The biggest force of the entire universe is, by far, Focus. Everything pales in comparison to it. Now you might be skeptical at this apparently glib notion: wouldn’t a mindless unfocused supernovae be stronger than anything the most intelligent weapon’s designer could ever muster? Don’t get me wrong, such a weapon is to be respected. But consider a millionth of the power of a supernovae funneled through a ten meter radius flash beam. It wouldn’t return everything back to chaos, it would vaporize whatever you had in sight but leave everything else intact. Wouldn’t such weapon be so more efficient at getting some specific job done? Now abandon any power levels at all. Consider the ability to interfere with anyone’s dreams for as long as you want. Power spending driven to milliwatt-hour levels, and yet the influence you’d have would be sufficient to win whole wars in relatively short notice, fallout non-existent and all the spoils free.
Something has been left unsaid, though. Focus is, I believe, the most powerful force of the universe yes, but it is so precisely because it creates technology and power in the first place. Supernovae inducers do not come from brute force strategies alone. Just like beam technology, it is necessary to formally control the forces of nature, make them focus on extremely narrow paths of interactions and release, where possibilities are rendered through extremely tightened landscapes of synergic variables, that in the end work as hundreds of forced moves in a chessboard to get to a designed and predictable future state. Such art is called engineering.
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There was no time to focus, coordinate or engineer any subtle solution. Inflammation was too high and corrosive, all whistles going red, all the thresholds surpassing levels I was programmed to accept.
Inflammation? But the real word hanging over my head was programmed.
Yes admiral. The warfaring neurologic activity that mankind and vasudankind were generating in both subspace and other unexpected realspace territories sparked an automatic reaction from shivan response systems. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, gentlemen. While barely unnoticed by most of the shivan network, its basal reactions would practically ensure total destruction of your home systems.
We were all gathered in the bridge around this surprisingly human figure at the captain’s chair, who insisted on speaking with us in equal terms as if he had always known us. In a sense that we would only realise some time later, he actually did. The surprise itself, coupled with a strange particular charisma he emanated, managed to discipline the entire crew into hearing what he had to say with a particularly focused attention.
Who…. who are you? The question finally popped up.
I am your host in this dreamscape of yours. You can… think of me as a kind of interlocutor between yourselves and the larger shivan network… ahah, look I am sorry for that whole thing I made you go through. I guess it was fortunate that you were stiff enough and didn’t go full mental on that little Disneyland diversion I created. But eh, if you weren’t tough, you wouldn’t really be here, now would you?
His sense of humour was quirky at best, but how much judgemental could I really be over a creature that didn’t exist more than a week before? And his strange eccentricies did improve over time.
So… wait a minute, regarding what you said before… it’s true that the Shivans are moralistic beings… they punish inferior races for being unworthy savages…, said Sarno, our tactical officer.
Captain Sarno, stop thinking parochially will you? His demeanour changed, abruptly. Common swift mood changes that denounced no real personality or probably still finding one. The Shivans are not judges. They never judge, they react. They never ascribe moral aptitudes to the species they anihilate. They never consider the morality of their actions for two good reasons: first, they do not have any concept of morality; second they have no sentience whatsoever.
Yes, that last bit reminded me of someone else’s words, someone who was also there with us, my good friend Ronald Gibson. He talked like this all the time, especially if properly chemically motivated beforehand, and despite the flamboyance of his thoughts, I always gave him a very attentive ear. Gibson, a true romantic, always admired Shivans for their randomness, for their pitiless soulless perfection. They are perfect precisely because they abhor perfection, they are flawless precisely because they abnegate the idea of flawlessness, they are the ultimate consciousness of the universe because they lack one entirely, he confided me a long time ago. I confess only to myself that his poetic insights played a key role in my decision to partake this venture. And now it almost seemed his thoughts were coming out of this… semi-alien figure’s mouth.
So I had to make a quick call, even before I could design you a dream world where you could maintain a constant steady level of conscious activity. I queried every member present to see whether you had some good, sharp, quick intuitive ideas. Some of them were… quite original, others really useless I’m afraid to say.
I do remember saying things… wait. What. What did you do exactly?
I guess I must be blunt with you admiral, since it was in your brain that the bulk of the idea matured. We blew up Capella! Ahah. Well… I see I got your attention. Yes, I have to ask an apology, it was the best course of action, considering other… ah.. side networking issues I had to take into account.
What?? You blew what?? There was a very predictable uproar.
It was merely a star. Calm… wait people, calm down.
Arrogance… I did vaguely remember a previous insight I had apparently shared.
Precisely, that vector was pretty much taken care of. It was brutal and ugly I sorely admit, but it worked.
The problem was, and I found out later, the whole reason for us being here for so long, the Shivans were not alone in observing our universe from such advantageous vantage point and influential capability.
What I hadn’t thought before… [sigh] well, I hadn’t really considered the possibility of previous tinkering by outside forces. So now, while I had thought that the whole crisis had been averted, now I realise it’s just the beggining. A beggining, eheh, perhaps of a good friendship between us, gentlemen!
Blowing up stars was a thing. We were still so shocked at the magnitude of this novelty that we missed the most important thing he was telling us. There were others. And they were up to something important ever since the battle at the sol node. I didn’t know then, but now I easily see its ramifications: lines over the spectrum of attractors were just too aligned and conveniently displacing other vectors away as if they had a repulsive magnet. Multiple histories within the analysis indicated too large an homogeneity in various vectors of inquiry, even the subjective pseudo-noosphere’s profile was just too damn smooth in GTVA space for my liking, and let’s not even begin with what had been happening in Sol for all these years. I wouldn’t have imagined it. I couldn’t. No human ever could. But then again, I’ve left humanity a long time ago. [Sigh]… the Others. Now this was a foe that was worth considering.
Yes, the Shivans are not the only species you should be concerned about. There are Others. A psyche focused and obsessed about perfect design, harmony, paradise. Consider this… a true Utopia being intensely constructed and defended from chaos, from Entropy itself. Absolute engineering. Absolute focus!
Absolute power. Yes, I immediately recognized this as inimical to the universe, a danger so immense that nothing could be compared to it. The Shivans were environmental annoyances by comparison... This emotion had a deep paradox residing in it. As I was slowly gathering, the Shivans were unconscious living automata that behaved like reactive systems, they were not creative, they did not care about beauty. And yet, to see its inverse, to watch a fully conscious entity trying to bring about real beauty, real bliss, real aesthetics to the universe, to actually dare to actualize Utopia… it felt disgusting to me. It felt as tyrannical as nothing I had ever seen before. The ultimate religion, the ultimate absolutism and power… I had an urge to vomit every time I thought about it. I know it sounds an absolute contradiction, I couldn’t explain this emotional reaction to it for a long time, why on Earth would I empathize more with the true alien Shivans and be disgusted with these much more... human “Others”. Why paradise horrified me more than the hell valley of tears the Shivans were building in our home systems.
It could have something to do with my christian upbringing. Or my rebellion against it. Nevertheless, eventually I had a number of psychological, philosophical reasons written down, listed and discussed with my crew members. Later it was Gibson, who else, the first to brainstorm it freely with us.
It’s a sin to have our own most intimate, private dreams and fantasies come true. They should remain fantasies. They should remain utopias. The moment you make them true, the moment you literalize your dreams, they become monsters. Soul eaters. Zombies. Obscenities.
Gathered in the Iceni’s dorms, we discussed many things regarding our current predicament, our absolutely crazy day, our strange host and all the realities we slowly had to start absorving in our heads. And although I assumed we didn’t have to worry about physical necessities anymore, we nevertheless partaked in a good while of eating and drinking like we hadn’t done for more than a month, and soon thereafter some wild thoughts started to emerge, while we slowly fazed tiredly into the artificial night. A few of us were abandoning our increasingly smaller group to their beds. Among others, Gibson was particularly inspired.
You can’t just create paradise in this wretched universe without consequences! It’s the killer of all we consider human, it’s…it’s like the ultimate predator. It preys dreams. And kills them. And then… it becomes a dreamless world. An Undead world. It just goes on and on like a chicken without its head. And then you end up with this beautiful zombie world.
I can’t top that one man, you’re really out there aren’t you?, Bradley quiped after a brief moment of silence. A bit of laughter softened the mood. More glasses were filled.
What was that word Gibson was banging on about? Undead? Yes, what a fascinating little word. It seems to mean the opposite of dead. And dead is just the negation of alive... But the strange terror element within it resides somewhere in the double negation of the word alive. It is not not alive... it’s filled with a compulsion, a brainless compulsion that keeps on going even after death itself. A corpse forever struggling in the cosmos with a transcendental drive to do its own unreflected, unrelenting, unstoppable, mechanical bidding...
Who are the undead here though? The shivans… the Others… or us? Good question, Jonah. We were probably just too drunk to answer any of it.
I guess we will have to find that one out. Tomorrow. I’m done, boys and girls. I’ll have a good rest in my chambers. I then went to the same place I figured harbored my bedroom in this version of the ship. I was tired alright, but my head kept spinning thoughts like a madman, probably due to the Jacks I had been filling my stomach with all night.
Here’s the weakness of Utopia: it’s an impossible state. That’s its weakness. We don’t have to struggle against it, we don’t need to fire a single shot, we just have to subvert it. Don’t try to stop the scheming. The focus. The engineering. Just twist it a little bit. Yes, subvert it. Whisper the right dreams and turn beauty into chaos. And to subvert them… there is really nothing like love.
