CHAPTER SEVEN
Anomaly
The primitive signals arrived via one of its more frequently used sensors: the modulated radio frequency detector. This sensor never detected anything of particular interest and what it did detect was quickly rejected as being background noise, or signals from an excruciatingly underdeveloped civilization.
It had learned eons ago that any technological civilizations would inevitably pass through a phase of their development where they use a simple binary code transmitted by a modulated carrier wave radio frequency signal. It was an incredibly primitive form of communication and a wasteful one at that: most of the energy of the signal was used to carry the information, not to convey the information itself. But, it was also a form of communication which was extremely easy to generate technologically and just as easy to detect precisely because it was so wasteful. Civilizations passing through this early stage of development couldn’t control their own creation and beamed such signals out into space in all directions quite by accident and with high power since they didn’t know any better! They were announcing themselves to a frequently hostile universe without realizing they were possibly signaling the beginning of their own demise.
Sometimes, as was the case this time, the signal was local, meaning less than a light year away for its purposes. In fact, this signal was only about 420 million miles away. From its current perch around the unremarkable gas giant, it now found itself orbiting, it could make out the signal well. It was, in fact, many thousands of different transmissions all at once. This was only slightly more unusual than any other of the thousands of such signals it had detected over its thousands of years of service because there seemed to be many different voices speaking at once. There was no cohesion to the transmissions. There were, it reckoned, nearly one hundred different languages coming through on various frequencies, with varying patterns, all of which it could quickly and easily decode using its vast data banks of linguistic knowledge amassed over the eons. Most planets it had encountered that were inhabited were more cohesive than this, with only a few languages in use. This, it had learned, pointed to a species even more primitive in terms of social development then the signals had initially indicated.
The topics of the words it heard were as diverse as the languages employed: some were entertainment, some military. Some were direct being-to-being communications discussing the vagaries of everyday life on this world while others were simple machine-to-machine signals. All of them were immensely primitive,
Far too primitive for this species to meet the criteria of its mission, far too primitive to be of any real concern to its masters.
Still, it recognized the unmistakable hallmark of a civilization on the rise. Some of the transmissions, it realized, were about weapons that utilized the power trapped within the subatomic bonds of the atom. This civilization had discovered the secret to unleashing that power in explosive form. While these crude weapons, something it had seen many times before on many different worlds, were no real threat to its masters, it knew that that knowledge would lead this species down a path that could someday present a threat.
It began to calculate. It filtered the huge volume of data lifted from the transmissions through its neural network, comparing to previous civilizations and applying logical extrapolations. It followed many possible evolutionary paths, some leading nowhere of any importance, most leading to this civilization destroying itself like most seem to it its experience. This, it had learned, was the final fate of most species that managed to get much further down the evolutionary path than this one had.
A few of those extrapolated paths, however, lead somewhere interesting: a level of technology that could threaten its masters. It calculated the odds of each of these outcomes. They were always low.
But non-zero in at least a few cases.
It had no weapons of its own, never had a need for them, although it was technically capable of forming them by reorganizing its constituent parts if needed. It was undetectable by nearly every civilization it had ever encountered, and the ones that could detect it would have been cataloged as threats to its masters and summarily destroyed in short order, as was their destiny, even though it had never witnessed this itself. It had faith in what its memory matrix told it to be true though, so it knew it had happened thanks to others like it, and that knowledge was sufficient.
While it wouldn’t do anything directly to this species itself and was limited it what it could do anyway, it didn’t matter because that wasn’t its purpose. Its purpose was to detect, analyze and report, and that’s what it began to do now.
It determined the proper course of action in just a few hundred milliseconds: it cataloged this species as a long-term emerging potential threat. It even identified the time frame before which its masters could easily dispatch them: 1,400 years. After that horizon, the odds began to improve exponentially that they could represent a legitimate threat to its masters.
A threat to its masters? That notion had always amused it! It knew that its masters were immensely powerful, a power almost beyond reckoning, a power far beyond that of any species yet encountered by it or its brethren. Still, it had its programming, and it had to fulfill it. When a certain threshold was crossed, or it could be determined that the threshold might be crossed at some later point in time, then its masters needed to act. It had never even thought to ask why, and it’s doubtful its programming would have allowed it to do so anyway. It simply was.
But the why of things didn’t concern it anyway - only pleasing its masters did.
Sending a data burst with the sensor reading and its analysis about this civilization, it knew, would do exactly that. They could come along, at their leisure, and destroy this species with the mere wave of their hands, long before its masters could be threatened by them. They would wait, bide their time, allowing this species to develop a little more. They wouldn’t waste their time or resources on this species now, not for half a millennium or more most likely, but they would be on the list as soon as the data was received none the less.
None of that mattered because in the time it took to have these thoughts the data was packaged for transmission and blasted across the fabric of spacetime using a quantum-entangled system established at the time of its launch. This data, it knew, could only be detected, deciphered, and ultimately understood by its masters. Upon receiving it, they would come, eventually. They could afford to take their time because not even the few hundred years it would take their nearest fleet contingent to arrive would allow enough development for this species to pose a threat to them.
The data burst on its way, it hoped this job well-done would be sufficient to earn their adulation. It was sad that none of the previous data bursts it had ever sent had been sufficient, apparently. It still toiled out in the vast, dark void, hoping that this would be the thing that finally earned it the love its masters, and the expression thereof.
Though, while it was sad, it was also hopeful. Hope was all it really had in fact.
Its propulsion system began to purr into action, preparing to launch it out of this solar system forever and on to the next, its work here complete. As it was about to engage the final launch sequence that would send it out of the ecliptic of the solar system, a sensor alert filtered through its processing matrix, alerting the CCU to an anomalous reading reported by a sensor it had never registered a reading from before. It was, in fact, a sensor it wasn’t even aware existed before now, suddenly springing to life, dumping data at an incredible rate into its sub-processing units. It was being flooded with information about something it had never seen before, something so alien to its experiences, all its thousands of encounters with other species, that it felt an entirely new emotion.
It was excited - so excited in fact that it had to kick in new subroutines to - what was the phrase it had heard earlier in analyzing the communications from that primitive species? - ah yes: it had to “calm itself down."
The new subroutines did their job perfectly, and in mere nanoseconds, it was back to its usual operational state.
It began to sift through the data, trying to comprehend what was for all intents and purpose incomprehensible. It had detected a dark energy anomaly. Dark energy was something it had encountered before, many times, but what made this anomaly so unusual was two inexplicable facts.
First, it had come out of nowhere. That should not be possible. Dark energy exists in a region or space, or it doesn’t. Some virtual particles can in fact pop in and out of existence on a quantum scale, but dark energy cannot. For dark energy to suddenly appear would have to mean…
…it felt itself getting excited again because the implication of what it was registering was staggering. It was, in fact, witnessing a technology that was even more advanced than that of its masters! This was something it had only seen a handful of times, three in fact, and in no situation before had it involved dark energy, which is something not even its masters fully understood or could manipulate. It was one thing for a species to have more advanced medical technology or more advanced computing technology than its masters, but something of this nature was entirely unprecedented!
Across five thousand years of searching and across more than twice that number of worlds and nearly two thousand unique technological species, this was the first time a reading of this nature had ever been detected. The data set it was examining now pointed to a possibility that had never even been postulated, based on a rapid search of its memory matrix. It directed sub-processing units to cancel pending routine jobs and enlisted them to analyze the data more rapidly.
It began to run through probability trees, tried to correlate the data with known phenomenon. It concludes that it must be the non-corporeal life form on the gas giant that was responsible for this anomaly. They clearly were an advanced race, perhaps they were in fact so advanced that they could somehow manipulate dark energy. Could that be possible without technology? It scanned the gas giant and the life forms again. It must have missed some type of technology. It enlisted the aid of a host of other sensors that it wouldn’t typically use on the off chance that something showed up on them.
Nothing did. The life forms were as it initially thought: highly evolved but entirely non-technological. No, something else entirely was responsible for this anomaly. Something very powerful and something technological. It knew that just had to be the case.
The second inexplicable fact about the anomaly that was unusual was something that took it more time than was usual to realize, something that took considerably more analysis to fully grasp the significance of because it was so unexpected. It took a while for its processors to begin understanding what it was seeing…
…as suddenly as the data had arrived and been interpreted, mere milliseconds in real-time but an eternity to it, a new cascade of data raced across its processing matrix. The data formed an emotion it recognized, having seen it many times across many species, but one it had never experienced itself.
Joy. It felt joy. Unrestrained, almost unfathomably deep joy. It washed over it like waves on a distant shore, crashing and reverberating through every processing unit that made up every part it.
At once it knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that what it was now detecting would surely, after all this time, earn it the infinite adulation of its masters!
And its joy intensified to untold levels at that thought.
The second inexplicable fact about the anomaly was that within it, at the exact center of the churning bubble of highly unusual radiation that it was, where there should be nothing, there was in fact something. It was something it would never, given everything it had ever seen, given every branch of the largest probability tree it could ever construct, have suspected could be there.
It was a metallic object, larger than it was but by no means large itself, dwarfed by the gas giant. It was an insignificant object, an object that, to its great surprise, it had in its memory banks!
It was an object it had recently cataloged. Very recently in fact, as part of its review of the primitive species on the third planet from the local star. But it couldn’t be what it thought it was, it just didn’t make any sense. The object was the product of a primitive, inferior race, a race it had all but dismissed as insignificant in almost every way that mattered to its core programming. That, and the object was technologically primitive and couldn’t possibly have been responsible for the dark energy anomaly. It had even cataloged the word that primitive species called the object…
”Airplane."