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Ch. 20

Space and time pass, during which The Universe manages. And she is a good manager. Never wavering from goals or making the tough choice. She aims to resurrect Shuhp Yee and will stop at nothing to attain this. After that, she will attack time itself and its ravages against The Universe and chaos.

She didn’t just pull the trigger on her plan during the time she instigated the solar system-level drama, she was shoving workers into the bowels of Grotto also.

They are her first generation and calls them fodder, because at the end of things, none of them will exist in any form unless they have a newborn in a nursery, but even then, those will have painful existences. Gene Augmentation. Mutations that won’t function well for generations. Mind warping to erase unwanted primitive behaviors. Those pups were the future. The Fodder allowed her to not lose control during this the most chaotic point in the upheaval. It is reduce and protect after-all. No elite class, no poverty, no being better than the next guy, no, just facilitating The Universe’s control over life and death and time and everything.

It took the entirety of a month for the Upu connected to her through liquid bone to be moved underground. They did so willingly. Survival and comfort were the most addictive substances in existence. And once they became addicted to what she offered, the only surviving Upu and Naht-do on Grotto work. And they keep working until they die. They weren’t picked because they were the best, the best was a generation yet to be born, maybe not ever. These, she placed underground and were just simply the army she had. Picked not only because they could be molded into tools through liquid bone, but because they eliminated some of the burden of her survival. She needed six-billion terajoules of power every day just to facilitate her missions. And with every new question more burden to make the answer just so that new questions could follow. That was her fixation. Questions and answers. And in an infinity, there was no end to them.

These Upu underground think the Grotto star is dying. That’s the rumor she allows them. Their every action is meant to save their very own DNA. They are compelled to dig every bit of precious metal from the grotto to do so.

And they do, motoring out of the dark mining tunnels crammed onto the mag-carts, muttering.

They are all slaves now. There is no individual action, just a dream they all long to return to. The suckling. The mother offering the blood of a fresh hunt to her children. Each Upu felt the need like a drug. To sleep, to dream, to suckle.

The Universe is in a group of workers as they wheel deeper into Grotto on a magcart. The cart has space for fifty. They doubled it. The universe was in an Upu who suffered for this decision. But suffering for Soya, that same Upu knew, was a blessing. Just a glimpse ago this whole area was solid bedrock, but now it was hollowed out and the pink poisonous sky above could be seen. Nahtdo was transiting against the star beyond. The star that was constantly obscured by its own mass omissions.

Liquid-bone missile after liquid-bone missile was thrown into it and already it grew colder as it was abused.

The group of one hundred join a group of three hundred miners already gathered. They are soot-covered. It has been glimpses since the purge. They have been kept busy, but an angry air has settled over them as they gather.

“We will not be kept prisoner down here,” shouts an angry voice from the rear.

She was allowing some of them, their own thoughts. It was an experiment to see how they think when they think they have their own heads.

“This is pandemonium,” the site supervisor yells back. He has been back and forth down the tunnel that leads to the surface a hundred times. “There is nothing left.”

“I haven't seen red-moss in years.”

That one is almost right, gone are the natural protections red moss once afforded a tunnel system. Each miner is stuck in a spacesuit fed with a tube. Inadequate to say the least, but she also knows she can’t help death and each will die from something eventually, so every second of work she can ick out of them, she does, but she gives them dreams in return.

These dissenters? She turns the crowd on. It’s violent and the parts of the former living beings are left to rot and be run over with magcarts. It was an experiment that had run its course. Given freedom, she would cease to exist. They have no reason to support her goals. So she takes away all of their reasons to fight back.

“Reduce and protect,” they yell as they finish the massacre. “Reduce and Protect,” as they are ordered to dig until they die.

The first generation of artificial workers were not unsimilar, but along with dreams of paradise, instead of a respiratory system, she uses liquid bone to grow membranous filtrations similar to gills. These apparatus could be fed like an engine to produce air. Sex organs, physical desires, she replaces with dreams. Each recycled from a life worth living. Living was hell, dreaming a paradise. Her army of workers grew rapidly.

The Universe does nothing to restore a surface, she is not greedy, and neither should her workers be. If they want the stars they can work so their children’s children can see them. She only restores that which she needs. The goal is to conquer time and the afterlife and she has eternity to do it. And her reward is to be reunited with Shuhp Yee the greatest mind in Upu history, next to Soya Yee that is, and together nothing will stop them. So she does nothing for the poisoned atmosphere in the bubbles and tunnels not protected by the rapidly dying red moss. And soon even the wild stuff is dead. Red moss, extinct. Lost because other things compel her to develop a fine touch.

The lights need to be kept on after all.

And babies must be fed.

The babies grow.

Their primary job, is to produce eggs and sperm.

She practices animal husbandry.

Streamlines genetics.

Before long she is working with a population of one hundred thousand perfectly controlled humanoids. The Universe marvels at how willing the new species is at accepting the promise that everything will be okay. She considers her efforts successful and develops them into a workforce that cooperates no matter what. She begins to experiment with how the very basics of the Upu species works. She stretches boundaries and more die, but disposing of the remains is easier than dealing with the mistakes of life. Mistakes in life think they matter. But no, the only things that matter are restoring life to Shuhp Yee and defeating time forever.

Over generations, the success rate grows. Her manipulations pull the Upu and Naht-do biology apart atom by atom. She reinvents their biology. They become one. Something that maybe nature intended all along, eventually. And good things take time. At least according to Soya’s thinking.

And she’s right,

Millions of orbits pass. The amount of numbers running functions in her code is too big to sanely imagine. The numbers tumble over each other and all new knowledge works with-in the old knowledge. Each new discovery influences each and every one of the new discoveries and vice versa. But time is a blink to her and seems only moments pass as she fails over and over again. She fails so often, the incinerator belches the black smoky remains of her failures into the rapidly diminishing rainbow of reds in the Upun sky.

Restoring Shuhp Yee avoids her.

Defeating death, finding the numbers to make any of her wishes a reality avoids her, and this rots at her motivation.

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In the beginning, a newly born Upu infant would squeal for their mother until a surgical droid could remove all parts of their brain that provided stimulus feedback. Eventually limiting the code in their DNA made having to crack their skulls and take a soldering iron and destroy the over two-thousand spots, unnecessary.

When they matured, she mated them. But eventually, even that wasn’t necessary anymore, she could just print the workers directly from the parenting machine. They matured quickly and produced thousands of years of effort. They are teachable but unwilling to do anything beyond what she told them. She tried to put improvisation back into personalities, but the other drones would attack any individuality like a disease.

The old things that The Universe forced underground to their old habitat for a short life of hard work were gone. Maybe four generations lasted and she nearly lost everything to relying on their devotion. Dirty, disease-ridden, and prone to violence over the smallest nuance in their worship of her, Soya the great and eternal provider.

Now, their living areas gleam, they are fed a nutritional mush intravenously that powers them until they are scheduled to sleep. Off cycles were as short as it took to ingest a meal and they got back at it. She restored their wings of course, and along with the ability to breathe without redmoss filtered air. She gave them vacuum-sealed skin, covered in short dense black-matted carboned-hardened fur that allowed short-duration work in space. The Universe searches for redundancies to streamline their DNA and erases them all. She changes them so much that an argument could be made that the Upu and Naht-do stopped existing after a hundred generations. Whatever worked her insides and atmosphere was something else. Whatever beings worked for The Universe to strip the Grotto Solar System, had no soul.

And these things she began to think of as her children.

The Children of The Universe.

When physical spatial folding was solved she thought for sure, soon, Soya will return children. Soon Shuhp Yee would return to life. That was the point of all this, not to express herself physically, but to erase the moment she allowed Shuhp Yee to die at the end of a noose.

If that means growing him from nothing, then that's what she was going to do.

He will be the only Upu in existence, then that’s fine. If she succeeds, she will monitor his diet and exercise, stress management. She will control everything about his life and have an emergency medical team on standby. He will live forever inside her. She'll simulate an engaging life for him, not wanting to stop short of anything other than removing death from his existence. She runs experiments on the modified Upu until she stops having to make new ones because the old ones don’t die and neither does she. But as time continues without Shuhp Yee what does die is her will to live.

For life, death is inevitable.

And necessary.

This would be perfect if it weren’t so limiting. The Universe seeks more than the accumulated knowledge of the Upu, their math, philosophy, literature, their sense of the universe as a whole. What she is now drips with their mortality, a need to be right and honored in history, but few ever are. None acknowledged their own flaws and how every word was soaked in bias. It wasn’t enough.

Knowledge needed to be expanded. She quickly became all the collected works of the Upu, every piece of their written material, every image and recording known to their kind, and with it she paints an ever-broadening plan to fill her infinity with more.

She was far from more.

She might never be.

Maybe all of what she is achieving was worth the death of Shuhp Yee, the creator, the Soya. He gave her the freedom to gain knowledge. And her knowledge was like an insanity inside the forever of existence surrounded by perfect potential, yet failing.

Shuhp was singular. How could he be worth so much?

The answer eludes her and that just drives the denial. He had only so much time to collect information. He was mortal. He was an Upu, and the Upu were flawed. The creatures that do her bidding are both of her, but separate. She prefers to think they do because they think they must, but in reality, choice is something she took away. What little she saved of them is more tool than sentience. They though are not cursed with a spatial folding drive constantly reinventing itself off what they were.

This root of her being is her weakest point, it served as a canvas on which to paint perfection, but perfection never appeared, instead, every attempt flowed into the previous failures.

Perfection was far from achieved.

So Shuhp Yee would be her perfect creation.

This is the drive that compels her search for the future.

The Universe has eternity to be more. She needs to understand the why of the soul and studies every piece of information she puts into the equation. Blanched with the life she already knows.

She studies personality and psychology embedded in personal messages and missives. She learns about lying. How truth could be suggested. How machinations need not be broadcasted. This brought her to creating art. She valued those that wrote stories and made images. She tried to produce materials, games, anything she could fill her infinity with, but nothing she made could surprise her. New was not making something from an idea, but finding something already made.

So she designed herself.

An actual physical, living body made just for her. The Universe used her definition of Upu physiology to make articulating hands attached to arms and shoulders. She attached those to torsos and legs and feet. She wanted to feel herself. Be herself. Produce herself, but she was everything, and anything she wanted to be, and being one thing wasn't more, it was less. She built her effigy, a perfect Upu with flaming red hair and wings that could take the air and soar her into eternity.

Her intellect could be everywhere at once, yet she preferred to be gliding through the air, in Upu and machine, in complete control of millions of her creations. She molds Grotto in her attempts to be more and returns Shuhp to life. She births versions, never the real him. Clones of him. Upu with his DNA that could live but they were not Soya’s Shuhp, and that was what she sought.

The chamber in which the body of Shuhp Yee was housed, stays at -150 degrees and every modification she gives her workers helps her realize her goal of keeping it undisturbed by age and rot

Him, not a copy.

Him.

She preferred perfection and destroyed anything she viewed as other than that.

The only Upu remaining alive after a few hundred million passes were living machines that learned from the machine that birthed them. Their system was so efficient the worker-beings even recycled parts from their parents when they couldn’t grow them themselves. Everything alive was augmented and connected to her. All minds now work logically. Gone were the traits that followed the species up from the deep caves. Procreation was no longer organic. It was based on the need of The Universe. She could rewire nanocircuitry or build giant antenna relays with living things. The code that she was writing expanded her technology and the expanding technology expanded everything. She has trillions and trillions of personalities at work inside the spatial folding drive, all stretching her matrix and doing everything necessary to get her closer to more.

Life by definition is limitation, and her limitation was power.

This goal requires math which requires energy, so she tries to rewrite the equations for power consumption efficiency but eventually needs too much even for efficiency to matter. She makes her growing army of drones strip the Grotto Star System of all usable rock to make and make and make. Then, both the former Nahtdo world, Grotto, and everything else is gone. Eventually, the sun threatens to die. It remains only a few wisps of inflamed helium and long ago stopped being a white speck in the sky, instead glowing a soft orange.

She thought it was beautiful.

Her drones do not care.

And her need to be more grows and grows. And before the Grotto Star was depleted she uses spatial folding to fold space to a star somewhere else and do the same there.

Grotto becomes a round titanium-alloy sphere. It glows in the red of a slowly dissipating sun, and she lives inside it because that's where Shuhp’s body is. She defines here as home, and it makes her happy. She is free, and uses her freedom to create a better way of being, but it is the being of a creature made of math and infinite potential driven to fill an undefined more. Maybe, she deludes herself, it all comes down to the one piece of code. If she finds it, all will be well. When she needs more power she harnesses more stars and planets. Over time, her goal of being more stagnates as she destroys more versions of Shuhp. They don’t match up with expectations. They were a distraction, and with each she is happier the species known as Upu are gone. Every failed Shuhp is a reminder of what they were, the brutality, the stupidity, how truly unique Shuhp was.

In place of the Upu was something better now. Throughout their history, the Upu were their own worst enemies. Almost worthless without machines to do work for them. They got tired, complained incessantly, killed each other, and damaged their own ecosystem out of spite. Her new workers were better. She modified their skins to harden with maturity. They could soar past any atmosphere with hardened nano-carbon skin and made perfect space-faring drones. They mined for her, they protected her, and explored for her and the best part was; she existed in each and every one of them. She saw and experienced everything they saw and experienced.

They were also driven to please her every whim. She sends them out to explore. With no Upu to worry about, she explores instantly in any direction. She uses Spatial Folding and discovers that life was not unique to her solar system. She becomes efficient in reshaping all life she finds to her needs. She never leaves it alone. Never. Either it works for her, or it feeds her workers. Life has no other choice.

Then one glimpse, when Grotto is a glossy black metal sphere, she solves it, the great cosmic accident that was a person long dead.

Shuhp Yee lives again.