“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
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
“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