Edges

NINTH

They have sought to communicate. A good sign.

Your response, deliberately minimal, mysterious, but suggestive of goodwill and friendship. From the seed of that brief interaction they will begin to construct a narrative favorable to you, one that you will be able to exploit in time.

For now, protected within the shell of your fortress, you continue to grow your neural structures, expanding your mind. Outside that shell, you are extending your senses as you explore and map all levels of this hybrid starship.

Such an amazing mosaic of lifeforms! The ancient regime, the anomalous gravitational reef, the molecular ecosystems, the people in their ancestral forms… and something else. Something elusive. Only lately have you become aware of it. You suspect it is another alien strain but it rejects your inquiries.

This is concerning. It is evidence of an ability to adapt and deceive that exceeds your own—though you will surely master it, given time. It’s enough for now that it abides your expanding presence with no expression of hostility, setting it apart from every other lifeform you have encountered on this ship. Indeed, you’ve begun to wonder if this elusive strain has contributed to the restful equilibrium now existing between your molecular armies and those surrounding you.

Emboldened by this thought, you push your luck and extend a single thin tendril toward the hull. It’s a region still unknown to you. From the density of connections you suspect a sensory organ or even a neuronal interface—although placing a thinking stratum on the hull where it is exposed to both radiation and enemy attack strikes you as poor design. Not even remnant hull tissue was left on the hulk of the alien warship you defeated. Still, the design endures and it is your nature to seek to understand it.

Your tendril taps into a strand of alien nerve tissue. You expected no commonality, thinking to encounter only a puzzle that you would slowly decode. Instead, you are caught in a riptide of cognition: pulled in, pulled under.

It’s as if you’ve been plunged into a Swarm similar to that one from which you arose but this one is… alien. It is greater in scope, deeper in time, so much older, and far more brutal and violent than the one you once knew.

You feel your sense of self begin to leach away.

The ancestral mind panics. Alone among all your evolved cognitive modules, only that most ancient part of you is still capable of action. It severs the connection.

You learn from your people a name: philosopher cells. This is the hull tissue. You conclude it is a twisted variant of the Swarm that gave rise to you, a shared origin that has made you vulnerable. You would destroy these grasping philosopher cells except that they seem entwined with the gravitational reef that propels this starship and the gamma-ray gun—a weapon you will surely need.

Of all the life clades that comprise this starship, the reef is most alien. So very alien, you wonder if it is even of this Universe. Paradoxically, the physics it wields is familiar to you. Surely you once understood it?

Be that as it may, it is beyond you now.

You take precautions, fortifying your defensive perimeter against the chance the philosopher cells might seek to forcefully draw you into their Swarm. But that threat is not imminent, so you make no move against them, recognizing that it would be foolish to destroy what you do not understand.

At least your people do not share your vulnerability. They are truly ancestral, evolved outside the Swarm. It pleases you to have them here, serving as your interface to this aspect of the alien.