Hakeka
27-02-2007, 05:35
ooc: This is the intro thread.
The darkness of outer space heralds many secrets. An explorer with a good nose could find all sorts of junk scattered throughout the void: The wreckage of a mysterious alien vessel, for instance. Or a discarded keg.
And if you had a nose good enough, you might just sniff out something on the edge of the galaxy, just 50 light-years distant from the swirling cloud of gas called the Eagle Nebula. No, look closer. You're getting cold. That's good, you're getting warmer. Keep looking. Warmer. Warmer. Oooh, cold again. Warmer. Warmer - that's it.
There. It's a very large object, almost a Neptune in breadth. Its shape is that of a snowflake - but the fractal patterns are far more complex, and the colors are different. In fact the colors are shifting, intricate patterns forming and dissolving each passing second. Within its confines it houses 2 billion people, give or take a million, in states of life and undeath - the survivors of a war between colonists and their creations, the Jupiter Brains, which the colonists ultimately lost. By the third month, clouds of nanomachines had already devoured the system's terrestrial worlds, pushing the remaining colonists into the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Eventually it was decided that the colonists would flee the solar system in a worldship that would be constructed using nanotechnology to extract and process available elements in the outer worlds.
So there they were. Inside the object, completely self-regulated and sealed, on a forty-year journey to the nearest system, where the worldship would settle in.
Many of the colonists were content with living in a tin can for forty years. Most simply froze themselves. But others - others desired company.
So they made the worldship a beacon.
Invisible to all but the most sensitive equipment, the worldship pulses gravitational anomalies. Encoded in the waves of force is a set of numbers, the x-y-z coordinates of the object relative to the galactic center.
For a long time, there was no reply. Many became discouraged and joined countless others in cold sleep.
So for years the ship lay seemingly dormant. But it kept broadcasting, transimitting those same coordinates over and over again in an infinite loop, in the hopes that one day someone would tune in.
And one day, perhaps they would.
The darkness of outer space heralds many secrets. An explorer with a good nose could find all sorts of junk scattered throughout the void: The wreckage of a mysterious alien vessel, for instance. Or a discarded keg.
And if you had a nose good enough, you might just sniff out something on the edge of the galaxy, just 50 light-years distant from the swirling cloud of gas called the Eagle Nebula. No, look closer. You're getting cold. That's good, you're getting warmer. Keep looking. Warmer. Warmer. Oooh, cold again. Warmer. Warmer - that's it.
There. It's a very large object, almost a Neptune in breadth. Its shape is that of a snowflake - but the fractal patterns are far more complex, and the colors are different. In fact the colors are shifting, intricate patterns forming and dissolving each passing second. Within its confines it houses 2 billion people, give or take a million, in states of life and undeath - the survivors of a war between colonists and their creations, the Jupiter Brains, which the colonists ultimately lost. By the third month, clouds of nanomachines had already devoured the system's terrestrial worlds, pushing the remaining colonists into the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Eventually it was decided that the colonists would flee the solar system in a worldship that would be constructed using nanotechnology to extract and process available elements in the outer worlds.
So there they were. Inside the object, completely self-regulated and sealed, on a forty-year journey to the nearest system, where the worldship would settle in.
Many of the colonists were content with living in a tin can for forty years. Most simply froze themselves. But others - others desired company.
So they made the worldship a beacon.
Invisible to all but the most sensitive equipment, the worldship pulses gravitational anomalies. Encoded in the waves of force is a set of numbers, the x-y-z coordinates of the object relative to the galactic center.
For a long time, there was no reply. Many became discouraged and joined countless others in cold sleep.
So for years the ship lay seemingly dormant. But it kept broadcasting, transimitting those same coordinates over and over again in an infinite loop, in the hopes that one day someone would tune in.
And one day, perhaps they would.