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doodleofbugness · 2 days

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A leap of faith and physics

We thought for a civilization to form, one needed liquid water, a stable planet with a hot core, and tardium crystals. Apparently, this is not so.

Because we just received a vibromessage over the tachyon network from an unknown source.

Which in itself would not be too unusual. Plenty of newly realized civilizations figure out how to configure tardium to send tachyon messages across isospace. Hoping someone will answer. We always do. It always takes some time to go from simple repeating messages to understanding one another. Most civilizations don't come up with the galactic standard modulation on their own. Nor do we know their form of communication all that well, language, culture, all of that.

First contact is always a lengthy affair, until the new species is integrated into the intergalactic community. Then follows the exchange of knowledge and culture, the setting up of historical archives and sharing of starcharts. Since light travels only at luxionic speed, the charts provide a valuable look at the past. Once the new civilization has been caught up to date, things tend to settle. Updates are fewer and far in between, and culture tends to somewhat homogenize. Not completely, of course, as everyone has different living circumstances, but with all the exchange between us, some settling is bound to happen.

But we know where tardium reserves are, have felt the reverb of our scans, we know where civilizations could potentially pop up. The message we received was unusual not because its source was unknown, but because it came from a sector without any sufficient tardium deposits.

That... shouldn't even be possible!

The signal is also a bit noisy. Strange. Usually, the bigger the tardium array, the more self-stabilization should occurr. And for interstellar communication, you tend to need quite large arrays. So then why was there so much noise?

It was clearly a signal, and according to the triangulators, it came from the outer third of a dark spiral galaxy. We call them that, since they were never really observed, at least not with any isocartography. We only know they're there due to shared star charts. No idea what's going on with them at the current isotime. We can't know, without any tardium resonance to pick up.

Anyway, of course we answered. Their signal had been prime numbers, if we demodulated it correctly, followed by things we couldn't really make sense of. It was standard practice to begin communications with mathematics, and fundamental harmonics. It's strange that they did that right away, but not unheard of. We sent back primes, and then a couple of playful harmonics. Music. What we received back was weird, because we thought it was music, but it wasn't.

It turned out to be a starchart, and not just any kind. Pulsars. We sent back a chart of their galaxy, as reconstructed from several older starcharts. Then, we waited for their answer. And waited. And waited. An entire solar cycle (of our species) later, we finally got another answer.

And it just would not stop. We recognized it was a series of images, or rather, rapid successions of images, together with harmonics on a different band as well. This was video! The footage depicted a bipedal species, with symbolics next to different features. The images cycled through different body parts, with different descryptions. We had a really hard time catching and saving all the data, a task which had to be offloaded to the communal computation grid, as our own planet simply did not have the capacity to do it alone. This should have tipped us off to what we were going to be dealing with, but it didn't.

We continued, almost business as usual, just a fair bit faster. Then objects were being shown, often together with the bipedals, and their corresponding glyphics were depicted right next to them. Also, each image was accompanied by a sound file. They really made learning their language easy for us. We learned that they called themselves Humans, and their home was Earth, a planet orbiting a yellow star. They were a surface dwelling species! Those are pretty rare, as most can not survive the exposure to open space for some reason. We then sent back images and glyphics of our own, matching them in their intent. We sent images of life forms, images of our own body parts, images of objects and always accompanied by isostandard glyphics.

Usually, once communication has come to a basic understanding, the exchange of culture would begin.

But the Humans had started out with primes and starcharts, so of course, their next communication wasn't about culture. We... honestly didn't know what exactly it was, for a while. Until some of the mathematicians from across the network found patterns. They were sharing mathematics with us!

Eager to help, we sent back entire databases full of insights. They requested more soon. So we sent more. And more. And more. We wondered how they could even store all that we sent them. We asked. They sent back something we didn't understand. We hoped the mathematicians could figure it out, but nope.

Eventually, we sent steam engine configurations, as well as the corresponding heating and shunting tardion-arrays used to power them. They sent back their own designs for steam engines. And other engines that seemed similar, but shoudn't work with steam. The machine configurations, piston layouts and such, were fairly primitive. As was to be expected from a new species. But they never sent us schematics of their heating or shunting arrays. When we asked how they kept things cool without shunting arrays, they sent back another steam engine. But, when we called it that, they corrected us. What they had shown us was a heat pump. They used the opposite effect, instead of creating movement from a temperature difference, they created a temperature difference from movement. We asked them why they wouldn't just use shunting arrays. They asked what those were.

And this is how we found out why they were in dark space. Why their signal was so noisy. And why they had never depicted heating or shunting arrays in their schematics.

They had practically no tardium. They simply did not have enough of it to make arrays, as we thought all civilizations do. The largest piece of tardium they had was the centerpiece of a gigantic machine. It was about the size of a human "nail", which is a vestigial claw originally used for superior grip on one of the native plant species of their planet.

We did not know how to respond. We could not comprehend how a civilization could form without tardium crystals. They asked us if we knew where more could be found, preferably near them. We didn't understand what they meant. Then they asked us how to locate reserves. We gave them the modulations that we use to scan for the crystals' tachyon resonance.

They thanked us, and ceased their questions. Then, communication became choppy. Only occasionally would we receive an exchange of culture. Their questions about mathematics and tardium crystals ceased.

---------------------

When we first received back an answer from the deep space tachyon dish, we were extatic. And shocked. And kind of in disbelief. Nobody had really known if it would work. Still, everyone in the control room agreed that we should make sure it was really a signal, before we dropped that bombshell to the public.

We focused a couple more dyson collectors onto the dish, and changed the signal. Instead of primes and harmonics, this time, we encoded the pulsar chart, multiple times, in every encoding we could think of, and sent them all.

Only a few hours later, we received another signal from the previous location. The encoding was our own, easily recognized. With shaky hands, i pressed the 'open image file' button.

When i was greeted by a picture of the Milky Way, everyone in the room lost their collective shit.

"Holy Fuck!" "Oh my god." Someone fainted. Multiple people cried. Nobody minded any of that.

~~~

The prime administrator creased her brow. The direct line was ringing. This better be important. "Hello? Prime administrator here." From the other end, she could hear someone suppressing tears, and whimpering: "Tachyon dish project operator here. We... we."

"Everything ok over there?", she asked. What could possibly have happened that had the scientist crying? Was there an accident with the dyson swarm or something? Did people die? No, she trusted the operator of that experiment to not call unless it mattered to the entire human race.

A wet chuckle. "Better than ok. Maam? We... We're not alone."

Not alone? What does that...? Oh. OH! oh

"Are.. you sure?" Dammit. Now even her own voice was shaking.

"We sent a pulsar chart and got a beautiful image of the Milky Way back, in the same image file type. Pretty sure at this point."

~~~

The following year was downright insane. The mere confirmation that we weren't alone in the universe spurred us all on. Artists did their best to show all sides of us, scientists got together to determine what questions we should ask, even the long obsolete military awakened from its slumber, churning out tactical analyses of possible tachyon based weaponry, and how to defend against it.

Some people were panicking, others in denial, but most relished the opportunities that might open up.

Policies were made, on how to handle aliens that would come to the solar system. Tachyon mechanics, an until now unproven theory, made leaps and bounds, scientists working as hard as they could to understand it better.

The dyson collectors were turned to multiple new research projects, powering large machines that channeled vibrations into the tiny crystals we had found to pick up on tachyon vibrations. The largest one that we had discovered while asteroid mining was still in the communication dish, but the smaller shrapnel, a couple millimeters in size at the most, were being utilized.

Eventually, after a year was up, communications resumed. The linguists sent data, and worked closely with the astronomers that had made the initial transmissions. We also received back data, and the scientific community devoured every piece of information. We learned their language as fast as we could.

But our requests for the sharing of scientific knowledge appeared to fall on deaf ears. Whenever we sent natural constants, or physical laws, we got nothing back. Well, almost. Our prodding did yield one answer: How to locate the crystals. Which were apparently common? Though our scans painted a different picture. We did have some scattered about the asteroid belt, yes. But the largest one we detected was only 3cm in diameter. A little bigger than the one in the communication dish, sure, but not that much.

We came to accept this, figuring that maybe there was some kind of prime directive that forbade the sharing of further technology. Actually, perhaps we leaned a bit too far into our Star Trek analogy. Because most of us would not get it out of our heads to try to build a warp drive. Well, not really a spacetime bending drive, but something that could go faster than light. Because, obviously, thanks to our discovery, we now knew that while the speed of light may be finite, the speed of information was not.

-----------------------------

After ten cycles of cultural exchange, the humans sent a request for isocoordinates of the nearest known civilization to their own. This request kind of drowned in the noise, we didn't really think about it much, we just transmitted our coordinates. Turns out, the nearest ones were us, in what the Humans call the Andromeda Galaxy.

Shortly after the request, they went totally vibrosilent. We tried and tried to contact them, but to no avail. This, while tragic, was a reality of civilization, though. Extinction events could always happen. Sometimes the affected civilization would realize in advance and send a couple warnings, but nobody could help them from afar, of course. So that's what we figured happened to Humanity. Maybe their sun blew up, or they got knocked away from it by a passing object, anything could have happened.

Many cycles passed. I had aged, my once young and springy exoskeleton now wobbly and soft, though my mind was still sharp enough to crew a communications array.

None of us were prepared for the schockwave resonating through our sensor grids. Multiple arrays straight up shattered. Luckily, as big as they were, there was nobody close to them, so no deaths. What the rest of them picked up though made no sense. We could determine there was a pulse, but no normal communication had that level of power, nor resonance.

Then, half a planetary rotation later, there was a new luminance in the sky. We were about to renew our arrays and update our starchart, when the light source moved. Toward the planet.

What?

And then, my assigned communications array resonated.

"This is the Human vessel Enterprise, calling anyone on the planet. Can you read us?" the crystal sang in choppy English, the language of the Humans. The ones we thought were extinct.

I scuttled to my post at the resonator, tuning it to reply:

"This is communications, we read you, but i don't understand? We are recovering from an unprecedented resonance pulse that shattered multiple arrays, sorry if the modulation is a bit off."

The answer was swift: "Sorry about that, our engines are a bit out of tune at this point. That pulse might have been us. Glad to hear you all down there, is anyone injured?"

"Your engines? And uh. No, nobody injured."

"Yes our engines, again, we apologize for that. But glad to know everyone is alright.

Requesting permission to land on the surface."

This was a momentous occasion, which i didn't realize until later on. The entire tachyon network would eventually refer to this exact communication as a reference time. This exact moment would come to be known as 0:0 PFJ

0 Cycles and 0 rotations Past First Jump.

The only thing i remember is absently giving permission, not quite understanding what exactly they were requesting here. If i had, i would have convened with the councils beforehand.

Then, the cave began to shake. It wasn't coming from any of the arrays. It was coming from the surface.

~~~

They. They were here. The Humans were here. On the surface. Of. Of our planet. What? How?!

Most importantly, why?!

Then i remembered the stories about their exploration of the surface of their own planet. How they had sent people to their poles, despite their biology not being fit to survive there. And several did die! How they climed mountains. Made pressurized vessels to dive below the surface of their open ocean. We asked them why. They told us.

I realized at that moment, not how they were here. But why.

"Because we could, and no human had been there before," they had answered back then.

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