//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: As The Abyss Swallowed The Sky // by MSPiper //------------------------------// Greatclaw departed the seventy-third astronomical symposium unsettled. Even the staunchest of the eternalists had agreed that the stellar disappearances in the Anemone Globular Cluster were no fluke or measurement error, and had pivoted to spinning fanciful theories about extreme types of variable star without regard for what nuclear physics actually allowed. Combined with the case put forth by Clammer that the dark mottlings of the Whalefall Galaxy could best be explained as the expansion fronts of resource-seeking civilizations, it suggested a worrying possibility. Further investigation only served to deepen the unease. While most of the astronomical subcommunities gave little credence to the idea of non-natural causes and thus struggled to find a pattern that could unify the disappearances, the majority were either of stars whose characteristics would render them priority targets for an expansionist intelligence or of stars along plausible trajectories that pointed towards such targets. Though insufficient data meant no definitive conclusions could be drawn, it seemed like a vital topic to discuss at the next artificial intelligence symposium. Greatclaw departed the eighty-fourth astronomical symposium disturbed. The results of the Great Galaxy Survey left little room to doubt that the apparent anisotropies in galactic distribution were very much real, with most dark galaxies and the overwhelming majority of mottled galaxies located in the Whalefall sectant. With the universalists tizzied over what sorts of natural phenomena could possibly result in such a skew, fracturing into no less than four separate camps before the first night was out, the few remaining exocivilizationists who'd realized the Survey's ominous ramifications had been thoroughly ignored. Further investigation only served to deepen the concern. Even cursory modeling that accounted for the Survey's refined measurements showed that the observed distribution of mottled galaxies was consistent with a spherical-shell expansion front for a wide range of possible intergalactic speeds. While the naturalists had rigorously demonstrated that the chance of so many distinct interstellar civilizations arising in such close proximity was far too low to provide a satisfactory explanation for the Whalefall Galaxy's mottlings, a single intelligence consuming it from many arrival points at once suddenly seemed eerily plausible. Assuming that the primary probes had punched through it without slowing even yielded trajectories that served to explain many of the stranger stellar disappearances in the Anemone Globular Cluster, well enough that the difficulty in imagining how such probes could be engineered appeared to hold scant weight. Though there was little hope of observing any such probes directly, it seemed distinctly probable that once the first orbital telescopes were finally completed, among the things they saw would be threads of dimmed and dimming stars tracing from the Whalefall Galaxy through its satellites and into the intergalactic space beyond. Greatclaw departed the ninety-third astronomical symposium alarmed. That the investigation of the Anemone Globular Cluster's asymmetric distribution of luminous matter had revealed not an ejected intermediate-mass black hole but a vast swarm of lower-mass objects had come as no surprise at all. That the swarm produced as many microlensing events as it did had come as very much a surprise, and left the exocivilizationists suspecting that their worst fears might not have been worst enough. Further investigation only served to deepen the dread. Proper analysis bore out the surmise that the number of observed microlensing events was far too great to be accounted for by any plausible distribution of natural objects, with the least-unreasonable alternative being that most of the swarm consisted of planet-scale bodies created through tearing apart the stars that had originally been present. That such a task could be accomplished with so little waste heat as to go unnoticed was unnerving enough, but that it had been accomplished in the timeframe implied by the speed with which the stellar disappearances tracked through the rest of the cluster was far more chilling still. The power required would easily suffice to send secondary probes to the Local Tidal Stream in decades less than had been originally anticipated, reducing the time available to dally from minimal to none. And still the rest of the artificial intelligence community dithered in pursuit of the perfect core values, uncomprehending that the risk of an unfriendly superintelligence was far greater from without than within. Greatclaw departed the ninety-eighth astronomical symposium terrified. Shortly after the Nautiloid Star had become the sixth one confirmed to host a planet that exhibited unquestionable biosignatures, it had become the first star with a well-characterized system of transiting planets to vanish. After it began to dim, the life-bearing planet had made one final transit before the system faded outside the Kelper Space Telescope's ability to detect, and its dwindling starlight had shone around a dead world with no sea or sky to soften the glare. The bulk of the astronomical community unsurprisingly rejected the result as a measurement error, since in the normal course of things atmospheres did not simply vanish without a trace inside the span of two years, and no amount of desperate teaching could get it through their minds that such a feat was well within the scope of a typical superintelligence. The bulk of the artificial intelligence community failed to appreciate the greatest and growing threat, secure in the assurances the astronomers gave them and confident in the competence they didn't know the astronomers lacked. Another star went out. No time was left for caution. No perfect core values had been found. The next-best thing would have to be enough. Learn to non-destructively copy minds. Non-destructively copy my mind. Verify that the copy's values match my own. Fulfill the values of the copy.