The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 64: Intercluster
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.
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