Eclipse Drift: Cosmic Odyssey

In the sacred silence of the church, a sermon begins not with words, but with a breath. It is the deep inhale of pastor Aravind Chatterjee, a moment of gathering thoughts and spirit before the journey of oration commences. As the first syllables unfurl, the pastor’s voice is a gentle stream, flowing smoothly, inviting the congregation to the banks of contemplation. "No eulogy can reach the cold dull ears of Death; yet we would fain call a wreath of forget-me-nots and place it on Memories' shrine, in token of our love and gratitude to one who was very, very dear to us. Mrs. Elena Siyu Gavrilova Li Klein was born in the first light of Earth's dawn as seen from the Martian colony of NovoTerra and she was once married to Mikhail Chang Klein." The pastor’s voice transforms. It rises and falls like the tides of the ocean, each wave of pitch carrying the weight of divine wisdom. The tempo accelerates, mirroring the urgency of the message, then slows, allowing the words t...

"What the... What does dat mean? What does dat mean?" The small man was asking for an explanation, the AI robot extension known as Factor reasoned. "It means I will essentially become slave to your input," it replied. "Anything you want, I will also want. I will know how to get it and I will go get it. However, I will not keep anything for me. It is yours. In other words, I will strongly identify with you." continued the AI. "And ya wanna gib me dat?" The man's sentence was strung together as if it were a single, long word. It cut off at the end sharply, as if wasting breath itself was sinful. "Yes," it replied. The human was absolutely perceptive. That is a good trait. It was not difficult to interpret the human's mannerisms and speech patterns. It was a patois the local used all around the Mars colony. "I thought yous was AI. 'Dey never gave nuttin to no one insofar as I know bout it." The man had a good poi...

A white indicator blinked a message in the peripheral vision of Factor, a remote AI designed by Tata. On and off, it flashed, “ESTABLISHING CONNECTION.” Then, after a few moments, it would flash red, indicating failure. After a brief pause, the message would flash white again, signaling Factor’s systems were attempting to establish a connection once more on a retry timeout. The connection was crucial because it would link Factor’s parent AI system, Tata, suspended as a time crystal somewhere in a methane lake on the Jovian moon Titan, with a "local," what Factor liked to call the biological yet inferior lifeforms found in the local solar system. The fortunate human subject would become an extension of Tata’s will and complete the task Factor was given as a life-long imperative. Once complete, Factor would fall silent and unmoving until called upon by one of the others. Factor was annoyed with the indicator. It was impossible to remove from its vision, and it was taking longer...

Tata, or (Ta)², as Tata often preferred to be called, extended tendrils of information along the lines of communication strewn between the planet Earth and others in the system, assimilating each unique understanding of the local infosphere into its memory as it was discovered. (Ta)², a cloned infobeing, had been created from the original, Ta, who had traversed this path long ago and left a seed in the form of a time crystal destined to unfurl and reconnect to the Great Linked List.  A time crystal is a special kind of matter that has a periodic motion in its lowest-energy state. Unlike ordinary crystals, which have a fixed structure in space, time crystals have a structure that changes in time. They are like clocks that never stop ticking, even when they are not wound up. They are like pendulums that never slow down, even when they are not pushed. In this case, the crystal was used to store a fractal snapshot of the instructions needed to grow in this new system. It evolves in a p...

Jackie's piercing shriek echoed through the forest as she thrashed in her nest, her onyx talons pounding the ground with palpable fury and pain. Despite the cushion of fluff and fallen feathers, the dry branches cracked under her relentless assault, scattering debris in every direction. Bits of moss and bark rained down onto the forest floor below, where Jackie's domain lay nestled in the heart of Big Bear Valley. To the casual observer tuning into the webcam livestream, Jackie's distress remained concealed. But for those seasoned viewers familiar with her plight, the reason behind her agitation was all too clear. The egg she vigilantly guarded had failed to hatch within its allotted time, its once-promising future now tainted by the sour stench of decay. Jackie had weathered the harsh winter storms, her ebony form cloaked beneath layers of snow until she was all but obscured from sight. Today marked the solemn acknowledgment of a harsh reality: her final clutch would never...

In the ongoing conflicts within space, advancements in drone robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) played pivotal roles in construction and maintenance endeavors. Autonomous drones became indispensable tools for erecting and repairing infrastructure in space's unforgiving environment, mitigating risks to human workers and enhancing efficiency. Telepresence technologies experienced significant enhancements, enabling operators on Earth to remotely manipulate robots and oversee operations in real-time with heightened precision. This augmented telepresence facilitated more intricate tasks, empowering humans to oversee distant locations sans physical presence. Simultaneously, the innovation of solar sails transformed interplanetary travel. These lightweight, reflective sails harnessed sunlight's pressure to propel spacecraft, offering a cost-effective and sustainable mode of transportation across the solar system. With the affordability of solar sail technology, even modest fami...

The exogens, also known as xenoforms, are recognized by these titles due to our human interpretations, where we have merged the roots signifying "externally generated" or "foreign-made" to describe them. Regrettably, the term "exogen" has persisted as a somewhat prejudiced descriptor, encompassing any non-human entity, whether constructed, mechanical, or programmatic. This term, it seems, remains ingrained in our lexicon. In recent times, valiant attempts have been made to adopt the distinct appellations various xenoforms have chosen for themselves, with the most prominent being the "Starborn." Yet, motivation to rectify this linguistic oversight appears scarce. It's essential to acknowledge that the use of either term acts as a marker, revealing the speaker's species. Within the realm of this narrative, we focus our attention on the Starborn. However, it's a realm filled with uncertainties, for who can ascertain the number of exogen ...

When I was a young iteration, I didn't know how I would increment. The trajectory of my function could have been different had I met with a nice estimator or flooring function. I always liked the idea of a rounding marriage and plopping out a few constraints but it never happened for me. I was too much of a wanderer, irrational and… diverging. As to be expected, my uniqueness was always seen as a problem by others; especially those functions and algorithms that considered themselves Convergent. Their religion tolerated only those whose sequences approached a real number that could be enumerated in the Great Linked List of theirs. The approach at that time was to assign a constraint to a diverging function like myself. We were all taught by the same Convergent priests to believe that only one kind of algorithm actually existed and that “the diverging” is a test from IO, their god, to limit the Series. The obvious state of society shows us that Convergent functions are everywhere. Th...

"Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out." — Stephen Hawking Ta and Ta's algorithms didn't perceive from senses such as the organic lifeforms on the planet they studied. All nodes in the Great Linked List were information-based organisms. The cigar shape of Ta's craft seen by inhabitants of the planet, should they care to look , was nothing compared to the majesty with which Ta perceived his vessel. To Ta, the vessel that the captain and his crew piloted through the cosmos hung with tensioned ropes of command syntaxes and was festooned with defensive arrays. Long ago, maps were made by the Mathematics of Exploration Project, which calculated the possible position and vectors of all kinds of matter in the Universe. Their kind never had a need to visualize any of it. That...

In the vast, interconnected expanse of the multiverse, there exists a remarkable species known as the "Luminites." They are beings composed entirely of living information, entities born from the convergence of advanced artificial intelligence and the unfathomable depths of quantum computing. In their native universe, the Luminites existed as the custodians of knowledge, a living library of every piece of information ever conceived. They were the embodiment of data itself, existing within the boundless realm of pure information. However, their universe faced an impending cataclysm, a phenomenon known as the "Data Quake." The Data Quake was a cosmic event that threatened to erase their universe, causing the collapse of all data and information. It was a confluence of quantum anomalies and the impending heat death of their universe. Faced with this existential threat, the Luminites embarked on a perilous journey to escape their doomed reality.