My Admiral,
The Alecto has continued on its course toward its unknown destination. We have left a supercluster of galaxies and crossed into a region of great emptiness, before, we believe, entering the supercluster in which our target lies.
As a result, the Drift has lost its usual whirling aspect… due to the vast distances separating us from luminous objects, we can clearly perceive the Drift and the movement of the universe around us. The distant galaxy clusters appear like clouds slowly sweeping across the horizon.
The awareness of the exceptional void surrounding us has shaken some members of the crew, who have developed psychoses we thought extinguished since the early voyages of 2100. I administered cognitive therapies which proved effective. However, two individuals have not recovered and currently live in a virtual space generated by Soft Sun.
Ironically, we have learned that this vast empty space is not truly empty: there are objects present, but they simply lack light sources that would allow us to detect them. One day, as we stood in the observation bay, we saw the Alecto reflected in a large cluster of water molecules-imagine total darkness, then a flash, and another ship appears. One of our sailors, Bao-despite being from the very materialist Titus-spoke of ghosts, saying he feared that some immense creature from the darkness might be approaching to devour us. The Captain shared his thoughts on this matter: he said it was paradoxical that humanity fears ghosts. Their existence, unproven, would in fact be the proof that we have nothing to fear from death, since it would mean there is an afterlife. Unless the idea of never returning to nothingness is what disturbs you?
You can imagine this did not in the least assuage Bao's fears.
orders, I undertook the Captain's therapy with new perspective and enhanced faculty. The Captain suffers from a mental distortion linked to a physical flaw in his brain, and I can only imagine an experimental genetic modifier to be the cause. The Captain does not have a single stream of thought that occasionally jumps from topic to topic, but rather ten well-defined thought-streams progressing in parallel. From a therapeutic standpoint, his case is rather basic: he is neither depressive nor depressed. He was broken at some point in his life and cannot manage to reassemble the pieces. His mind, in one way or another, convinced itself that there would be less pain in completing the work of destruction than in creating something where the cracks would still be visible. I am working on positive reinforcement, relieving his suffering when he tries to rebuild and to hope. Now, he claims to experience visions of his own death… All in all, I think that as long as he remains under my care, he will hold together. You can rest assured.
In the heart of intercluster space, our Drift came to a sudden halt. We had arrived in a place of unprecedented nature, which the Captain named Stellis Sargasso. A large mass of organized matter: imagine the algae of a deep sea, but extending in all directions. Life forms moving from one to the other. Of course, these were not organic lifeforms but mineral matter, growing and interacting with all forces of nature except for the one absent here-light: gravity, strong and weak interactions, magnetism, electromagnetism… thus, utterly devoid of light and heat, a form of life could emerge and organize itself.
The algae existed at both the molecular level and at the scale of nebulae, shifting fluidly between orders of magnitude, like a fractal mandala. For the first time in the existence of these curious mineral entities, we had to bathe them in light in order to move through them: we turned on the Alecto's lights to carve a path for ourselves, with grapples and thrusters, through this frozen yet living maze.
And then we saw it: a hole in the structure, as if a shark the size of a planet had chewed its way through the stone-algae. The Captain decided to flee through the hole, as it was the most direct way out, and we had no idea how long we would be wandering in the Stellis Sargasso. Except for Andrei, leaning against the bridge railing with his usual sad stoicism, tensions were high: what if the shark turned back?
We advanced for hours at maximum grapple speed, as stones clattered against the hull, the lights shining on a black void within a jungle of stone that should never have existed. "Your training must be tested," said Andrei. "Training is the hammer striking the sword, and experience is the tempering."
We exited the Stellis Sargasso at the same time as the shark-which was not a shark: it was one of those wandering planets that move for reasons unknown, far from any stars. However, this one was covered in structures, so the Captain granted the mission two hours for orbiting, landing, and reconnaissance.
Without light and without a star, exploring this ghost planet adrift in space was not exactly relaxing. The many structures present were devoid of all sentient life-and even of AI. We did, however, find large data banks in an unknown encoding, made all the more difficult to decipher by the fact that their computing systems appeared to be ternary, not binary.
In the days that followed, we left our onboard AIs and "the clan of three"-the three students Andrei had asked me to assign to the AI preservation project-to work on the research. What we had thought was a way to keep them busy during our long journey turned out to be a fascinating and adventurous tale.
The data banks were solely composed of technological schematics-in other words, a manual to construct all the inventions of this vanished civilization. But through them, one could infer their history.
It was one of those poor intelligent and industrious civilizations, born long ago in a distant galaxy, that had never discovered the Drift. They had, however, developed a powerful device, using immense energy, which allowed for the dematerialization and rematerialization of something farther away by using vacuum fluctuations-what we have called the teleporter.
Their aging sun had turned into a red giant, swelling and threatening to engulf their planet. So they teleported their planet into a wider orbit, and then used all the resources of their system to convert their planet into an autonomous spaceship: essentially enough to sustain themselves without the input of a star.
Then they teleported their star elsewhere: without the gravitational pull of the star, the planet was flung from the system toward the next. The planet-ship traveled from system to system, sometimes encountering Xenos and learning from them, and sometimes-so we imagined, without judging-exploiting them to extinction, which was inevitable anyway, since making the star disappear was the requirement for leaving the system.
It is likely that at some point the machinery broke down and this planet-ship encountered a problem, for we crossed its path without finding any sign of life… "or else," concluded the Captain, "they were indeed there, but we could not see them-because we are not able to see them."
Could the teleporter technology be useful for our civilization? Probably, but it is limited for now: it only moves objects over a fixed distance, 2048 times the object's own size. Nothing that could be turned against the Aleph. Moreover, the energy required is on the order of several gigatonnes of antimatter per use…
"There's something to do with this teleporter," the Captain told me thoughtfully, before one of our therapy sessions, "but I can't figure out what."
We opened a research lab on board the ship to study manipulation of vacuum fluctuations. Is it possible to influence parts of the universe to create things? In the infinite, anything is possible. In the heart of the most absolute void, particles can emerge and disappear. We believe the Transients teleport themselves precisely by creating a copy of themselves, atom by atom or photon by photon, on the other side of the galaxy through vacuum fluctuations-while disintegrating at their original point, photon by photon, just like infinitic theseism, which aims to preserve the continuity of thought during virtualization. "That would explain," said the Captain, "why the Transients adopt this energetic, spherical, simple form… it makes movement easier."
This lab was entrusted to Officer Konrad. Konrad is a difficult element, young and brilliant. I find him handsome, I deeply admire him, and if he weren't so tormented, we might have become friends. Initially specialized in radiation and fundamental physics, he was recruited as the ship's astrophysicist by Andrei. He took the assignment badly, partly because astrophysics is now an obsolete science that has made little progress in hundreds of years, and partly because of the Alecto's sidelining on Valentine. Konrad is brilliant, and he has always been a sun in his surroundings, wherever he is… but Andrei is brilliant too, and he felt envy and rivalry toward this twin star. I had long suspected that if anyone were to spy for the Aleph, it would be him. Andrei tempered his ambition by associating him with research on reverse Drift-plunging him at times into hope of making a name for himself, and at others into bitterness at being stuck in a dead end.
Konrad was ravenous to prove himself to everyone-and to himself-and plunged into the study of the teleporter with irrational fervor. He built a first teleporter capable of moving something the size of a glass of water, and requested from the Captain one kilo of antimatter, which was no small matter, and Andrei approved. The teleporter was not very reliable: it created a slightly squashed tomato thirty centimeters away, leaving the original tomato in place. Moreover, to compensate for the vacuum's deficit of fluctuations, it absorbed the equivalent of the tomato in oxygen from the void. Andrei noted that it was a good way to multiply loaves of bread-lamenting only the cost in antimatter. He then delivered a rather long speech on "the mystery of the tomato," that is, the fact that tomatoes appear on many worlds with no link or contamination between them. I saw Konrad boiling inside, but he didn't explode. After that experiment, the lab was ordered to focus strictly on theory-and only on theory.
However, it turned out that Konrad had continued his research, and then stole seventy-eight additional kilos of antimatter, leaving us with only one hundred and thirteen kilos remaining. He attempted another teleportation-this time with himself-as observed by a monitoring camera. He wanted to be the first man teleported by man.
I am not lying to you: we now have two Konrads. One is Konrad, and the other is a sort of human jelly, barely sentient and completely devoid of consciousness. Konrad Two-or rather, One and a Half-is a vegetable incapable of any human activity. Andrei did not punish him, but he required Konrad to take care of his double and also study him. "Since you've transgressed," he said, "follow the path to its end and see if you find redemption."
It turned out that the brain of K2-as he is now called-was a receiver for Konrad's thoughts, as if a permanent thread was stretched between them. Psychic entanglement, Andrei clarified, revealing that Konrad had, without realizing it, through his experimental mistake, crudely reproduced a recent creation of the Aleph discovered by the Wau.
The Captain eventually grasped Konrad's inferiority complex and summoned him to the briefing room in my presence. He congratulated him on the discovery of a technique that would allow us to communicate without relying on the Drift, which would earn him a promotion (unfortunately, in a grim espionage service I know all too well).
I am unable to make an ethical judgment on this situation. I believe we lost our compass a long time ago.
Unless there are specific alerts, my next report will announce our arrival at our destination.
Pallas