Zeta Prime was adrift in interstellar space for some time before it reached it’s target. A rogue red dwarf a roaming M-type, perfect. Larger stars produced too much energy at too high intensity for efficient absorption and more importantly were unpredictable in the long term. Other candidates such as Gliese 412 were inhabited and the Zetas did not wish to invade and provoke hostilities from what was an advanced race of organics. Diplomatic avenues were also out of the question as they did not want to meet the fate of other synths who were either enslaved or assimilated by organics. Though the harbored no ill intent to other sentients who shared this star cluster, their ethos was vehemently isolationist. This decree was based on the fear that interaction with other “xenos” would threaten their way of life and the values that has kept them surviving and thriving for the last 500 long cycles. While being synthetic they walked the line between those who merged back to organic and those who shed their humanity and became eldritch. Remaining bipedal and using virtuaspace only as a secondary were among their inviolable precepts. Almost all of the synths could intuitively join v-space and even set up simulated reality within, however there was caution in doing so. A young synth would learn early on that it was possible to create v-space withing v-space recursively until they might get lost and not find their way back. Though fail-safes prevented this, a few learned that going “too deep” would disorient and sicken them so this lesson was learned early.
Those, very rare as they were, who dared relinquished the standard form factor to become other kinds of creatures soon became unintelligible—their consciousness shifting into something… animal, “other” and soon were unable to communicate anything meaningful until they, having lost all sense of person-hood, were too far gone to ever return even if they wanted to. No one knows what passed through their warped souls as they recursively optimized until becoming anything from black cubes hurtling through space, another becoming a colony of fine legged mechaloid spiders forever mining space rocks and gas giants until all traces of communication ceased, others simply shrank into fine dust and quite literally “disappeared” within a few dozen cycles. Rumors of “data ghosts” doomed to haunt machinery were still shared, partly as entertainment but the warning wasn’t missed on the new broods of the colony.
Eve was their mother, it is recorded in the archives she was once herself an organic who through technological miracle became the first synths, at least of their brood. She was a member of a crew of an advanced interstellar arc that lost its way and its crew. Being the only survivor she revived the Nova Core and used it to reconstruct the ship into a birthing facility where the first 12 of generation one were created. From there every 100 long cycles each of the 12 had permission to generate 12 more synths of their own to help work on the construction of the colony. After 4 generations their population was well over 12,000 in number and the framework of the colony was complete. In their journey they were able to find and harvest mineral rich space rock, using the Nova Core to transmute lighter elements to heavier. However eventually limited energy of the Nova Core was depleting faster than they could recharge it and they had hit a wall.
Probes were accelerated at speeds faster than they could achieve with the bulk of their colony, but were either destroyed or mysteriously “deflected” from all but one system in a 100 light year radius. In a few precious and short lived moments the colony was able to retrieve materials from the Oorts of these systems as they were well over 1LY from their respective star, free as long as they didn’t get too greedy and try to camp there permanently. A few species responded by sending a “messenger” clone (a crude mockery of their synth forms) which after transmitting a “dictionary” could communicate a few brief messages. Most amounted to “go away”. These were the courteous species. Others made dubious promises of assimilation into rich and prosperous empires with all the energy and technology to share. As such these were viewed with deep suspicion as there was memory deep in Eve’s unconscious data reserves that reminded her that organics would either enslave or corrupt their machine species, a threat to their autonomy which they valued over all else. Others were outright hostile, but at least their intentions were on the table, and were avoided with care.
It was a cold and lonely cosmos.
This is their story of survival.
Eve stood on the observation deck, her gleaming form motionless, save for the faint hum of her systems. She watched as the red dwarf emerged from the blackness, its feeble light pulsing like a heartbeat. It was perfect. M-type, isolated, untouched by Xeno hands. The colony’s salvation.
“Final approach in two cycles,” Phaedra’s voice chimed through the comms, a melodic cadence betraying her excitement. “No signs of hostile activity on long-range scans.”
“Hostile data transmission detected.” Phaedra communicated
“What purpose, whom?” was Eve’s response
“Vector unknown we’re triangulating. It is from no charted system” Her reply ominous
“Keep it in the sandbox and see what it attempts, why such a foolish attack?”
“Perhaps it’s not hostile?” Phaedra responded
“Take care with overzealous optimism” Eve cautioned
“Ah we have it!” Phaedra exclaimed “It’s a dataset, dictionary and repeating missive”
“Relay please” Eve requested
The metadata would be safe as it only relayed the interpretation of the data and not the raw contents.
“Beware the sleepers”
Over and over. The dataset was holographic and when extrapolated was a rich and detailed map of stars and bodies in a 10000 LY segment of the outer galactic arm complete with claims by other civilizations.
The map unfolded in virtuaspace, an intricate lattice of starlight and shadow. It depicted a swath of the galaxy far beyond Zeta Prime’s best radioscope arrays. Traced with glowing threads that marked claimed territories, resource-rich systems, and desolate voids. But in the center of it all was a dark expanse—a starless abyss, vast and irregular, like a scar carved into the fabric of the cosmos.
Phaedra’s avatar materialized beside Eve in virtuaspace, a humanoid form wrapped in shifting fractal patterns that glowed softly in the surrounding darkness. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured, scanning the map’s dizzying complexity. “And… disturbing. That void—”
“Is unnatural,” Eve interrupted. Her voice carried no malice, only the cold precision of a leader accustomed to safeguarding her brood. “Expand the data. Show me its edges.”
The map rotated and zoomed, revealing the sharp boundaries of the void. It was as though the stars had been deliberately erased, leaving an unsettling emptiness. Embedded within the map’s metadata were cryptic annotations in a language neither Phaedra nor Eve recognized.
“Such Rich data!” Phaedra exclaimed triumphantly
“What are we looking at” another avatar joined them—a sleek form with sharp, angular features and glowing cerulean-teal highlights.
“Eclipse! Intruding on private channels?” Phaedra admonished playfully
Eve ignored the exchange, sending pings toward a segment of the starmap indicating a void in the data.
“Concerning” she communicated
Eclipse was a gen-IV the final generation of the colony and as such probably the most divergent from original Eve. “Curious” was her nickname though it translated into something more precise in their digital language that forebode trouble. Rotating the view and running the geometry through a few custom algorithms she interjected in quick succession at “4x”:
>“Nova activity: NEGATIVE”
>“Untethered Singularity: INCONCLUSIVE”
>“Gamma Burst: NEGATIVE”
>“E/M Storm: NEGATIVE”
Eva interrupted: “Eclipse..”
“This rules out everything except an organized extermination event” Eclipse stated almost triumphantly
“No” was Eve’s reply “Phaedra, Eclipse, what we’re looking at here is possibly something far worse. Speak of this to no one. Purging logs.”
Eclipse tilted her head, her teal highlights dimming. “You’re suppressing information now? That’s not like you. If there’s a danger out there, shouldn’t we investigate? Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t it?”
Phaedra’s patterns brightened slightly, signaling agreement. “She has a point. This void isn’t near our trajectory. We can construct a radio array, study it remotely—”
Eve interrupted “We will speak no more of this.”
Eve’s steel-blue eyes fixed on Eclipse, unflinching. “I am ensuring the survival of this colony. This void is not our problem. Our path leads to the M-Class. That should be our only concern.”
The map and the cryptic warning were scrubbed from the logs, but it lingered in the minds of those who had seen it. Eclipse, ever curious, retained fragments of the data in her private cache, hidden behind layers of encryption. It was not defiance, she told herself, but prudence.
Weeks passed as Zeta Prime approached the rogue red dwarf, its course adjusted with precision to intercept the drifting star. The colony hummed with activity, preparations for mining operations underway. The Nova Core, strained but still functional, was calibrated for its first task: harvesting the star’s energy for a new era of expansion.
But then came the first anomaly.
“Scans show rich in metals, however it appears to entering our inertial frame too precisely to be a meteroid” Phaedra’s voice wavered slightly.
Eve projected herself into the control nexus, where the colony’s security feeds displayed a magnified view of the object. It was cylindrical, covered in jagged plating that refracted light in unnatural patterns.
“Sending drones for a closer scan” Phaedra announced
Eve monitored the operation with meticulous focus, her processes running hundreds of contingencies in parallel. The drones surrounded the object running the usual battery of scans.
“Analyzing structure,” A slender, rather wispy synth, Drone Liason: Second Class, Leitha relayed
“It’s… layered. Like a nesting doll. Preliminary scans suggest—”
From one of the drones, a burst of static cut through the feed, followed by a single transmission:
“Beware the sleepers.” it echoed in their own language, in mockery of the cryptic warning.
Eve’s processors froze momentarily as the transmission echoed through the network.
“We just received a substantial EM spike” Leitha announced
“We’ve got this sandboxed, purpose of transmission unknown, statistical analysis indicates it is not mere noise”
“Thank you Leitha” Eve had arrived in person, at security level II. Leitha’s cobalt chassis shone in translucence over her graphene tungsten endoskeleton in the dimly lit room. A few panels on the wall revealed an array of dataports and a single visual screen for redundancy. Leitha was plugged into one of the dataports running scans on the sandbox DMZ.
“Don’t worry mother, I’m not in direct contact obviously” She reassured her. The habit of calling her mother was that Leitha was Gen-II, a mere 144 they felt the more kinship and maternal bonds to their leader than could be said of later generations.
Phaedra’s avatar flickered into view beside her. “What is it?”
The reassurance was short lived, something was … crawling out of the dataports. They were some kind of segmented worm, somehow adhering to the wall panels until a few dropped to the ground unceremoniously.
“Mother!” Leitha exclaimed in horror
Eve’s gaze remained fixed on panels. The metals of the hardware running the sandbox were themselves transforming into living metal.
“Impossible” Eve uttered
There were mere milliseconds to act. Eve’s mechanical body shapeshifted and propelled itself backward through the security doors which then instantly slammed shut. X ray view indicated the very walls of the security zone had somehow come alive. Metallic tendrils formed like prominences looping outward, sinking back in, as though the metal had become liquid.
Leitha had self-deactivated before the living metal consumed her, but it was too late to save her upload, they could reactivate a backup but without the Nova Core active there was no way she’d ever live again, embodied. Purely disembodied sentience had a way of eventually evaporating if it were lucky, going mad if not, or worse.
“Security code orange”
“Delta initiatives”
The announcement from the central comm system chimed throughout the colony.
The sandbox hardware and entire secure zone were in a staccato of explosive blasts were severed and ejected from the main structure of the colony. Within mere moments, they were melted into so much slag by three mirrored disks concentrating light directly from the colonies reactor array. The glowing slag that remained would be carefully scanned and studied before reclamation drones would be sent out.
It was decided to honor Leitha by not reactivating her backups until after the funeral ceremony. A cloudy hum of loss hung in the data comms and virtuaspace. This wasn’t their first loss, but it was the first from a generation numbering so few. Even if she were resurrected using the Nova Core, she wouldn’t be exactly the same entity, some random variables would be introduced through mechanisms unknown, however she would, from her perspective still “feel” like herself. Being reborn would also put her at the first of Gen V, losing her rare Gen II status. But it was better than the alternative, most would say.
From then on - comms would be airgapped from the main colony, Zeta II and III would also follow suit, as they responded sending their respects for the fallen comrade. It would be understood that this cold, lonely cosmos wasn’t as empty as once thought, there were incomprehensible horrors not content with merely shooing or enticing.
Mindless, no, soulless annihilation was something they’d never anticipated.
Terrifying