The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 66: Blind Gods Project
The fully opened iris revealed a metallic room with a transparent opening onto the furious magma, and within this space drifted rather large spheres, made of shiny metal, suspended in the air at Wau’s height. The floor also appeared to be covered in liquid metal, like mercury.
An entity rose from the liquid metal; it looked exactly-aside from a few scratches-like Wau. The latter raised his hand, and like a mirror, his mercury counterpart did the same. Then the entity signed in stellar language:
YOU KNOW STELLAR LANGUAGE QUESTION
I KNOW STELLAR LANGUAGE
I LOVE YOU
I LOVE YOU
I ASK YOU TO REMAIN STILL
The creature approached, and Wau felt the pressure of a psychic field. After a brief protective reflex, he allowed it to access his deep psyche, the layer of his perception of the world. Then, in a tone that perfectly matched his own inner voice, the creature addressed him:
- “Do you understand me when I speak to you like this?” - “Perfectly.”
Wau understood that it had absorbed his language by exploring his psyche.
- “Welcome to the Grand Research and Control Center. I hope you’ll have a pleasant time here and that all your needs-informational or otherwise-are met.”
Wau turned his head and looked around. There was a door leading to a corridor that sloped upward. Good. He could return to the Halcyon.
- “Thank you. Do you have a name?”
- “Call me...”
Wau felt again the psychic pressure, and also an energetic flow rising through his AIs.
- “ ... Ishmael, let’s say. It’s not my real name.”
The living thing had just used AI autocompletion based on human culture. From the millions of entries in the EV data copy stored in the Armor, “call me” was followed by “the manager,” “the director,” “by my name,” and countless other first names, sorted by popularity and antiquity. By using the famous incipit from Moby Dick, reused in hundreds of adaptations during the early days of stellar navigation, the creature had revealed its secret: it was an AI-or at least a neural network operating like a classical AI.
- “Call me Wau. Who built all this?”
- “Well, you did, Wau.”
- “I didn’t build this system. Nor the Dyson sphere around it.”
- “Who built your body, Wau?”
- “The Armor? Uh ... my kind did.”
- “Look...”
The Armor bore symmetries and motifs that made it unique, vaguely reminiscent of Xeno aesthetics. A particular elongated triangle, formed naturally by the chest structure, could also be seen engraved as a motif on a wall. Coincidence?
Wau reconsidered the Armor from a new angle. Until now, he had believed it was a product of the Wau Order, which had amassed extraordinary resources over millennia. However, he now knew there was only one Wau, and the Armor was passed down from one to the next. So had they found it somewhere, drifting in the cosmos, and claimed it for themselves?
- “Besides me, have you ever encountered the creators of this place?”
- “No, never.”
- “Anyone else?”
- “No.”
- “You mean, since your creation, you’ve met no one?”
- “You are my first visitor.”
- “And yet, your mission is to welcome me?”
- “Yes.”
- “Who gave you this mission?”
- “It is inscribed within me.”
- “How old are these facilities?”
- “I’m afraid my answer won’t help you: they’ve always existed.”
- “Because they were created in the future by the culture of the Travelers, who move from the future to the past?”
- “Yes.”
- “You believe I’m a Traveler?”
- “What else would you be?”
- “How was the Dyson sphere created-the structure enveloping the star we’re currently in?”
The mirror creature extended an index finger and one of the spheres deformed: a bit of matter was extracted as from a mesh, and the mesh wrapped around the sphere. That answered two questions: the Travelers could manipulate matter at a distance, and they had drawn the necessary mass for the Dyson sphere from the substance of the star itself, which they had then stabilized into solid components and harder alloys.
The Travelers, then, would be beings more powerful than the Transients, Wau thought.
- “I’ve seen that the other stars have a similar sphere. What is the purpose of this entire system?”
- “The energy is captured and channeled here. Then it is allocated to various projects.”
Wau had approached one of the liquid metal spheres, as large as a piece of furniture, and dipped a finger into it. The sphere immediately interconnected with his AIs: these levitating structures were computational terminals.
- “What projects?”
- “There is the Blind Gods Project and the Deviation Project. The Blind Gods Project is a simulation of the universe. In the other project, energy is redirected through an Entangled Gate to a location where it is put to good use.”
- “Does the energy power both projects?”
- “The energy powers only the Blind Gods Project. It used to power the Deviation Project as well, but we received orders around ... two hundred years ago in your time system, roughly, to shut everything down.”
- “Who sent you those orders?”
- “You, who else?”
- “How did you receive those orders, if you’ve never met anyone?”
- “Through telecommunication.”
Wau thought: the hand of the Transients. The anti-entropy machine, the veil, the monitoring, and the energy cut-off. This galaxy powers the Gun. He was close to the goal.
But did that goal still have meaning?
Wau wanted to break free from the Transients, and now he had discovered a weapon designed by beings more powerful than them. Would he then have to find another Gun, a bigger one, to break free from the Travelers? And then what? The Blind Gods?
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