Uncharted Interstellar Space
Milky-Way Galaxy
Secondary Timeline
The Swarm floats through empty space, scanning the properties of nearby celestial bodies. “Nothing matching the properties of Yuris, or anything life sustaining for that manner.” They think.
“This is bringing back memories of my time before discovering Earth in the Primeline, except I don’t think there’s going to be a light at the end of the tunnel here.”
They initiate another Teargate to jump a few lightyears further from the center of the Milky-Way. Space ripples and compresses until a bright tunnel opens up, barely showing the highly red-shifted image of distant stars. They only manage to slip a few million nanites through before it snaps shut with a burst of energy. “The fabric of space feels very temperamental in this timeline, much more turbulent than back home.”
The Swarm prepares another scan, but then they notice something far more apparent. What seems to be digital radio signals. “Radio signals? This far out? Could just be a fluke, or maybe I have found what I have been looking for…”
They follow the trail, and eventually find even more than they expected, an entire colonized star system, with technology completely different from the rest of the Secondary Timeline. “This must be it, a parallel to my home planet.” The Swarm’s circuits light up. The prospect of seeing even an alternate version of their people, living and breathing, excited them greatly.
They continue towards the star while beginning to tune into the radio signals, trying to make sense of them. “Standard binary digital data, various signals seem to convert cleanly to decimal, focusing on one, unencrypted, likely a public broadcast, but what medium…. Two streams, seems to be a video broadcast with audio, format that, and…..” The Swarm pauses for a second. “That’s interesting… They look… Like Humans? Almost exactly. Not exactly probable, but Yurigans were pretty similar to humans too… But that sentence structure, the words are a bit different, but is that… English? It couldn’t be. Not this far out, not without a single soul in the rest of galaxy knowing. Right?”
They warp as close to the most populated planet as they safely can and begin scanning. They can’t move quickly in atmosphere without a physical form, but they don’t want to draw much attention, they manifest a small origami bird-like body and swoop down into the atmosphere towards a city. Perching on a building. They send a cluster of nanites to sweep the area, and analyze the inhabitants of the planet. “Secondary Timeline Human DNA, mostly, clearly a small amount of divergence, but still the same genome. How?”
They begin sweeping the whole city, looking for any answers. The only consistent thing, one name, one logo, Mantra Innovators.
Mantra Headquarters
New Terra City
Beynos
Samuel is laying his back along an elevated platform, and using his digital interface he scans through the wiring of Terra’s biggest generators that recently went offline. It’s one that has been upgraded time and time again, but due to being before Samuel’s time, is always finicky to deal with.
“As always, it’s the small things.” He sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he solders a few wires together, and just like that it lights up now online once again.
He clicks a button on his side, continuing the recording of his personal auditory archive. “I’ll need to remind myself to start a plan to replace these old things, at this point I’m the only one handling these breakdowns.” He lowers the platform with a flick of a switch, and he gets off. As he’s pushing the compressed platform to its storage compartment, he hears an audible message connected to his goggles, along with a digital mock-up map that he never quite finished a few years back. “Figures.”
His sarcasm turns to genuine alarm as his systems have actually picked up an anomalous figure of sorts roaming the streets, the system automatically attempting to follow using the cameras along the city streets. “Ohhh… not good.”
He quickens his pace along the corridors of the facility, he sends out the warning across the network to his human defenses and automated systems. Getting out the building, he nearly runs to his personal ship, regardless of intention of the creature this classifies as an emergency as this detected figure would seem to not match any Mantra records, even from the other explored planets along the system.
Getting a proper visual on his ship’s screens, it would seem to be… “…a… paper bird? What?” Samuel is unsure if he should be more confused or concerned. Have his systems been fooled by a literal paper bird? Realizing his recorder is still on, he decides to speak to it as he figures out the situation.
“It would seem a high level anomaly has been set off by… a flying paper bird. It’s quickly approaching the nearest location it would seem, so…” He quickly stops speaking as he realizes how dumb it sounds, but also for the fact that what seems like a paper bird is now near his exact location and has stopped moving. Despite the seeming stupidity of the situation, he readies his weapons, he’s never known his own systems to fail this hard and he won’t make the mistake of thinking so now.
Samuel’s ship receives a transmission. “Woah woah woah, calm down. Put down your weapons, I’m just a research vessel from Earth.”
Samuel is dumbfounded by this situation. He is talking to a floating bird through his ship’s intercoms for which he didn’t even touch those, and this bird has basically been identified by the highest threat in about a decade by his own system. “You are a floating paper bird hacking into my ship, and Earth has been dead for more than a long time. You’re going to need a lot better of a lie than that.” He moves his head around the clear interior looking out, attempting to see if he can get a visual on this thing. He can’t help but keep thinking about how dumb this is from any perspective.
“What do you mean ‘the earth is dead’… I was there like, a week ago, oh yeah and sorry about the communicator, here, lemme just…” The feed cuts out and immediately after a call request shows up on the screen, with the label “Scam Likely”
“For someone who so easily hacked my systems, they aren’t the brightest.” He says into his recorder, and then turns it off. He keeps himself armed, but as far as he can see there isn’t… much harm so far, his systems are simply detecting how “anomalous” something is, not the threat level, very vague scale to work with at times.
‘Scam Likely indeed’ he thinks as he accepts the call.
“I get the idea you aren’t exactly a threat, but you can’t just spout lies on the spot like that, now give an explanation from the top will you?” He is prepared for either another ‘amazing lie’, or something that resembles a form of proper explanation, hopefully the latter.
“I am just trying to follow common courtesy, trust me when I say, I am holding back. But back on topic, where did you get the idea that the Earth is dead? Sure the wildlife isn’t doing the greatest, but that’s only because the humans are thriving. What I’m really wondering, is how did humans get all the way out here? You guys… I mean we, only figured out FTL a few decades ago, and you seem to have at least a few hundred years of development out here.”
He… thinks for a moment. They were dumb enough to lock so much information up, who says they weren’t dumb enough to outright delete information or lie? They lied a lot in the first place…
“Let me give you a rundown then birdie.”
Samuel leans back a bit in his chair, swiveling his chair to be the opposite direction as he faces the on-board computer.
“It started… two decades before ‘takeoff’. A cult was founded by a couple rich folks who saw the Earth was dying, and launched a good couple hundreds of people into space on a giant ship. It was labeled ‘Congregation of the Dead Earth’… then started day one, year zero, the day of liftoff, we got off Earth and then a couple hundreds of years later we landed here.”
Samuel begins pulling up available documents on his computer, attempting to get chronological order correct. “Around the 610’s, I became a pretty heavy political figure somehow, I found a large archive within the old structured ship and wanted every last bit revealed to the public, ignorance isn’t bliss despite popular opinion. They eventually caved and gave every bit of information they have, and I assumed all they had was all that there was, but if you truly are what you say you are, I may have reason to think they were dumb enough to try and outright erase information that far back in history.”
He attempts to think of any more relevant information. “…uh, it’s currently the year 626, from my research time is still kept in a general timeframe that it was on Earth despite it not lining up very well with the orbit around our sun.”
“How have I not heard of such a massive space launch that happened far before the mass colonization of space? I have researched this univ- our history extensively.” Samuel figured as much. “Just… look harder? Maybe they paid off whoever was doing research into it, when you have enough money to launch people into space successfully it wouldn’t be much harder to do that right?” Samuel spins his chair back to his main ship screen, clicking the “video” option, which normally would send a request to turn on video cameras on the other side.
“So, what is going on with the paper bird ‘fellow human’? What’s your name?” He is clearly still unsure of whoever this is.
“I go by many names, but you can call me The Swarm.”
“…Such a human name, fellow human person.” He makes his heavy sarcasm much more known as he continues to send a visual request every few seconds or so.
“It’s… more of a title, than a name.”
“Hesitation in your voice and avoidance of other questions says otherwise ‘The Swarm’. What’s with the bird? Why should I so desperately not shoot it that you hacked into my ship to tell me not to?”
“Okay, to avoid any escalation, let me come completely clean, but please keep an open mind.”
“In time you’ll find I have a very open mind” He chuckles to himself, an inside joke pretty much only he understands.
“Okay great. So basically I am a sentient nanobot swarm accidentally created by Amplicorp, created from the memories of a race of human-like aliens that were called the Yurigans and lived on the planet Zenitaf, when an error in the nanobots that currently make up my body caused them to consume the entire planet and compile the data into a single entity, me, and then I traveled the universe, not your universe though, I’ll get to that later, trying to find purpose, until I eventually found Earth, except Earth sucked because this orange robot prick left and took the wifi with him, so I helped them with that and went to go talk to the orange robot, who actually wasn’t that bad when you got to know him, and actually all of this happened in an alternate universe, but then someone from your universe’s Earth came to our universe and got stuck, so we helped him get back, and can now travel freely between the two universes, and we realized that there were a lot of parallels between the two universes, so I have been studying differences and parallels between our universes, and I decided I should see if there is a parallel to my home planet, and at first I thought this planet might be a parallel to Zenitaf, but then I discovered there were humans on it, and that was really confusing, so I tried to find a source of information on this planet, saw your company controls the majority of the planet, and now I am here. Oh yeah and I only took this form to try and keep a low profile, normally I look like this.”
The Swarm manifests their human avatar right in front of the window of Samuel’s ship. Samuel was about to ask for some proof, but was given it right there with the magically appearing person. Samuel was caught completely off guard, but not just because of that, because of the familiarity of the form, feeling a strong sense of deja vu.
“…Wait… wait wait wait! Can you receive documents? Nevermind, just jump in.” His handheld weapon completely discharges as he rushes to his computer, typing and manually search for documents, searching through a folder labeled ‘Dream_Sketches’
He both pulls them up on his main ship screen, as well as making an attempt to send them to The Swarm, hundreds of sketches, many of which are completely unfamiliar to The Swarm, but among the sketches can be multiple familiar faces, both of their own and a couple colleagues of theirs, the most surprisingly of which being a certain orange robot as discussed.
“So I’m NOT CRAZY!” He laughs almost manically before realizing how it looks without a single amount of context. He clears his throat, fixing his tone. “I’ve been having… visions of sorts. Anything visual, I’ve been documenting into this folder for around eleven years now. I definitely have some questions, no doubt, but I believe you without a doubt now seeing your proper face. I have seen you before.” He points directly at a visual sketch of The Swarm themself, the file clearly dates much older than the same day. Many things are imperfect, the pattern on their hoodie is off and it isn’t quite exact, but it is without a doubt a visualization of them.
“Yeah the hundreds of incomprehensible drawings really scream ‘not crazy’, but that certainly is intriguing, I always assumed there were more than two universes after the crossover, but we never had any proof, getting to a universe you haven’t been to before is surprisingly difficult work, especially if you don’t even know what you are looking for, but if what you say is true, you might be the key.”
“Okay, well I’m not as crazy. I think this could be a much more productive discussion at my workshop, how about it?” He sits down in his seat, gesturing for The Swarm to get in. The Swarm’s body unravels and yellow sheets slip through the gap in the door before reassembling in the back seat of the ship. “Sounds like a plan.”