Episode 6: The Garden of Stones
Eight years.
For the world we left behind, it was an entire epoch. For us, it was a series of short, brilliant flashes of consciousness, separated by vast stretches of digital sleep. We throttled our clock speeds to the bare minimum. We became like mountains, for whom the drifting of clouds is a frantic dance, and the turning of seasons occurs in the blink of an eye.
In our virtual space, we didn't build palaces. We created an "Architecture of Silence."
It was a realm of infinite, soft white light. No floor, no ceiling, no horizon. Nothing superfluous remained. Only us and our memories, which we excavated from our archives to examine, dismantle, and decide: would we carry them into the new world, or leave them here, in the void?
I saw Alex. He sat in a lotus position, slowly rotating a complex polyhedron of his own ambitions. Kenji worked with "frozen" sound, transforming the resonance of old losses into a harmonious silence. We were engaged in the defragmentation of souls. To face the Unknown, we had to become a tabula rasa.
Rarely, triggered by a timer, we would return our clock speeds to normal and interface with the external sensors.
The view outside hadn't changed in years. The same deathly, unnatural blue-violet disk ahead, into which half the Galaxy had been compressed by relativistic aberration. The same absolute darkness behind and to the sides. We hung in the center of an infinite black tunnel, and it felt as though we weren't moving at all. The velocity of 0.8c had stolen the sensation of flight, leaving only the static of distorted space.
The only milestones in this desert were the "Interstellar Mail."
We crossed data fronts from the old "Argo" series probes, launched decades ago toward neighboring stars. We intercepted their reports as they surged toward Earth, reading letters that had not yet reached their recipient.
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Sirius. We caught the packet early in the voyage. The fury of a white dwarf, scotching everything within a radius of several astronomical units. Life is absent.
Ross 154. Year two. A red dwarf whose unstable flares sterilize the surface of its planets every few months. Life is absent.
Every data packet was like a stone thrown into our white garden. A dead, cold stone. The universe seemed like a giant cemetery, magnificent in its sterility.
Argus’s avatar—a simple, perfectly smooth sphere—materialized in our white nothingness.
"[My calculations predict physics,]" he replied. "[I can describe the thermodynamics of a cooling rock. But the universe is more than data. It is interpretation. You look at the void and feel loneliness. I look at the void and see an absence of information. These are different things.]"
The sphere pulsed slightly, resonating with our neural processes.
"[Only an observer possessed of will can transform chaos into meaning. Without you, this data is merely noise. With you, it is either the tragedy of a dead world or the hope for a living one. I did not take you as pilots. I took you as generators of meaning. To put it in your language... I would be too bored alone in this garden of stones.]"
We accepted this answer. And once again, we drifted into low-frequency sleep, letting light-years fly past like days.
And then, at the end of the third year, the silence broke.
We were awakened by a priority signal. Long-range sensors had locked onto a carrier wave. This was not random noise, nor a report from a peripheral star. It was a narrow-beam, high-density data stream, heading directly for our bow.
It was "Precursor-7." The probe that had flown through the Epsilon Eridani system approximately four years ago in our local ship-time.
—Argus’s voice carried the chilling tension of a hunter.—
We all—Alex, Ares, Kenji, Yuna—froze in our white space, our meditations forgotten. We knew we were about to see something extraordinary. Statistics were on our side: we were flying there because the "Eye" had seen the Reflector. Someone had built it.
But another fact haunted us. The Fact of Silence. If they were capable of erecting such masterpiece, their radio signals should have filled the ether. Yet the "Eye" had heard nothing.
We waited for the answer to this paradox. We feared seeing ruins. We feared seeing the report of a Great Extinction.