Ragnarok

Chapter 11 - Fractal

The scout probe reported in several cycles later. The small yellow star was host to an embarrassment of riches, from tiny rocky worlds close in and around the edges, to a quartet of massive gas or ice giant worlds, each of them a small solar system in itself with their many moons. But most interesting was the third planet from the yellow star, a small blue-green jewel barely a third the size of Rok.

It was from that planet that the signals had been coming, and it assumed a geostationary orbit over it, trying to analyze the signals that were crossing back and forth across those giant, blue expanses of liquid water. They were some kind of radio signals, that was for certain, but what kind was beyond the probe's limited capabilities to analyze. It simply swallowed it all along with high-resolution satellite scans, and beamed it back at near-instantaneous speed to the massive supercomputers that made up the Traveler.

With the relentless determination only a machine mind could have, the Traveler began to work. We will know your secrets, tiny beings, it inscribed within its data log. What sort of creatures are you? Are you useful allies, worthy but distrusted neighbors, or a plague to be exterminated? Let us find out.

What it had found had been disturbing at best. The creatures on this world vaguely resembled the small primates that had once climbed the trees of Rok, when it had been a green and vibrant world like this one. They lacked fur or scales upon their oddly naked flesh, except in a few places, and wore the skins of other animals along with cloth woven from plants, as if displaying some sort of trophy.

Many of them even draped themselves in metal and stone, the very bones of the world they skittered across like insects. Their greatest dreamers told myths of gods and the promise of the future, while the rest shuffled through the motions in a daze. Neither noticing nor caring much beyond their own daily struggle.

A pompous species, dressing itself in great illusion and forgetting the muck from whence it came. A child playing at being god, and burning itself again and again. But growing higher every revolution, in a slow double spiral.

They were a numerous, squabbling race, who could not seem to go for very long at all before launching themselves at one another's throats, no matter how often they had to learn to work together towards a brighter path. It seemed to be a curse of sentient life that the limitations of its evolution had to always be contended with, even if the mind was able to conceive of how to overcome them.

It was a story that the god of Rok knew all too well.

*    *    *

Rei received a comm signal while Micah and Mia were having a bit of alone time. When asked to do so, she could leave nothing on but a browser function, and even that asleep in his implants. They were doing "human type things", as he put it. Likely the same sorts of things he'd asked her to do, back when it had been just the two of them.

Becoming human meant exploring every aspect of the fractal spectrum that was man, so she had agreed to his cautious requests readily enough. She had found it fascinating, and still did; they both needed to know how to do that sort of thing eventually, in order to serve themselves.

But perhaps it had been a mistake, judging from how he sometimes couldn't seem to stop looking at her.  All of her, for that matter.  Especially the softer parts... though that was entirely his own fault. Sometimes she wondered if he was forgetting what she really was, and knew what he was getting into.  If so, at least it was a mistake he had himself invited.