The Abyss of Time

Chapter Eleven

"Can we communicate with them?" asked Jack as he dunked a biscuit into a hot cup of tea. "Maybe they can help us."

As the people gathered around the table enjoyed the intermission, several conversations had begun. Mostly gossip as people asked after each others families and how they'd coped during the attempted cyborg takeover. A welcome trace of normality as they tried to reassure themselves that the danger was over and that they only had to face the comparatively mundane challenges of surviving on a dying ship and a lifeless world.

The day before had seen the funeral service for the members of the ship's crew who'd died in the fighting. They had been given 'funerals at sea' as their caskets had been set adrift from one of the cargo airlocks, and the general feeling among the survivors, Jack thought, seemed to be that it had marked the official end of the incident and that it was now 'acceptable' to behave normally again. It helped that no-one in the room had lost family members to the cyborgs, but those who'd lost work colleagues still looked uncomfortable as the conversations broke out, as if thinking they were showing shocking disrespect. Miller, in particular, was staring down into his teacup as if thinking about Captain Dhlomo, whose zombie remains he'd personally put to rest.

Jack sympathised with his father, but he, Jack, had barely known the Captain. He hadn't known any of the fatalities in fact and the elements of the Dyson swarm that still showed on the wall screen preyed on his mind. The visual evidence that a powerful civilisation, a civilisation vastly more advanced and accomplished than their own, had reached out and rearranged this entire solar system with the powers of gods. The full implications of this didn't seem to have occurred to the others yet, but to Jack the swarm elements spoke of amazing possibilities that they might be able to take advantage of.

"Communicate?" said Felgin thoughtfully as he returned to the table with a steaming cup of coffee. "Well, we've detected no communications between the swarm elements. Even if they're using lasers to communicate, the sheer number of them means that we would occasionally be directly between two swarm elements sending messages to each other. We would see the bright light of a laser beam pointing right at us. So far, though, we've seen nothing."

"If they're millions of years more advanced than us, they might use some means of communication we know nothing about," Jack countered.

"They'd need a very good reason not to use something as simple and reliable as electromagnetic radiation," the scientist replied. He took a sip of his coffee, "Also, we're not seeing any waste heat that would be generated by any kind of industrial or computer activity. The swarm elements are just there. As far as we can tell, they're collecting and storing energy and doing nothing more."

"So someone created the swarm just to gather a vast amount of energy?" said Pangiran as he also returned to the table with a slice of cake on a plate. "They're gathering it and they'll do something with it when they've got enough of it?"

"Speculating on the motives of a civilisation millions of years more advanced than our own is probably useless," Felgin replied. "We may never know. Maybe the people who created the swarm all died."

"Died?" said Pangiran, staring incredulously. "After having reached such heights of achievements? After having survived the risks of nuclear war, pollution, overpopulation? To get as far as they did they would have had to have survive crisis after crisis. How could they possibly just die?"

"One of the defining characteristics of all life everywhere is competition," said Felgin, his voice falling naturally into the tone of a teacher tutoring a class of pupils. "All life forms favour their own descendants and siblings. People say bad things about humans, that we're incapable of living in peace with each other, that we're still savage barbarians who just happen to have computers and spaceships, but look at the natural world and you'll see that all living creatures are the same. Even plants try to strangle and poison each other. There's no reason to believe that the beings who created the Dyson swarm were any different, and no reason to believe that their essential natures would have changed when they became software running on computers. The only thing that would have changed is that they would have fought each other with computer viruses and logic bombs instead of guns. It's certainly possible that they fought a war with each other and that they were all killed."