Space

She doesn’t get a chance to understand before it kills her.

When the generation ship Seeker arrived at the galaxy’s edge, it found a marble stela half-buried in the void’s velvety fabric. The ship’s crystal-mind anchored itself there while it began to wake the carbon-minds who formed its crew: the technicians and choice-makers and void-watchers and reconcilers who did all the things which it could not, and who were set to be awakened anyway to celebrate the start of the ship’s true voyage—to look out upon the radiation-scoured emptiness which divided them from the Sculptor’s luminous beacon, twelve million light years away and nearly as ancient. ...

Originally posted to Twitter on December 15, 2021. “Did you know,” she says, “that the average person can endure less than five minutes of direct exposure to Her before their timeline is completely overwritten?” You, bound and gagged on the floor of the temple’s airlock, can only nod in response. Everyone knows that. She grins at you. “Unintelligent matter is rewritten faster, of course, and living wood endures surprisingly well—that’s why your rebellion was so excited when they found the asteroid forest, right? Sucks for you that we got here first.” ...

She drifts, unseeing and unfeeling, a speck of strangely dense matter wandering through her prescribed path—an arc countless centuries long, guided by the slow pulls of celestial bodies and solar fire’s angry wind. An interruption is neither appropriate or expected, and yet— She comes to ground in a storm of displaced momentum, energy ripped away from her and scattered to the eight corners, lensed into more manageable forms—explosions of light and color, bubbles of compressed time sending trees hurting far into their own future deaths. ...