They called themselves Ancients and they were the only survivors of the heat-death of their universe. They weren't really life as someone from Upstream would think of it. They didn't have real bodies, as the protons had disintegrated long before and Neutrons soon followed. Their bodies were large clouds of neutrinos and electromagnetic waves.
They had lived long enough to finally know the last secrets of their universe. It had been created by the Ancients of another universe and it had flourished on its own, vastly different from other universes the Ancients that had created the Manifold. Only one planet in this universe had been able to flourish life, the third planet of a normal yellow dwarf star, a planet that had been called Earth. But it had spread from the beginning, like life in the Panspermia Theory, with a first meteoroid impact on the young Earth just a few million years after the genesis of life. Life had only needed five hundred million years to spread out in the Milky Way galaxy, but only this single galaxy.
So life had flourished in the Milky Way galaxy and brought forth intelligence that soon spread out from their home systems, creating a Darwinian Galaxy with hundred of spheres of colonization that lived for a few hundred thousand years and than collapsed. This begun while life on Earth just left the oceans. For a long time this went on, until a species found a way to bend the runes of the universe and created a way to travel faster than light. This had formed the first interstellar empires.
Finally a hundred million years before a species call man developed, life used its way of FTL-travel to leave the galaxy and spread life to the local galaxy group and beyond.
Than the age on men begun and a kingdom formed in the Solar System that was the origin of life, but it collapsed after a thousand years. Man needed ten thousand years to get back to a real civilization and to the brig of space travel again. But than the place that had been the origin of life became the place for the death of life outside of Earth.
One human had initiation a process that had been called Silence. It had spread out faster than light and destroyed all life in the galaxy, the local galaxy group and beyond, leaving men as the sole intelligence. Only a robotic civilization in Andromeda had survived the Silence, but it had been destroyed when mankind spread out to the stars and into the universe.
Now the Ancients had gathered over a time of more than ten trillions years to converse about the Silence and a way to prevent it by sending one of their ranks upstream. They needed more than ten million years to finish their conversation and decide who would go downstream.
They decided that they would send the oldest Ancient, someone who had been there, when the Silence came over the universe and was partly responsible for it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Upstream, 2002 AD
Ranma smiled as he looked at the machine had build. He had wanted to try building something that could teleport photons in a larger number than normal. It could very much be a break through for FTL travel. He tried to go this route after the Wormhole project had spectacularly failed, with the loss of Farscape One and its pilot, John Crichton.
He sighed and turned back to the computer he was working at. Than he was nearly blinded by a xenon blue flash of light coming from the machine.
"What..." he said and blinked a few times and turned around.
On the floor next to the machine lay a green-haired woman, slowly stirring to stand up. She turned her face and looked at him.
Ranma swelled as he saw that her eyes were solid black with something that looked like stars in them.
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by AWarringer
(Posted Sun, 31 Oct 2004 15:29)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.