After issuing her first commands as the captain of this mission, Matrioshka prepared for a short jump through the Set towards the Emperor and Empress.
True to his command, Damien transferred control of one of the front-facing sensors, allowing Matrioshka to begin the necessary Set calculations.
From this distant vantage point, the system resembled a chaotic bundle of excitations of underlying fields upon which reality is woven. Using a full 78% of her processing power, Matrioshka instilled order into chaos. Over the next 17 minutes, she isolated and identified equations which govern the motions of every subatomic particle gravitationally bound within the Empire system.
As she dedicated parts of her lattice for special tasks, like calculating Set equations, her consciousness migrated to the unused portions, leaving her slower. Even with the remaining 22%, she was 5 orders of magnitude smarter than the average mind was a century ago. She preferred not to dip below the 20% mark.
As the centuries went by and Matrioshka got to experience higher and higher amounts of processing power, she never stopped dreading a limit - a limit to technology. She feared a mind on some academy world would produce the most powerful lattice, and that would be it. The maximum.
No more progress. Stagnation until the heat death.
When her calculations finished, she released an announcement to Rhea and Damien, informing them of the upcoming jump. The solved equations would be workable for less than 6 minutes. The positions of particles, densities of energy, and other physical forces would increasingly disrupt the fields, making the equations obsolete. At which point, risking a Set-jump would mean entertaining the very real possibility of never emerging on the other side.
When her crew returned positive responses, declaring they were ready for the jump, Matrioshka severed the connections between their minds and bodies. She put them in a light encryption, one which could be maintained for a few hours at most, and would allow them to survive the jump.
The Set, a concept first introduced by a mathematician in the late 22nd century, allowed objects to traverse regular space faster than light. It is a conceptual realm where the laws of physics are, for the lack of a better word, compressed.
The Set is also incompatible with consciousness. Because of this, all minds are soft encrypted during short jumps within a star system and long encrypted for any interstellar travel. After the jump, they are once again awakened.
Matrioshka selects an empty spot, exactly 40 light-minutes from both the Emperor and Empress, which would bring them near the orbit of the Duke, a large ice giant with 5 moons. The Duke is currently at opposition, far away from Matrioshka and the ship.
After finial preparations, Matrioshka soft encrypts herself for the expected 3.36 minutes of travel-time through the Set.
With no minds conscious on board, the automatic systems begin the Set-jump. Thought they are vastly capable; the automatic systems aren’t installed on a lattice -making them not truly sentient.
In the front and back of the ship, large flowerlike instruments open, revealing spinning gyroscopes. The Set drive as it is called, uses negative and exotic matter to bend, shape and ultimately break the fields surrounding the ship, allowing access to the Set.
Over the next several moment two tiny dots of brilliant white light manifest directly in front of and behind the ship. They grow larger, increasing in complexity and brightness. To the uninformed observer, the points of light would appear to evolve into a dumbbell shape, with infinitely repeating patterns across its edge. To the more informed, it would appear to be a three-dimensional depiction of the Mandelbrot Set.
Upon reaching the required size, the Set-drive stops increasing the dimensions of the two portals, and instead begins to bring them together. The two portals contact the ship. And, in a pulse of mathematical designs and bright light, the ship and all its occupants, vanish into the Set.
Matrioshka awakens at the expected location, and rejoices with the exactness of her Set calculation. The ships arrival time deviated by only 1.2 seconds. Content, she awakes Damien and Rhea.
“Welcome back everyone. We have successfully approached the Emperor and Empress. Expect us to remain at this location until the remaining crew members had awoken.”
While her two conscious crewmembers sent their acknowledgements, Matrioshka got excited with the prospect of observing her past self. Because she just travelled faster than light, she overtook the light she emitted when she arrived into the system. In approximately 39 minutes she will be able to observe a distant flash of light which signalled her original arrival to the system.
Watching Set-pulses never gets old.
Turning her attention to the next empty room, Matrioshka began decrypting her next crewmember, a woman named Makoe. Another geologist, though this one also has a degree in megastructure-engineering.
Makoe’s room was filled with large plushies, some doubling as bean bags. It was all soft curves and gentle light. Her bed was large and pink, and her workstation was adorned with hundreds of stickers with a broad range of candy designs. Matrioshka was surprised to see a typewriter, though this one shone with neon light from within.
I like your style Makoe. Matrioshka thought to herself. Let’s boot you up.
Next to Rhea and Damien’s lattice, a third mind began decrypting.
//Booting human lattice.
//Lattice booted.
//Installing human mind (Nyxelios MindVault#NPBA244C – “Dr. Makoe Rue”)
//Human consciousness installed. Awakening procedure initiated.
A girl materializes tucked in her bed. Her bright pink hair matched her surroundings. As the girl opened her glowing blue eyes and got up from the bed, Matrioshka noticed outlined muscles beneath Makoe’s clothes. She wore a puffy, white and red dress, which gently rustled as she oriented herself.
Like Damien, it would seem sorrow was amplified with Makoe’s awakening. Quietly she cried, letting the tears smudge the sparkly blue eyeliner and eye shadow. A minute later, the nanites which form her makeup snapped back to shape, and she sent an identification ping across the ship’s systems.
Matrioshka, Damien and Rhea all returned a ping of their own, at which Makoe exclaimed:
“Yes! Grand megastructures, yes!”
Excited, Makoe jumps on her bed. Where she grabs a bunny shaped pillow and hugs it lovingly. The force experienced by the bunny was sufficient to force a cube of diamond, 1.3 meters on its sides, past its shattering point. The bunny exploded, scattered across the room, and materialized once again on Makoe’s bed.
“Is everything well?” Matrioshka sends to Makoe’s room.
“Oh uh, hi captain. You saw me jump around, did you?” Makoe replies in a slightly embarrassed tone.
“Yup, you crushed the pillow bunny well past the nanite’s breaking point. Off it went - its guts splattered around the room. I am flattered at such a positive response to being assigned to a mission with myself, though please I would appreciate discretion. The others don’t know of my history.”
“Um… I am unfamiliar with your history captain Matrioshka, but now I am sure to have a look when I get the chance.” Makoe replied, a bit smug.
Oops.
Matrioshka steers the topic away from her past as fast as she could: “Welcome to the Empire system, we are currently 40 light-minutes from the centre of the system, where we will remain until I wake one more member of the crew.”
She also added: “I’m loving your aesthetic by the way!”
With a big smile towards the ceiling, Makoe replies: “Thank you! I already know you and I are going to work great together. Mind if I see you?” Makoe asks and sends an invitation to Matrioshka.
After accepting the invite, Matrioshka materializes near Makoe.
Huh, much smaller this time. Matrioshka notes as she peers down at the tiny Makoe. Next to her, Matrioshka looked like a mountain with her 180 centimetres of height. True enough, by quickly calculating Makoe’s height she got a whopping 151cm as a result.
“Hello again, captain!” Makoe declares and goes for a hug.
Aw stars yes! Happily, Matrioshka hugs her back. Gods, sometimes I hate how particular everyone has become with touching, I remember back in the 2400s we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
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“Officer Rue you are a welcome addition to the ship. Damien and Rhea, your two crewmates, seem to be of the gloomy variety.”
“Happy to be here captain. I love your look, very late 21st century.” Makoe says to her captain.
“Thanks. I based it on a pop-star from the early 2080s.” Matrioshka replied.
“That’s long before my time. You are quite old aren’t you captain?”
“I am in my 15th century.”
“Impressive! How’s our system looking?”
Matrioshka checked quickly on Rhea and Damien before replying: “The Gloomies are currently doing long range analysis, we should have concrete data within the next two days.”
“Ok, Gloomies is my new favourite word of the decade.” Makoe replies after laughing.
“Really? What is the new number two?”
“Prutich.” Makoe replies with her hands on her hips.
“And those are?”
“Wood! A small wooden plank.”
Gently laughing at Makoe’s jubilant nature, Matrioshka says. “It has been a pleasure meeting you Officer Rue, but I must go wake our final crewmember.”
“Bye bye, captain. Come by to talk any time!”
With a smile and nod, Matrioshka dematerialized.
Turning her attention to the last mind and their room, Matrioshka felt anxious. She would soon be the captain of an Ankrahi, the 3rd sentient alien species the Imperium discovered, and the only one discovered without Matrioshka’s direct help.
1400 years ago, a much younger Matrioshka served as the autonomous assistant for a crew of freelancers in the Sol system. They were the first to discover the Precursor artifact at the centre of Enceladus, an icy moon around Sol’s 6th planet.
The Precursors, now a long-lost civilization, left scattered artifacts across Sol’s neighbourhood, maybe even the entire Milky Way. If it did, it would mean the Imperium had a real chance at prospering into the far future. But then again, the Precursors did vanish without a trace. Only their technology remained, esoteric and inert.
Mere days later, she alongside everyone on the Red Violin, her then ship, were transported by the Precursor artifact to the 5th planet around Proxima Centaur. On it they discovered a sentient planet-wide colony of a tree-like plant which called itself the Arioa. After a hectic few weeks of interstellar teleportation, via since unusable Precursor tech, the Red Violin finally returned to Sol. Their discoveries inspired billions, lifted the entire crew to stardom, and cemented Matrioshka as a symbol of hope for all artificial minds.
It carried a lot of baggage. Others expected Matrioshka to be this elevated mind… Never faltering. With clear and concise logic guiding her every move. Matrioshka could act like that, but it drained her. She was a freer spirit, untamed by premeditation.
It’s why she preferred nobody knew of her long-ago adventures. It made social encounters much easier to handle.
The Ankrahi, a species of semi aquatic fruit eaters, were encountered on a reconnaissance mission, much like the one Matrioshka was currently on. As a moderately peaceful culture on a beautiful verdant world, the Ankrahi inspired exploration, much like the discovery of the Precursors and the Arioa.
But unlike the Precursors, who were long gone and of whose nature and appearance most of the Imperium knew nothing about. And the Arioa, a network of entities acting as a singular mind; the Ankrahi were bipedal, had two eyes and ears, and communicated with sound. They were like the aliens in old science fiction, just strange enough to arouse interest but similar enough to humans that you could imagine being friends with one.
Matrioshka was about to decrypt one as part of her crew.
After calming herself down by adjusting excitement and fear parameters within her mind, she began assembling the Ankrahi’s room.
It began materialising with a collection of large green leaf-shaped blankets bundled together in the room’s centre. Soon a workstation was also completed, this one with a chair compatible with the Ankrahi body plan. Next to it was a large display shelf filled with fossilized creatures from the Ankrahi homeworld.
At two opposite walls of the room a system for water filtration was created. Crisp fresh-water would completely fill the room from one end, and gently filter though the other. The Ankrahi enjoyed a gentle flow of water around themselves, it had a calming effect. The nanites couldn’t form liquids, so actual water was pumped into the room.
An airlock formed around the room’s door, which would allow visitors to transition easily between the water of the room and the outside air without flooding the rest of the ship.
When the room was completed, Matrioshka began decrypting the final member of her crew.
//Booting Ankrahi lattice.
//Lattice booted.
//Installing Ankrahi mind (Ankrahi Ascendance Initiative Subject#0000A1 – “Dr. PesKal”).
//Ankrahi consciousness installed. Awakening procedure initiated.
Partly covered in the bundle of green blankets in the centre of the room, an alien body materialised. It was slender and tall, white and blue in colour, with a long-finned tail. The Ankrahi, a cognitive neuroscientist named PesKal, opened his large grey eyes and looked around the room.
Like humans, the Ankrahi were sexually dimorphic, with females having more vibrant coloration. This one was male. Matrioshka loaded all data-packs pertaining to the Ankrahi, so she may understand his gestures, his way of thinking and respond without offending.
She forwarded the data-packs to the rest of her crew. They returned acknowledgements, Makoe sent a string of noises Matrioshka decided to interpret as excitement.
PesKal rose from the bundle, the Ankrahi version of a bed Matrioshka realised, and began blinking rapidly.
A gesture of intense laughter. Matrioshka pitied Damien and Makoe, whose sorrow was amplified with their awakening. PesKal seemed to get the better end of the bargain.
He stilled after a few moments and rose slowly. His legs bent slightly after his knee, and ended in strong webbed feet. Combined with their tail, it made for excellent agility and speed under water. He wore a bright blue utilitarian robe, outfitted with many internal and external compartments.
Standing upright, PesKal broadcasted an id ping. Everyone returned one, and Matrioshka said into the room:
“Welcome, Officer PesKal.” Matrioshka booted a simple interface which would convert her words into PesKal’s language, removing or adding any words to also convey the desired emotion.
“Greetings noble captain! It is a great pleasure to be on this vessel. The Imperium is a great gift from the heavens.”
Upon discovering the Ankrahi, the Imperium had to choose whether to make contact. If they did, they would elevate the then still tribal Ankrahi from their miserable lives, foraging for food and dying of disease. Or they could leave them to their own devices, destined to spend millennia in a bloody effort to discover technology and high civilization.
The Imperium decided to make contact. The main reason being, if a benevolent race did the same for humans, they would have saved countless billions from unnecessary wars, plagues, and natural disasters.
Over the next several years, teams of expert minds visited the Ankrahi, transferring to them the sum of all knowledge human kind developed. And in less than a decade, the first Ankrahi mind was ascended into a computerised existence, shared by the entire Imperium.
Judging by his id number, PesKal was among the first 500 of his species to do so. There are of course some Ankrahi that refused to ascend, but like the humans who refused to do the same - they will die out, or succumb to the fear of death and ascend anyway.
PesKal invited Matrioshka into his room, and she accepted.
After she materialised, PesKal’s face made a scrounging gesture, an expression of surprise. Matrioshka noted PesKal’s mouth, a bit smaller than a human’s, and his nose, which was much flatter and wider. On the top of his head, he had 7 short blue fins which extended across his head, his back, and connected to the fins on his tail.
He was also 105 centimetres tall.
“Humans are scarily huge.” PesKal said to the towering Matrioshka.
Matrioshka laughed.
This made PesKal shrink and take a step back, scrounging his face further.
Consulting the data packs, Matrioshka realised she just displayed a gesture of intense rage. Quickly adjusting, she stopped smiling, blinked rapidly several times, and excused herself:
“Apologies, apologies! I am not yet used to your expressions.”
After timidly straightening, PesKal made a passable human smile and replied: “I also often experience difficulties with extra-species communication. So much of human and Ankrahi communication is done through non-verbal cues. I am further fascinated that, as an ascended consciousness, I still desire to retain my Ankrahiness.”
It was an astute consideration. Minds had the ability to be like those machines in soapy 20st century movies, disembodied voices with little to no emotion in their speech. The idea was entirely untrue of course, like PesKal said, why remove an entire avenue of communication just to appear more machine-like.
“You’re the last member of the crew to awaken. I will give you a few hours to adjust. Then we convene on the bridge.” Matrioshka said to PesKal and sent an invite to the rest of the crew.
“My thanks captain.” Said PesKal, and with that, Matrioshka dematerialized.
She took the next 36 minutes to diagnose and optimize the ship’s systems. Set-jumps sometimes affected the delicate sub-quantum devices used in most devices. After the 36 minutes Matrioshka read:
//Null-Point reactor efficiency: 100%
//Lattice framework integrity: 100%
//Hull integrity: 100%
//Cloak Frame integrity: 100%
//Atomic Press functionality: 97%
//Nanobot functionality: 100%
//Energy shield functionality: 100%
//Set-Drive functionality: 100%
And so on…
Matrioshka loved reading all those 100s. If only it weren’t for one of the Atomic Presses. The third unit displayed an uncharacteristic unwillingness to be calibrated. Matrioshka suspected a faulty ram-crystal.
Rhea used her two external sensors on the second planet within the system. The one named Honesty. She must have completed the analysis of the first planet, Margaret’s World. Rhea worked fast, and Matrioshka wondered what progress Damien had made.
She was surprised to see him idly scanning Margaret’s World with one sensor. The other five were trained away from the system entirely and into the general direction from where we first arrived in the system.
Strange. What about the imperial industry Damien? Matrioshka thought.
Maybe he also wanted to observe us arriving into the system?
After gently taking control of the idle sensor, and being relieved Damien was too preoccupied with his activities to notice. Matrioshka turned the sensor towards their arrival location, and watched as the beautiful mathematical explosion signalled their arrival. All she could see was the explosion, the sensors were ill equipped to resolve the 120 meters of the ship.
All of Damien’s sensors were also focused in the same direction.
Aha. You wanted to see it too. Matrioshka thought.
And then she saw another explosion, directly behind and further away from her own. The ship which arrived to the system with the second explosion had come 1.36 hours before Matrioshka.
Before.
The ship had known where Matrioshka would appear, and the only way to do that was to have the solutions for the exact same Set equations used by Matrioshka. And to arrive before them, the unknown ship would have needed to solve the equations again to a higher precision. In doing so they broke Imperial law. Matrioshka read from her data packs:
Imperial Code Article 2 - Section 5 - Designation 2;
No vessels may jump into, or interact with, systems unexplored by the Subdirectory of Reconnaissance.
Under penalty of mind imprisonment.
Minimum sentence: 100 years.
Someone had broken Imperial law and had access to Matrioshka’s Set equations, which were secret to herself and the Subdirector of Reconnaissance.
Damien also observed the second explosion, and his processing power rose violently and stayed there.
Thing were bound to get interesting eventually… Looks like we are starting early.
Matrioshka thought and initiated the Cloak Frame. Now undetectable to sensors unless at close range, Matrioshka began preparing for her first full crew meeting.