The drone was moved to another town. The Butterfly was moving the drone in a manner that looked like an old man. But captain Probir wanted to visit the planet by himself. It was still difficult for him to land because it was dangerous.
Probir ordered the drone to move to a quiet place, out of the town and decided that he, himself would land. He took a shuttle and landed right beside the waiting drone.
Probir, although a very capable starship captain, lacked the personality of being a captain, a showy personality with a very high level of charisma. He only cared about his next mission, and by doing that, he distanced himself from the others. Even his first officer couldn't predict his next move, not because the captain wanted not to predict, but because he was not like clockwork, like the other captains.
He always thought of himself as an observer, observing everything without interfering. The reason was, from his childhood, he was an observer, always keeping to himself and observing. Once he went into trouble with the school authority who thought he was a "quiet kid" type of student, but in reality, he was deeply philosophical and very unpopular among his classmates.
Most of the time in the class, he spent doodling and colouring out nebulas and spaceships. While some of his classmates tried to understand him, many ignored him. After all, the school was insanely difficult.
Captain Probir spoke to the drone which in reality spoke to the Butterfly. The captain started walking toward a small village while the drone was following him. It was nearing sunrise. They were following a small river to the town and suddenly the Butterfly told through the drone, "Captain, there is something wrong with the civilization."
“What is it?” asked the captain.
“Captain, I’ve seen many organics, recorded many languages and scanned many planets. The one most important thing I’ve seen is, that they tend to diversify. An example would be your own civilization. Before reunification, there were more than 3000 languages and still to this day, your own civilization has more than 5000 languages, including interstellar languages. You had different cultural and artistic expressions. But this civilization felt awfully like civilization with a manufactured fantasy. Culture seems to be very homogenous and there is a single language. The development phase looks like a culture that could be your early 22nd century of earth.”
The captain noticed that a long time ago and wanted to talk to the people. After reaching a small village, the captain and the drone sat beside a church-like structure. There were several statues and some symbols around the place. The butterfly said, “Captain, why do the organics need spirituality?”
The captain thought for a bit and started,
“See, spirituality is like a blanket.”
“I don’t understand,” said the butterfly.
“See, for the organics, we tend to find things that are strangely familiar, yet feel so desperately unknown,” continued the captain, “See, we love to imagine. Our imagination is the thing that carries us forwards. However, imagination can be of many types.”
“Please continue,” said the Butterfly.
“See, one can imagine a very comforting place, in a very beautiful village, like this one, and other can imagine something of a very far away place where there is no constrain of the laws of physics. You can also imagine a higher power,” said the captain.
“But we don’t know if a higher power exists or not,” said the Butterfly.
“Exactly, I cannot define spirituality. I can only tell what other people define it,” said the captain, “You see, humans are emotional and it’s very common for an emotional animal to believe in things like that.”
“But are you a spiritual person?” asked the Butterfly.
“No. I don’t see any reasons behind spirituality. You might think of me as a person of logic. I aspire to be a person without emotions; therefore, I reject things like spirituality,” replied the captain.
“So, is this the reason why you show little to no emotions on the bridge?” asked the Butterfly.
“Well, not exactly, I have other reasons,” the captain replied. He was looking at the horizon, the lazy sunrise and how the entire horizon was bloodshot red, suddenly, it reminded him of his hometown which is located by the side of the Ganges River. He felt something very home about that place, the “wet” scent of the riverside soils, the landscape scenery, almost everything.
Looking at the horizon, he started singing,
“I’ve never ever seen him in all my days –
There’s a mystical village near my home
Where a certain neighbour lives
Beyond deep waters, lies this neighbour’s dwelling
There are no banks,
No boats for the crossing –
Tell me then, how am I supposed to go there?
What can I tell you about this neighbour?
He has no body, head, hands, or feet
One moment he soars through the air
The next he skims the water
If this neighbour even touched me once
I’d be able to shake off my mortal fears
Yet he and Lalon live in the same place
Still, there is a gap of a thousand miles!”
The Butterfly was staring at the captain. He was trying to understand the meaning of the song.
Captain Probir finished his song, looking towards the distant horizon, his mind was somewhere else.“Captain, what’s the meaning of this song?” asked the Butterfly.“It’s complicated. See, the song was written by a monk-song writer and poet who searched for spirituality around 700 years ago. The mystical village he was talking about was the soul. The soul, which we still don’t know if it exists or not,” said the captain, “You see, we have 2 schools of thought. One believes that there is something called a soul within every one of us. It operates us, just like your operating system. The second school of thought was they believe that there is nothing called a soul. We do not observe this soul and we have no physical evidence for it.”“What do you believe in, captain?” asked the Butterfly.“Me? I believe what is scientifically proven. Our consciousness is the result of the emergence property of our neurons. I think, this emergence property is called a soul,” replied the captain.“But my
“How did you know about AI?” Captain asked for the 3rd time. That time, the drone and the captain dragged Nicolas into a nearby wood for questioning. While despite being an alien, Nicolas was nowhere near strong enough to overpower the drone. “I am not going to tell you,” replied Nicolas, “I’ve seen you, descending from the sky. You are not one of us.” “But I mean you no harm. Please tell me how you know about the AI,” Probir asked. This time, he was angry. Nicholas was staring at the captain like an idiot. His facial expression suggested that he was not in a hurry, yet he was not happy about the entire “dragging into the wood” business. “I will not tell,” for the last time, he told, before he turned towards the river and lay down. He was acting strangely. Probir and the Butterfly stood up and communicated with the ship, “This is the captain, I need a neural suppressor.” He wanted to wipe his memories. He was not so sure if it would work. “What is that,” asked Nicholas. “I will
“I am an observer. I observe things,” said a very deep mechanical voice. “Observer? What do you observe?” Probir was annoyed more than curious. He absolutely hated the so-called monolithic civilization culture. “I observe civilizations, life, anything that is interesting to me,” replied the thing called Nicolas, “My origin is beyond your understanding. I am, you may say, beyond time and space, yet I’m not omnipotent or omniscient.” Probir said, “Looks like you are in a higher dimension anyway. So, so it’s reasonable to…” before finishing, the observer said, “No. I am not what you think I am. I have seen many lives come into existence and extinguish and I have collected so much data that your universe would not be able to handle any of that. It’s more than Graham’s number, it’s more than your universe could handle.” Probir said, “Okay, tell me your origin. I will comprehend,” he wanted to know. “My origin is out of time. Countless times the universe went into the big rip, big crunc
The observer stopped for a bit and said, “I am to be frank tired of living. I have seen everything there to be seen. Immortality makes me tired.” To which the Butterfly then said, “Observer, I am immortal too. I think immortality is a gift you should not cast away.”“I know what you are going to say. You will say, there are many things to see and learn. But I have spent so many for so long times that I have seen events recurring in an exactly similar fashion. You cannot even begin to imagine how long I am being alive. There is nothing new to observe,” replied the observer.“Do you want to die?” asked Prbir without even a single drop of hesitation.“I… I don’t know. I have seen many deaths, but I could never bring myself to think about my own death,” replied the observer, “however as an observer who saw the death and destruction of the entire universe a countless number of times, I am tempted to see this. I will require you to disconnect my dark matter reactor from my mainframe. I cann
Captain Cohen, in the other system, was investigating a strange insectoid species of a very advanced technological capability. Their science ship and the cruiser went inside of the Dyson shell.It was massive, the Dyson shell was big, it was massive, it was mindbogglingly big. It was so big, that 550 million of earth could fit inside of it. From the perspective of the ship, there were distant stars glowing and twinkling. But those were not the stars, those were lights of massive mega servers built inside of the Dyson shell. There were cables going from one side of the shell to the supposed “space.” The helmsman said, “Captain, I’m having a hard time keeping the ship stable.”“Why is that?” asked Theo, his first officer.“Sir, the wall of the shell is at our port side, and the entire bloody universe is at our starboard side. I know how to keep a steady line, but for some bloody reasons, the ship is banking to the starboard.” Extremely irritated helmsman reported.“My host star has a v
“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
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
“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