sam might come up with some solution, but until now, we will have no choice but to grab it with a tractor beam. T’Yer, engage tractor beam and T’Mera, scan for any life sign. I wanna know if someone is still alive.”

The ship was extremely large and had a weapon complement that could simply glass an entire planet with an initial volley. T’Mera said, “We are ready, captain, our weapons are powerful enough to destroy this beast.”

“Destroy for what?” Captain was shocked and disturbed, “It didn’t cause us any harm. We simply want to study it. Let’s see, Sam?” Captain was asking Sam to give him the scan report. Sam was working with 3 of his lieutenants and Tatiana. Tatiana was typing something very fast and Sam was trying to access the ship’s database.

Suddenly the ship started moving and trying to turn around.

“Hold it!” shouted the captain. There was a distinct audio signal coming from the audio port. It was the screaming of an enormous machine, trying to grind metals.

“Captain, the ship is trying to get behind us, our tractor beam is breaking. We must abort!” reported T’Yer.

“Not yet. Arm neutron beams and antimatter warhead, lowest setting. We are going to scare the machine.” replied the Captain.

 T’Mera was watching with awe how fast humans could manage their hand-eye coordination and do the hardest of tasks like typing while calculating and sipping drinks at the same time. Suddenly Tatiana stood up and said, “Captain, we can take control of him, but I believe he’s alive.”

“Him? Take control? What are you on about?” asked T’Mera.

“The ship, he’s alive. He’s a sentient machine and he's been exploring this sector of the galaxy for several hundreds of years.” Tatiana replied.

“Just take control of navigation systems, but don’t do him any harm. I will never allow any harm to any sentient creature,” replied Captain Probir. He was very excited and looking forward to seeing what was to come.

A huge foghorn-style sound pierced the audio port and shattered some glasses, but everyone was fine. Suddenly, a red beam fired twice from the creature’s body, one beam hit the stern of the ship and another was missed by several miles.

“I’ve taken the propulsion system, sir,” said Sam. Suddenly the movement stopped. One last scream from the audio port and it became silent. It was like wrestling with a monster and finally putting it down, but in this case, just taking control of it and trying to understand it.