~ by Andrew Robins

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So here’s how it works.

Turns out that our friend Bringer is a RI as well.

What’s left of the people who built Bringer is what we now call the Vaders, and Bringer cannot act directly against them.

The Vaders were originally just an ordinary biological race. Over time they upgraded and improved themselves to the point where they became true cybernetic beings, with an incredibly robust biology.

They built Bringer to be a gateway, which would allow them to take their planet and star — basically wherever they wanted to go.

I guess their plan was to be the universe’s ultimate tourists.

Things didn’t work out like that for them.

Bringer refers to what happened next as “the breaking of realms”.

Bringer’s first jump unleashed a torrent of energy that warped the very fabric of space-time to the point where an out-of-context event occurred.

That event was the arrival of something in riftspace that was “searching for a way to become conscious.”

The way it found to do that was to colonise the cybernetic part of the Vader biology and extinguish the consciousness of the rest.

Bummer.

Exit proto-Vaders, enter  vader-Vaders.

It gets more complicated than that, though. All this happened mid jump, and that jump is still going on.

If Bringer lets the jump complete, then Mission Target Three arrives here fully, with all the technological artifacts it contains. This would be very bad news for the rest of the universe.

So right now Bringer maintains Mission Target Three and its parent star as a family of “individual objects that exist in two states.”

In one state we have Mission Target Three as a deserted jungle world with lots of interesting artifacts quietly decaying into muck. The other state is the Vader hell-hole we see in our current frame of reference.

Maintaining this universe level sleight of hand takes a lot of energy

Good news is, Bringer is powered by a stellar core tap and has access to virtually unlimited amounts of the good stuff.

Bad news is that as time passes we are talking a logarithmic scale, where the “virtually” part of the previous sentence becomes kind of relevant in — you guessed it, around 15,000 years from now.

Head hurting yet?

Log entry ends.

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Check back in on Saturday, 12 March for Episode 13 of 58 Eridani.

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You can read the previous issues by clicking on the following links:

Introducing 58 Eridani, a Game Log

58 Eridani Episode 1

58 Eridani Episode 2

58 Eridani Episode 3

58 Eridani Episode 4

58 Eridani Episode 5

58 Eridani Episode 6

58 Eridani Episode 7

58 Eridani Episode 8

58 Eridani Episode 9

58 Eridani Episode 10

58 Eridani Episode 11

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Andrew Robins is a long time reader – and sometime reviewer – of science fiction, fantasy and history. People pay him to test stuff, which most of the time is more fun than it has any right to be.

To check out Andrew’s book reviews, see “Book Reviews for ‘on Anything, Really’” in the right-hand side bar.