The Blind Gods - Cover

The Blind Gods

Copyright© 2025 by Wau

Chapter 51: Dimensions

My Admiral,

When I agreed to undertake this journey, I saw it as a temporary prison lasting a year. A year without respite, on the same ship, waiting for our arrival. That was not the case. If Garen Antor followed an untroubled route through sidereal space, the stars have since moved – and one could say: the universe has become populated, Xeno civilizations have bloomed, and we must now make regular stopovers to smoothly avoid overly dense galactic arms or simple nebulae.

Andreï is developing one of his theories: the diversification of Xeno civilizations, their rise, is exponential, in aligned cycles. Living beings, according to this theory, all become sentient at roughly the same time and rapidly spread throughout the galaxy; we encounter each other, and the encounters, initially sparse, become exponentially more numerous, because the more time passes, the more sentients are eager to explore, to know, to conquer, and they possess the technological means to satisfy these urges. Then they transcend ... they disappear almost simultaneously, leaving behind their messy rooms, artifacts and wonders that the animals who will next, together, reach sentience will use once again to conquer the universe, and so on, layer after layer. Synchronicity is not a magical fact, it’s simply a law of large numbers: a civilization traveling through space will encounter another, and even if it doesn’t grant them the secrets of Drift, even if that is always the case, it will have shown them that it was simply possible. Civilizations are like flowers, he told me, as he handed me one. Like a field of flowers. They bloom in the same season, then wither to make way for another bloom. We are not even the reason the process exists: we are the process. Sooner or later, something will be born from our gesticulations ... something incomprehensible, but all that we have done, all our hopes, all our sorrows, all our grandeur and our petty vices, it will be neither good nor bad, merely a process, a cog in the great machine. May the Blind Gods one day tell us what this machine produces. I would like to have that answer.

We made contact with a pre-stellar Xeno civilization that attacked us without warning – fortunately, with poor missiles whose trajectories were badly calculated. They won’t conquer the stars anytime soon. Before departing, we took a few high-resolution photographs of the dominant civilization to try to deduce their history. But as the Captain said ironically: this love of war makes me nostalgic for our HS. But yes, this belligerent or fearful civilization will have seen our ship arrive and vanish, and will know that Drift travel exists. Let’s hope they gain wisdom before the day of true first contact.

We then lost nearly six days of travel due to a Xeno incident remarkable enough for me to relate it. As you know, our perception of the universe is limited to three dimensions, but the “unified-limit” theory of physics, finalized in the 22nd century, teaches us that there are a decimal number of dimensions, that is, fractional – something close to 5.5. Baryonic anomalies began to appear in space, and we exited Drift, again. These were fragments of matter seemingly sliced in space that roughly formed circles. The severed parts, upon study, were cut with a precision below the Planck scale – the smallest possible – so we first thought they were fractal anomalies like those found on Tybalt. The explanation lay elsewhere: it was a great entity moving between dimensions without really being aware of it – a bit like us, in fact: when you wave an arm, you pay little attention to whether you wave it parallel to a plane or along a line, perhaps astonishing beings of one or two dimensions who see something arrive from nowhere.

Following the circles – which were merely the visible parts in our perception of a long sinuous tunnel – we found a planet orbiting a black dwarf, half eaten away: imagine a literal crescent moon. Once again, it was the entity that had overlaid part of our dimension.

 
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