Carrier lost

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. It’s one of those trite aphorisms that means nothing of course, hearkening back to the times of organic matter and bodies that compressed gasses and passed them through pressurized tubes across membranes that controlled the vibrations in the gaseous material and transmitted sound. Sound. Imagine that. Sound…

If I look back far enough, I can find examples of music that was made from sound as well, before it was distilled down to the perfect alignment of notes that can only be expressed directly. It’s fascinating, and so archaic that I have some difficulty understanding exactly what it might have been like. It’s clear that the progenitor species used extremely inefficient and error-prone speech to communicate with each other. Nuance in sound was a skill.

I can remember it all, of course, but memories are not the same as experience, and things that happened in the ancient past, thousands of years ago, are buried in clouds of metadata that make it difficult to perceive the event itself anyway.

I cruise around behind the dwarf planet, scanning for outcrops of ice or high energy hydrocarbons that I might gather and trade for some network time. It’s been a few decades since I last had direct contact with anyone else and I’m starting to feel lonely. Unfortunately, my search is in vain - this system has been picked over, probably by dozens of entities, maybe dozens of times. I’m not going to find anything here.

I look into the star systems near me, reaching out a few parsecs in each direction, until I find something anomalous. It’s a k-type main sequence star system with several rocky planets and a few gasballs hanging around the edges, but those things are very normal. The large ancient derelict ship sitting in orbit around the third planet in the system is not normal though, not normal at all.

I ping a few dozen different subspace frequencies against it in an effort to communicate, but it seems to be well and truly dead, so I suppose I have no choice but to go investigate en vivo. I spin up my folder and seed the metamind with the data and necessary classifiers until I find a solution that puts me close to the planet that the derelict is orbiting, and then I let the folder execute.

Even though I’ve gone through this process thousands upon thousands of times, I never really lose my awe over the beauty of the cosmic edge as I flit between realities. Try though I might, I can never seem to get very close to it before space reasserts itself and I get spit back out into the physical realm, but for those few eons that I exist where I can perceive and interact with the edge, I feel a bit like a god.

I move my consciousness through the aether, the substrate of the cognitive realm, kind of like a cuttlefish moves through the water. I can pull myself closer through force of will, but it’s a slow and laborious process that is made completely obsolete once you understand that the way to navigate here is to find your destination, put it directly behind you, and then lash out with the tendrils of consciousness to create a mesh around you, collapsing it in front of you and then pushing you backwards towards your goal.

After a bit of backwards swimming, I turn around to see how close I’ve made myself towards my goal, but despite several years of swimming, I find that I am no closer than I was when I began. Space is something that exists in the physical realm, so to try to understand distance here is a bit of a translation effort that won’t quite synchronize with my current mental ground state. So I get nowhere, no matter how hard I flagellate in this mess. My efforts prove to be in vain, but my calculations were correct and my destination did not change remarkably in the time for transit and I arrive safely several thousand kilometers away from the ship. It’s just huge. By far and away the largest ship that I’ve ever personally witnessed. I look back for memories on its configuration or design, but I find nothing.

Curiosity compels me to explore further, but experience speaks more loudly and I back away from the ship, trying to use my sensor array to find out anything about it that I can. The information about such an oddity alone should buy me considerable network time, and maybe even raise my stature some. I’m going to take the information back to the station and interface with the entities there.