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The Tempest II: A Hurricane of Troubles
The Tempest II: A Hurricane of Troubles
When the L Gate was opened, the worst case scenario occurred: an invasion of Ships made of Nanites, dubbed the Grey Tempest, promptly began pouring into the Galaxy.
All the explanation the Saiiban had was a repeating subspace signal, clearly a relic of the civilization that had inflicted this doom on itself, explaining what was necessary to defeat the Grey Tempest.
Winds blow, crack, the galaxy shaking
Clouds of grey death fly howling past
Through opened doors death is waking
Poking holes through wherever it has passed
And here we stand, athwart the storm
Our flocks, fly, wings spread, singing
Even as grey winds howl in swarms
Our song rises true, our voices ringing
Fly! Fly! Through a hurricane of trouble
Your song rising, defiant, screaming,
Your flocks, ready, flying on the double
Fly true, voice high, flocks teeming
Ready to deny death, despair, defeat
Ready to save the galaxy itself with our fleet.
On the bright side, the Grey Tempest invasion fleets were no match for the Saiiban flocks. The main issue was how many of them there were in so many different places.
A year in, the Saiiban had began to make progress into the L Cluster, but the Grey Tempest fleets had started to destroy areas of the Galaxy near various L Gates.
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A ravenous storm
Or a passing drizzle
The Saibaan's power
Will never fizzle!
And take heed,
For this is but the warmup act
Lurking in the shadows
Greater foes plot their attack
Or a passing drizzle
The Saibaan's power
Will never fizzle!
And take heed,
For this is but the warmup act
Lurking in the shadows
Greater foes plot their attack
The Tempest III: Melted Into Air
The Tempest III: Melted Into Air
Fighting tempest fleets the entire way, the Saiiban Fleets arrived at the Aswiri Trinary star system where the control platform for the Tempest was located.
Our brief crisis now is ended,
Our antagonists are but air
And whatever it is they intended
Is nothing now and beyond care.
They have melted, like their makers
Into the thin air of the past, scattering
Their threat all but imagined vapors
Their voices howled out, shattering
Through the gates of reality
But their voices now are silent
Having joined their builders mortality
Ended, like their beginning, most violent
And now, after a pause, our song soars
As the future, continuing, it explores.
The finally battle in some sense represented the greatest challenge the Saiiban fleet has tackled in history, but unlike some earlier conflicts the outcome was never truly in doubt and the Tempest was defeated with some modest losses.
It took the Saiiban precisely 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days to save the Galaxy from the horror they themselves had unleashed on it.
All our wings flied true,
passing through storm and sorrow
into the gentle breeze.
Like dust in the wind
The nanites were scattered
Our enemies dimmed
The Saiiban not battered
The nanites were scattered
Our enemies dimmed
The Saiiban not battered
The Gravity of our Desire III: Recursion
The Gravity of our Desire III: Recursion
As the entity which had communicated with the Saiiban remained frustratingly silent, the Saiiban began following what leads they had unraveled into the mystery of the Loop.
The loop calls us, saying
The beginning of the end
Comes all to soon lately
Time, that thief, giving itself away
Until we meet again, departing
To discover the certainty of this mystery
For if there is one certainty, it is confusion
Our confused tinkering carefully constructs an answer
Through our research into it, built on naught but faith
And we unveil the darkness at the center
Of the edge of time, frozen, unmoving
Progressing along into nothing
Until, we materialist scientists build a temple
To this frustrating, sublime thing
We, listening, call the loop.
In an unusual move, the Saiiban Academic Establishment opened up the discovered Loop Temple to the public at large, deciding that its bets function was a sort of public education center on the complex nature of time itself.
Decades of Saiiban research finally culminated in a theory of what the “worm in waiting” was, and how to meaningfully communicate with it.
A temple for science
Eyes stare at the dark
Reluctant compliance
To capture a spark
The skies will be sunless
The temples tall
A secret success?
Or doom for us all?
Eyes stare at the dark
Reluctant compliance
To capture a spark
The skies will be sunless
The temples tall
A secret success?
Or doom for us all?
The Gravity of our Desire IV: Shattered
The Gravity of our Desire IV: Shattered
In the early 2400’s the Saiiban were finally ready and able to finish, if such a word could be accurately used, resolving the mystery of the “worm in waiting”
Finally, in the end, it is time
Time, and time again, to talk with the loop
Some claim it is fate, or destiny
We prefer something simpler, more fundamental, like gravity
Pulling us closer to the center of the mystery of its desire
To speak to us, to teach us, to expand our sight
The final experiment was not engaged in without some trepidation by the Saiiban scientific community, but the scientific gains and promised resolution to the mystery behind the “worm in waiting” were too promising to ignore.
And at last, we have sight
Of the mystery that is time
And all the time we might desire
To go around this Loop
Succumbing to its gravity
Pulled around by Destiny
But must we be pulled by destiny?
Is all we see because of our limited sight?
Our eyes blind from broken, fragmented light, twisted by gravity
Are twisted by the weight of ignorance, twisted by time
And time is up now, for the Loop
Has made it clear finally, it’s desire
If we wish our desire
It says, we must embrace destiny
We must succumb to the loop
Lose ourselves, as our home falls out of sight,
Forever changed, for all time
As we, and it,, fall into the endless, crushing gravity
Of the worm
What, precisely, the worm was asking for, in that eternal moment, is still a matter of conjecture. But one thing all the scientists agreed upon, if the Saiiban agreed, the species, the Sairus system, the empire, perhaps the very galaxy itself would be irrevocably changed.
And so, as we once, in our nests, defied gravity
And , spreading our wings, embraced our desire
For all time, to fly free
We have decided,
No
We reject Destiny
We do not know what future we will see
We embrace the unknown, breaking the loop
Time’s arrow, flying uncertainty, cutting the knot
Its jagged edges, pulsating, raw, feral
Humming with danger, with promise
When the Worm’s offer was rejected, a strange inter-dimensional being appeared in the Sairus system and attacked the fleets there.
We sing,
screaming
Into the void
We refuse
to follow the path that has been set for us
We refuse to take
a certain, defined shape
We refuse to be
constrained
We spread our wings, become the air, become fire
Rising,
escaping gravity
Knowing you cannot escape time,
not caring
Our goal is not to escape
The jaws of time, but rather
To sing a song that echoes
With the wonder of not knowing
The wonder of discovery,
requiring uncertainty
The wonder of becoming
The wonder of the dark of the future, rushing, expanding
If others have sung this song, very well,
If we sing alone, but no
When singing, it is you and the song, the harmony,
And so, when singing, one is never alone
But one instead succumbs
not to doomed, dusty, destiny
But the knowledge that songs evolve, and grow
New notes are sung, from singers unknown
Into and unknown future
Flying, at escape velocity
From the gravity well of the past
And out into the dark, streaking light, song, life
Into the ears of the future.
Sing!
The defeat of the entity fundamentally raised even more unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable questions in the Saiiban scientific community. Some would argue, after, that the deal should have been accepted. But, mostly, the Saiiban came to accept that part of the scientific process was always having remaining unanswered questions.
- 1
To succeed, perhaps
is its own special form of doom
life, surprises, go on.
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I believe we have one more update in this movement and then we can do a census post and move, finally, into the end game.
In a metaphor for everything, getting through the end feels like ti is taking longer, despite, objectively, this not being the case.
There once was a worm
Or always there was
It had but one cause
To make its love firm
And so came the loop
The loop always there
To take in one swoop
What always was theirs
But firmness breaks love
And causes can falter
A spirit can break at infinity's altar
The worm that once was and always will be
Would search once again for an old devotee
Or always there was
It had but one cause
To make its love firm
And so came the loop
The loop always there
To take in one swoop
What always was theirs
But firmness breaks love
And causes can falter
A spirit can break at infinity's altar
The worm that once was and always will be
Would search once again for an old devotee
What was will be
What will be was
What will happen already did
All foreseen the Worm has
Oh imprudent Saaiban child
Playing with time's never-ceasing tide
What horror have you unleashed?
Are you certain it is vanquished?
What will be was
What will happen already did
All foreseen the Worm has
Oh imprudent Saaiban child
Playing with time's never-ceasing tide
What horror have you unleashed?
Are you certain it is vanquished?
Sing
Sing
As the Saiiban golden age of science continued to bloom, the practical application of how to build structures on a stellar scale began to be understood.
Ⅰ
I saw the best minds of my generation singing, building, wondering,
flying through space, seeing what there was to see and learn and fix
searching singers burning for all the songs of the universe to sing in the
echoes of space
Who looked at the universe and saw a multiplicity of weirdness, strange alien songs
singing in new ways impossible for them
Who saw a thousand mysteries of madness and marveled at the ineffable sublime universe
that kept teaching new things
Who searched for life and kept finding it in a thousand permutations and evolutions and who nonetheless kept looking for new version of that infinite song
Who fought with themselves and each other and with the echoing silence of nuclear mushroom clouds wielded by insane robots and all devouring insects seeking to silence them.
Who greedily kept the secrets of extended life to the elite as they spread out and built lives of scientific comfort for the masses who also hungered to earn their place on merit.
Who learned that the arrow of time bends and breaks and borrows and steals and talks and speaks poetry and makes insane demands that might kill you or turn your star into a black hole but still you keep learning.
Who listened to strange alien songs imploring for mercy as they fled war or death or assimilation into incomprehensible consciousness which stretched across stars and hungered to make all thoughts into theirs.
Who faced killer robots and did not shun or fear the robots they had already made refusing to let the mistakes made by others in the past become an echo into an uncertain and unknowable future.
Who built new and terrible weapons to bring death and new and wondrous structures to bring dead worlds to life and even seed the dark emptiness of space itself with living.
Who built structures in honor of the science of physics and of engineering and of sociology and also of war to ensure that their ability to consider the universe would continue.
Who found life on dozens of worlds but learned of the hundreds of dead worlds and saw that life was both common and yet unaccountably precious and so spread out its songs to everywhere where it might take root.
Who could have ruled or killed or enslaved an entire universe but were happy merely to have their own secure, if dominant place within it
Who were not above pushing another race out of an area they had already decided was theirs but who also stopped even if they could have continued to take more.
And who sang a soft, quiet song as they bid good night to an entire star encased in a blanket of metal and science capturing the entire energy of its song for their own use
A few years after the Confederation celebrated the bicentennial of the beginning of its voyage into the stars, the ultimate testament to scientific curiosity that had driven the Saiiban out into the Galaxy was built.
The second “megastructure” to be completed was a state of the art center for the Saiiban fleets. The confederation was determined to ensure the continuation of tis era of peace and prosperity by ensuring that no other power would be able to threaten it in the way that the XT-489 or the Hive had done.
Ⅱ
What song of wonder and determination entered through our ears and set fire to our brains and our imaginations?
Singing! Science! Exploration! Mysteries! Wonder! Anomalies! Science and its unobtainable answers! Science and its impossible certainties!
Science the incomprehensible muse! Science the stern taskmaster! Science the demanding loving parent giving birth to a thousand ideas and laws and puzzles!
Science the horror! Science the wonder! Science in your millions and billions of cells unthinkingly murdering their way up to increasing biological complexity?
Science in your heavy pull, like the gravity of a black hole demanding we answer questions and make unknowable bargains and sacrifice scientists and sanity!
Science in your unity of purpose and function like a Great Unified Theory of purpose as minerals pour of black holes and millions of languages are translated!
Science in your totality as you swallow entire planets becoming your own complex ecosystem complete with predator ideas seeking to hunt and kill!
Science! Science! Marvelous murderer! Miracle of a mother! Savior of lives! Destroyer of planets! Reviver of hopes! Destroyer of certainties! Providers of puzzles and clues!
Science crushing all into little atoms and spreading it out into entropy! Science swallowing up facts into an event horizon heavy with meaning and saying look it's simple just revise your priors!
Dreams! Illuminations! Discoveries! New research! Epiphanies!
Laughing as we sing! Understanding we will never understand!
We’re back at the beginning ready to jump through hyperspace! We’re take flight! We go out into the sky! We taste the wind! We spread our wings!
We cry as we go out and see his huge immense tiny small galaxy and sing to it and it sings back! Into the dark! Into the sky! Into the future!
Among the most impressive Saiiban achievements during this time was the construction of a Matter Decompressor around the Gargantua black hole, turning it into a giant mining complex with an essentially infinite supply of minerals.
The Confederation believed that “soft power”, used correctly, could be even more powerful than the power wielded by its fleets. The construction of the Interstellar Assembly made the Confederation the leading diplomatic power of the Galaxy and would later enable it to dominate the Galactic community.
Fyyrt became the first and most important of the Saiiban’s ecumenopolis, an entire world turned into an city. Fyyrt would become a center for industry, receiving the flow of minerals from the Matter Decompressor and turning them into alloys for more Megatstructures, fleets, and other feats of engineering.
Ⅲ
Saiiban. We are here, but we have barely started,
where our mad dreams are taking form
We’re here, but we have barely started
Where we are wondering if what we have built will outlive us
We’re here, but we have barely started
Where we are aware we are building a legacy
We’re here, but we have barely started
To understand what any of this means
We’re here, but we have barely started
As we sing and hear the songs of all the voices who have joined us in some sort of impossible chorus to the ineffable wonder of billions of beings all wondering what it means
We’re here, but we have barely started
As thinking robots that we built in our image are planning and building the future along with us, the future building the future, our immortal children who still, on occasion, die.
We’re here, but we have barely started
As we still yet have to choose our destiny to become machines or to give up ourselves into the shroud or even to take genetic engineering to a more perfect level
We’re here, but we have barely started
As we build impossibilities that will echo into the future that our children might sing about and wonder at our madness or determination
We’re here, but we have barely started
As we push back and back the grim hand of mortality even among those of us who are still slaves to biology but then we wonder if we have become the master at last.
We’re here, but we have barely started
As we build rings around stars and build songs in space and wonder if the other singer in our galactic chorus are finally listening to us and learning as we have learned from them.
We’re here, but we have barely started
For some of our legacies still remain to be finished, projects put down in a moment of haste as the dark future rushes onward into the present and ever surprises us.
The Saiiban were not the only species starting to build Megastructures, but they were by far doing so at the most rapid rate.
In 2458, the Saiiban completed their next project, transforming an entire solar system into a “Ring World” , thereby creating the equivalent of four planets worth of living space where previously there had been little of use.
In 2456, after building various other Megastructures, the Saiiban set out to build a lasting testament to their cultural and artistic legacy, a Megastructure meant to evoke and take the form of song itself.
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It is not so much
that our spirit bent, or broke
but rather we said no, enough.
One thing we now know,
nothing in space is certain,
that is why we refused.
It's always nice to have a new reader.
Welcome!--
Next update will be a "census" type update and will finish this movement, and then we will finally be in the endgame.
So many megastructures all in just a few short decades! The Saiiban snowball has become an avalanche!
Architects on a galactic scale
The Saibaan spread their tale
Shaping their destiny at will
Their hopes no threat can kill
But beware, for in intergalactic darkness
Trascendent realms, or long lost directives
Lies unending death and madness
They will steal your dreams, those lovecraftian thieves
The Saibaan spread their tale
Shaping their destiny at will
Their hopes no threat can kill
But beware, for in intergalactic darkness
Trascendent realms, or long lost directives
Lies unending death and madness
They will steal your dreams, those lovecraftian thieves
Not new as I started reading this when it first went up but I just did not comment on how awesome it is for some reason.It's always nice to have a new reader.
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Next update will be a "census" type update and will finish this movement, and then we will finally be in the endgame.