In the late twenty first century the scientific community of Earth finally managed to narrow down what Dark Matter and Dark Energy were, patching a major hole in their scientific theory. Soon the method to convert between the two and normal matter and energy was discovered, leading to the creation of two key devices. The first of these devices was Bulk Matter Converters, which created tons of matter or antimatter of a type designated by the one running the machine, ending material shortages. The second was Dark Matter Generators, which converted Dark Matter or energy into electricity or heat to power society. These two devices lead to an age of prosperity for humanity in which no one lacked anything needed to live, as it was so cheap that you could live a comfortable life on the equivalent of an hour of work per week or less.
Humanity started expanding into the solar system, the cost of space travel and living on other worlds now being no more than the equivalent of ten to fifteen hours of unskilled labor per week. The population exploded and by the end of the twenty second century the solar system had a population of over one hundred billion.
It was then that humanity created two means of faster than light travel. The shear density of mass possible with dark matter and energy, and the ability to convert it into negative matter and energy, allowed the creation of Alcubierre drives for traveling the star system. The ability of dark matter and energy to leave the normal three dimensions was used to create hyperdrives, which could temporarily push an object out of three dimensional space and make it instantly reappear in another location. These were used to explore the nearby systems and, when Proxima Centauri C was found to have native life, a biology research colony was founded there. This kicked off a wave of interstellar colonization as every system within twenty light-years and most within fifty were colonized.
Soon into this wave of colonization it was discovered that exposure to dark matter and energy could cause those things to bond with a human body. Humans which were connected to hyperdrives for their superior control over machines started displaying abilities comparable to Bulk Matter Converters and Dark Matter Generators. Within the body of these people the two Dark sources would find a balance and these people, with enough concentration and knowledge of what they were doing, could create objects and energy from it. The dark matter or energy would then flow into their body from outside, replenishing it to just above its previous level. The difficulty of doing this properly, however, resulted in many people damaging or mutating themselves or others, or cooking themselves or others from discharges of heat or electricity.
Due to how dangerous this phenomenon was it wasn’t long before almost every world required that anyone with more than a milligram of Dark Matter or a joule of Dark Energy inside of them receive training for how to properly control their powers. These people became known as Mages, and were divided into Alchemists, who used Dark Matter to make matter, and Elementalists who used dark energy to make energy.
Soon, a group arose on Earth, calling itself the Agents of Purity. They claimed that mages were evil, that the use of dark matter and energy twisted them, and that they were dangerous to society. They used the early struggles and accidents of people learning to use it, as well as the growing number of Mage criminals, to draw in the people of Earth, the most populated world with a population of over forty billion. The hysteria grew and a few decades after their appearance they began taking over every government on Earth either by getting their member in positions of power or by convincing those in power to support them. They even got the leaders of several major religions to agree with them, from saying that Dark Matter was from hell or demons and that it could only be used safely in machines, as they lacked souls, to simply arguing the poorly supported medical theory that it drove people insane and made them commit evil acts.
In response to this a Mage terrorist group arose which swore to defend all mages from persecution. They managed to kidnap millions of people in what some called a false flag attack and force them into the containment areas of Dark Matter Generators and Bulk Matter Converters, flooding their bodies with these resources, in hopes that those people would choose to become mages. The Agents of Purity, instead, offered them cybernetic implants which could use Dark Energy as a power source and allow them to get their revenge on the terrorists that abducted them. The Cybernetically enhanced forces were able to crush the terrorists, thus ensuring that the mage threat was at an end. Once they had control of Earth, and banned the use of Magic, formerly known as “Biological manipulation of Dark Matter and Energy”, the Agents of Purity built star ships to bring their beliefs to the other colonies.
They quickly expanded to all of the Solar colonies and sent their ships through hyperspace to appear above the worlds of the extra-solar colonies. As none were even close to strong enough to stand up to the military might of Earth, they surrendered to the demands that all mages be handed over and that anyone found to be infected with dark matter or energy in the future would be given cybernetic implants, which the Agents of Purity gave them the schematics for, to control that power and allow them to put the power to proper use.
The mages of the various worlds had no choice but to build, buy, or steal hyperdrive equipped ships of their own in order to flee their worlds, traveling as quickly as they could to the furthest expanses of space. The Agents pursued them and, though the ships with mage navigators could jump further and more accurately, the shear number of ships the Agents could send after them meant that the mage refugees never had more than a few years before they were found and attacked.
--
I ran through the halls of the underground based, dodging the terrified people in the hallway. As I passed, a woman stopped me and begged me to explain why they wanted to kill her five year old son just because he was born with Magic. I had no answer. Sometimes humans were irrational creatures who only sought to destroy that which they didn’t understand, and therefore feared. Pulling myself away from them I continued on my rapid journey.
While, at this depth, you couldn’t hear the bombardment above, I knew that without our defense shields the weapons of the AoP fleet that had followed us here would reach us within hours. It was only through the efforts of our generator mages, exhausting themselves channeling Dark Matter into our generators, that the shield remained active. Still, it was only a matter of time before they breached the barrier and landed troops. They had appeared in orbit only seven hours ago and begun executing an orbital bombardment of our base any time their orbit brought them over the horizon.
With their fleet leaving no gaps in their orbit for us to escape through, only my project could allow us to evacuate in time. I had developed a way to send people and supplies through hyperspace without a ship, having them appear at a specially created device at another location. With the help of hundreds of small automated constructor ships, sometimes called Von Neumann probes, which would spread out into nearby star systems, we would build bases with such devices in random locations throughout the galaxy and maybe even one day in Andromeda and the other nearby galaxies. The Teleportation device could then be used to move people to an exponentially increasing number of new bases, ensuring that we managed to escape.
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The problem was that we hadn’t received encrypted confirmation of such a base being complete from any of our constructor ships. We had no choice but to try and buy enough time for one of them to send us a confirmation. Which my assistant just informed me had occurred mere minutes ago. I pushed my way past hysterical civilians and into my office. “Report,” I said.
“We just got a signal from ACS2-5-3-4.” The code meant that it was the forth constructor ship built by the third constructor ship, built by the fifth constructor ship, built by the second constructor ship we sent out. “It verifies that it has completed stage one of the Colony base protocol and is ready to receive its first one hundred settlers.”
“I hope it can support more than that. I’ll send it at least five hundred. Better to risk that some live in poverty as it struggles to expand than that they all die here. Round up a group of five hundred colonists and send them into the teleportation chamber. I need to speak with the mayor and get the shield power redirected to us.” My assistant nodded and I phoned the mayor.
It took some convincing, as I was essentially asking her to throw away the rest of the population in order to save the five hundred. In the end, however, the shear desperation of the situation coupled with the fact that the mages powering the reactor would soon be exhausted meant that she had no choice. In order that some may live, many must die. She ordered all military and security personnel to the most likely positions the enemy troops would enter at, and ordered the energy be transferred.
I watched as the energy stored within the teleportation device grew. It would activate automatically when it had enough energy to successfully teleport the people. The energy soon reached sixty percent, but I noticed that the rate of energy input was quickly dropping. The Reactor mages must have been near their limits already. Soon I began hearing gunfire in the hallways and the return fire of hundreds of spells, ranging from accelerated matter to fire, lightning, ice, sound, lasers, plasma, and other energy based attacks. I knew it was only a matter of time before our forces faltered. They had tens or hundreds of thousands of troops to send at us. We had hundreds of defenders.
“There’s a problem, sir.” said my assistant. “The energy inflow has stopped.” I checked the screens and verified that the energy input had, indeed, stopped. “We are only at ninety percent. What are we going to do?” We could remove some of the mass, and therefore people from the circle to force it to work, but if we did that they might turn violent.
“The only thing we can do. Turn on the backup generator and channel all of its output into the circle. I’ll power it myself.”
“But sir, no one can channel that much dark matter. You’ll die.”
“If I don’t, everyone here will die. Just do it!” I shouted and ran for the Generator’s interface room and shed my jacket and shirt as I went. The most efficient way to transfer dark matter is to circulate your blood directly through the device and for that purpose I had connecting ports on my chest which went directly to my major arteries.
Once in the room I laid down on the exam table looking chair and pulled out the cables, plugging them into the ports in my chest. Blood started to circulate through the dark matter exchanger on the device, then back into me. The reactor began generating a small amount of power in the megawatts range as my body naturally drew in dark matter to replenish that which was missing from my blood. When I was a Generator Mage as a teenager this was the way I operated such devices, going into VR simulations for the next twenty four hours as soon as I was set up properly. Now I, as the most powerful Elementalist in the colony, could drastically improve on this. I closed my eyes and began meditating, drawing in Dark Matter hundreds of times faster than I would naturally regenerate it. I let my mind grow clear of all the distractions around me, including the battle taking place nearby, and soon all I knew was the flow of Dark Matter.
--
The Assistant watched as the energy input grew rapidly, eventually topping the output of all the other generator mages combined. They knew that the man connected to the emergency generator would burn out soon. The human body hadn’t evolved with Dark Matter, and therefore would become more damaged the more of the substance that it was exposed to. Because of that he had minutes at most before his body gave out and he died from shock. He didn’t care, though. All he cared about was saving his people. It was a heroic act that, should an afterlife actually exist, he would no doubt be rewarded for. Who knew, maybe in a few minutes he would find himself in the halls of Valhalla, drinking beer with Thor.
The assistant watched as the energy reached ninety nine percent. It was almost time. Perhaps the boss’s sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain. Before it reached one hundred percent, though, the door exploded inwards and the assistant jumped in front of the screen to keep the enemy from seeing what was happening. “What are you trying to hide, mage?” a man’s voice said from within his power armor.
“I was watching porn. If I’m going to die, I might as well go out happy, right?”
“Move aside.” he said, raising his rifle. The Assistant guessed that the only reason the man didn’t fire was that he didn’t want to destroy equipment that could contain valuable intel.
“I’d better not. I was watching some pretty messed up stuff. You wouldn’t want to see it. Could scar you for life.”
“I said MOVE IT!” the man yelled, hitting the assistant in the side of the head with the butt of his rifle. He looked at the screen only to see a shirtless man cycling his blood through a generator. “Stop him.” the man ordered and two soldiers ran to the neighboring room.
“Too late.” said the Assistant as the meter reached one hundred percent.
--
From a familiar shift in the darkmatter around me I knew that the teleportation had succeeded. Five hundred lucky people were now safe in an unknown location that not even the AoP could find. Now I just needed to shut down the flow of darkmatter and join the battle, taking as many of them as possible with me when the damage caused by overexposure to Darkmatter killed me.
For some reason, however, I couldn’t shut down the flow. Somehow, this rate, over a thousand times my normal maximum recharge rate, had become my new normal. Thinking quickly, I started using a Dark Matter Shielding technique which was meant to protect against any spell an enemy might throw at you. If done correctly, it would block one hundred percent of the darkmatter and energy that got near me, depleting my reserves while blocking more from flowing in.
I twisted dozens of strands of darkmatter into cords around me, rapidly sending them out of my feet and bending them to reenter me through my head. Soon, a toroid of darkmatter flowed around and through me, causing any dark matter that came towards me to be deflected away. Soon, the level of darkmatter in my body started dropping. When it got too low, however, my control started to slip and enough managed to flood in to mostly refill my reserves. My reserves started to fluctuate like a sine wave, though I was learning how to do this more efficiently, and with every cycle the reserves were slightly lower than the one before.
Suddenly, in my state of meditation where the influx of dark energy into my brain greatly slowed my perception of time, I felt something hit my right abdomen, then shortly afterwards my right lung, then my right shoulder, then my right temple. Suddenly I could no longer feel my body as I only seemed to be conscious during times of high dark matter reserves. Somehow, I started to leave my body, floating above it. At least that was a phenomenon I was familiar with the idea of. More surprisingly, however, the darkmatter continued to flow through me as I had ordered it to, despite the fact that I no longer had a body. Could the manipulation of Darkmatter be a supernatural phenomenon? I didn’t have much time to think as I lost consciousness.
I only got flashes of what happened after that, flashes which become briefer the longer I was in this state. First, I was above my body. I could tell by my ability to still sense the interaction of darkmatter and energy with the physical world that the door was blown off of the generator room and two people with toddler-like levels of darkmatter in their bodies were pointing guns at my corpse. Then I was within the rock. Though I could sense the darkmatter around me, it was calm this far from people and equipment except for that which swirled around me. Then I was on the surface, seeing multiple landers near our surface airlocks. Then I was in space, seeing several ships orbit near me. With every flash, however, the physical world seemed to fade, like a fog was coming over it. The last of the physical world I remember was somewhere in deep space.