Chapter 1.
He remembered. Everything. He twitched a bit as he remembered. Some of it was still a bit raw. Those, those - ugly hairy things, almost alike in the grand scheme of things but so far different in their thoughts and why did they blow shit up first and ask question later? And why the so wildly different number of limbs?
There was a chase, he recalled. He and his family and others in the newly-developed Hypercraft fleet, off to another planetary system to explore and find new discoveries, new allies, just because that was the way they were, since after the Last War.
The Last War that had laid the whole planet low for centuries before they recovered, painfully and far fewer in number. It had consumed about half the water on their planet, but it demonstrated the principle behind the Hyper engine, and then it took another millennium of restoring the ecosystem, and then finally building the Hypercraft to go out exploring in.
The Last War taught that the people should go, learn, share information, catalogue, and improve wherever they went.
And there were always a few that wanted to explore. He and his family, as one, wanted to learn and discover. With a few other families they built a fleet and locked it together into a complex lattice, and then - it did what Hyper engines did, it was gone from here and appeared there close by the destination.
You couldn’t do it on the surfaces of most habitable planets because there was too much water, and for the same reason your there destination had to be well above the destination planet too, and then your shuttles with their shiny OWdrives did the ferry services.
But this time, they got to there and so did another craft, a huge hulking ugly thing that began spraying destruction instantly, destroying a swathe of Hypercraft. He remembered. The pain and confusion of the dying families, why did they do this? Why?
Remembered getting in an OWdrive and turning the bright needle on the huge lump which looked as though those vicious apes had just stuck a propulsion system on a small deformed moon and built inside and on the surface of it.
Then a dozen OWdrives all burning, burning, burning into the surface of that huge craft. At least it was quite quick. And a hundred bright flashes appeared all of a sudden, then the first sight of the apes, in a small craft that he caught on his scanner and meticulously recorded and catalogued for future reference while his OWdrive kept burning, burning.
The small craft approaching him glowed from the power the pilot and crew were trying to wrest from the engines, then suddenly it blossomed into an orange ball and cart-wheeled back into the mothership, destroyed by its own drive going random and throwing it about like a toy. The occupants wouldn’t have felt a thing.
He remembered. Landing on the there planet they’d chosen, after a suitable period of study and cataloguing from space. A Hyper drone was sent back with a copy of the catalogue, the records of the encounter, and messages to others back home from the explorers. “Five hundred years of development and still the only reliable way to get information across from here to there was to send a message in a bottle,” he mused.
The first OWdrive was an accident and many thought that the “OW” in the name was because, well, “OW!” but in fact it was derived from Operant Water because it too used water but in its hot quantum fog form and created more water as a byproduct.
Then landing in their shuttles as above them in an orbit just past the last planet in the system, a cloud of spacecraft debris joined the debris of the large spacecraft they’d destroyed as a lone hairy spacecraft that had somehow appeared out of the confusion blew up their Hypers one by one.
That brought the realisation that now they were effectively stuck here unless they could get a message home.
Chapter 2.
The landing wasn’t without surprises, either. The planet was a-roil with activity. They studied it, catalogued it, and sent a slowdrone (OWcraft on autpilot) on its way with the catalogue and a request for some new Hypers. It’d take time since the OWcraft were more constrained by spacetime than the Hypers, but the families would survive and the future generations would return with new knowledge catalogues for home.
Meanwhile he explored, catalogued - and eventually died. He remembered several deaths and then being reborn in the memory of his successors. Thousands, in fact. It’s what his people did, their memory being generationally transmitted as it was meant that he could remember the Last War and his later acquired disgust at his participation in it.
All the people remembered this, it was the event that shaped their species. There’s nothing like generational memory to ensure you never forgot what a bad thing conflict is.
He kept re-remembering the catalogue to study it, strengthen it, add observations to it. It’s what his people did. Then back at Home those catalogues would be stored by the Core Sole without any traces of original identity, and made available for anyone to peruse and take copies of things of interest to add to their own catalogues.
Core Sole was originally a family that decided that to avoid future wars and make the Last War the last, the best thing they could do was to become the mighty repository which they now are.
Due to the need for outbreeding, every so often a member of another family joins Core Sole or a Core member leaves and finds another family, and sometimes a whole family decides they’ve experienced enough limited multividuality and become part of Core Sole en masse.
And so Core Sole keeps growing and contains many scholarly families that analyse all of that huge edifice of information and thus expand its usefulness with their new discoveries.
Some theorised that they came from a primitive hive-minded lifeform, but so far there have been no proofs of this. When you can only remember from the first moment that the First One became aware but nothing earlier than that, these things don’t easily reveal themselves and let’s face it, aren’t all that important. NOW is important. The Last War taught that.
Chapter 3.
He remembers - Core knows how many generations back - how he excitedly detected signs of life on this planet. The beginning of lifeforms! He remembers the excitement he felt. This must have been how the People started. Strangely enough the People who loved information so much, had never thought to work out where they came from.
In fact, the First One was not the first one for very long. Like an extremely fast mental virus, the families all woke into awareness at the same instant, and all hungered for information to catalogue and analyse. For some reason all that thirst for knowledge immediately turned outwards, all the families also realised almost in that same instant that new information would need to be found outside.
An instant later their rapid uncontrolled information exchanges spread so much knowledge that the entire species gestalt altered, they realised that a system of catalogues would have to be carved out and apportioned. That led to tension as each Family unit realised that they might end up with the smallest catalogue, which quickly escalated into hostility, and resulted within very few generations in the Last War.
Families consist of both sexes but since they share the same generational memories, the way he experiences some things are a bit - multifaceted . . . - as each family member’s memories are added together into a quite detailed view. And because outbreeding is a necessity, other catalogues are incorporated. Core Sole is just a really big family unit
For instance, he was one of the family that flew one of the OWdrives and burned the large craft, but there were actually several family members flying several shuttles and all those memories are available to every member.
And the family memory, which is what he is remembering, is from both ‘male’ and ‘female' members but operates in either gender mode. During the battle the family gestalt acted as a male, then once safety had been established it reverted to female.
This triggered a thought in him: “Why am I thinking in male? What has happened that makes me feel unsafe?” and so he began to reel through the catalogue and found that discovery of life evolving. But it was safe life, microscopic plants and animals and strange blends of both and even minerals. Wasn’t it?
He reached for the nearest family catalogue to his. One member of his family must be close to one member of theirs. Confusion. Members of the other family had vanished. Reports that the hairies (here he flexed a smooth hairless arm almost in reflex) had been observed.
Strangely subdued hairies.
Almost not quite almost-hairies.
The catalogue details were strange and very interesting.
It seemed that in the last half-generation, there’d been a lot of interaction. A border, there was a border. On the other side of it, were the hairies. Their technology had become somewhat diminished as they scavenged their shuttles and finally started to use local technology, but it was their technology all the same.
There’d been a rare contact. He followed it in the catalogue. A distant family had communicated with several of them in a rudimentary fashion, and in laboratory conditions. They called themselves the People, had no catalogue of shared experiences, and no way of contacting their home world to send a rescue.
In fact, a rescue would have been senseless because the hairies had no shared catalogues and were what he considered barely conscious most of the time. No wonder they fought and warred. And then there was a more recent event. Toxins, some kind of pollution. He consulted some of the local creatures they’d watched evolve and then contacted at the right time.
While it’s difficult to communicate with alien life, observing and cataloguing the many many alien - species, he supposed they should call them - had given much common ground and so some communication was possible. Creatures here that were close to his physiology in particular could speak quite eloquently and convey advanced concepts.
It seems that the hairy blight (as he was beginning to think of them) had begun to do things on their side of the border. That made him wonder about the border but he saw that it’d always existed according to the local species. But this blight, these hairies - on their side of the border, they were also interacting with local species.
Quite frankly, the speed at which they recovered and reinvented their technology was concerning to him. And then toxins and pollutions crossed the border. He contacted a nearby member of one of the species, a large creature he’d actually had some stimulating conversations with, explained about the hairies and how they needed to be reined in.
Apparently they had planetary vehicles now and were using them to cross the border in places. And this side of the border was becoming warmer. That was worrying because the local species were still only narrow-adapted. Local species were dying out both sides of the border.
He saw the inevitability of it all and made plans. He taught the locals to attack their craft. They sent messengers to the border and beyond. It appeared that most didn’t return. He stepped up those plans.
“Hide, hide now” he said. “Attack their craft if you feel confident. My people are coming, they’ll make peace and ensure survival.” And when the creatures asked when his people were coming, he had no ready answer for them. To ‘himself’ it didn’t matter because he’d live in body after body. To these creatures, they had so few generations left before the planet killed them.
He searched and searched and searched, and finally he found it. The hairies they’d met out past the planet that they now referred to as Pluto and not even a planet, they were a remnant of the original hairy denizens of this planet and they’d already killed the planet once before, but escaped in great ships and left for what they’d deem habitable planets.
Unfortunately all the ‘habitable’ planets were definitely habitable, but had far too many discrepancies for the hairies’ limited bodies and they perished everywhere. The ship he and his party had met was the last one sent out, and - what was cryogenic suspension, and how could this be possible? - they returned, the return journey also taking millennia, back here to find the planet reset, as it were.
Signs of their prior habitation here were visible when he asked microbe colonies that lived deep beneath the surface, stromatolitic clumps that somehow recorded in a vaguely similar way to his people. The first wave of them was born of the planet and managed to make in uninhabitable, and now the thronging masses of the descendants of their one cryogenic ship were back and doing it all over again.
He felt weary, and squeezed himself into a large artificial shell that they’d crossed over the border, anchored himself with his suckered arms, and waited for the People to come and rescue him and save this planet.
“Hey!” said Jewel, “Look at this - an octopus hiding in an old glass flagon. I wonder if it knows we can see it in there? And… I swear it has ten tentacles, octopuses only have eight don’t they?”
“Leave it alone girl - it might be venomous or something, toss it back in and come out of the water.”
“But - . . . Like, I think I read about these, 300million years ago or something? Aw, never mind, okay okay I’m putting it back.. ” Overhead near the Oort Cloud, some little lights flashed, but no telescopes were trained there right at that moment. In a few days, they’d see some bright bolts of light moving unimaginably quickly towards Earth.
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