The Single-Event Upset sat sixteen parsecs from the target system, five kilometres of green and gold, shimmering silver domes and floodlit hangars. Small objects drifted lightlessly from curving assembly and despatch decks along its sides as probes were deployed, reaching a short distance from the ship and disappearing into blooms of tesseract engines.
The tesseract engine, acquired by their membership of the new Triumvirate, had become the favourite for the Great Civilization’s smaller modules and probes, though it was less energy efficient over greater distances, it was a superior choice for this role. The Great Civilization’s implementation of the S14 jump drive tended to emit optical light on the same wavelength as the parent ship’s emissions.
Most surveys did not require anyone to go in person. In fact for the vast majority of the missions, the Single-Event Upset took part in such a thing would not be useful. A ship designed for surveys, and scientific missions, the vessel certainly encountered the unknown, and often, but it did not do so by sending personnel to poke things.
Kyari Thaltorum Prescet of House Thao, Clan Tua watched with quiet contemplation as another constellation of drones transited off the starboard of the ship. The room they were in was a chamber for monitoring probes, surrounded by a holographic wall on all sides that made them seem to be floating in space, on a small raised dais, as if it were a flying carpet. The stars here were unfamiliar to her. She saw new stars with every deployment, but this seemed eerie.
‘Sometimes I feel that I did this,’ she said.
‘You didn’t do anything except reveal something that should never have been secret.’ Her companion was Udran Gar, a being twice her size, whose frame was supported by a small cluster of gravitic units around him. He was from an exoskeletal species, whose home gravity requirements were very different to hers. His species were called the Durshan, or at least that was how their name sounded to her ears.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘but still, I feel responsible for this. A whole culture, two, in fact, gone.’
‘Fractal upheavals happen all the time, Kyari,’ the larger scientist said, ‘we have a duty to the truth, and if they are truly gone, then we can memorialize them and learn from their errors.’
As the first telemetry flowed in, the environment shifted to show a composite of the probes’ destination.
Anchorpoint, Circlet III.
‘What happened there?’ Udran said.
She saw it immediately, ‘Is that an imaging error?’
‘I do not think so,’ the shipmind said, it was present in most of the laboratories and workrooms on board, and certainly the imaging chambers. ‘I’ve sent in another set of probes and I am seeing the same from them. Time slicing it now.’
Udran rumbled approval. The shipmind was an AI, of the Sepa class, the same as the majority of warships and other large interstellar craft. That meant that it was smarter than either of them, and saw the universe much faster, some argued that it was redundant to put less transcendent sophonts on a ship like this, and some other survey ships ran without a crew. But there were still ways they could contribute.
Calling up an array of phos-glyphs, hanging interactive controls, one for each of her four hands, Kyari frowned deeply.
The shipmind could in principle run on almost every particle of its frame, but it reserved significant computation for its crew to use. She ran a sim, looking at the display.
‘Well, I think I know what happened,’ she said. Her tone was awed, but not in a good way.
A note on IP: while Anchorpoint was previously held by another player, it was created by Sunset, who’s given permission for it to be reclaimed, and this thread will mostly cover the fate of Sunset’s IP, not the other player who’s CTE’d.
