by Marc Neuffer
Cold and Dark
Life and War
Marc Neuffer
Book 3: Heat and Light Saga
Cold and Dark is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2019 by Marc Neuffer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America
Contact the Author
[email protected]
Dedicated to my Children
Chris, Christopher, Benjamin, and Hannah
You are adults now, following your own paths, with your own families. Your mother and I are very proud that you are stable, creative, loving, tax paying, and productive members of society. Two of you are engineers and two are business owners. I blame your successful upbringing on your mother. You wouldn’t be where you are without her. Her birthday is September 11th. Don’t forget to send flowers.
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Book 1 on Amazon Kindle
Book 2 on Amazon Kindle
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Other books in Series
Prologue
PART ONE: LIFE
1 Brownian Motion
2 Mitosis
3 Fusion
4 Progenitor
5 Endothermic
6 Exothermic
7 Baryogenesis
8 Nucleosynthesis
9 Attosecond
10 Sublimation
11 Transmutation
12 Oxidation
13 Reduction
14 Entropy
15 Enthalpy
16 Yin-Yang
17 Homeostasis
18 Morphogenesis
19 Metamorphosis
20 Metastasis
21 Tropism
22 Hybridization
PART TWO: WAR
23 Alliance
24 Reconnaissance
25 Reaction
26 Intrigue
27 Insurgents
28 Infiltration
29 Insurrection
PART 3: PEACE
30 Intercultural
31 Intervention
32 Introgression
33 Interment
34 Inauspicious
35 Meridian
Other books in series
Prologue
Cold: Hyperborean, beyond freezing. Freezing implies options, a start and a stop. At absolute zero, there’s no motion. Nothing stirs, nothing moves, nothing changes. The cold makes no judgment. The chatter of Heat is silenced.
Dark: No intrusions, no glare, no shadow, no mirages of life or death. No eyes can penetrate—no minds comprehend it. Nothing can touch you in the dark. Frequency flatlines and amplitude goes to zero. No light in the dark. Not one photon.
✽ ✽ ✽
I live, but my life is not much of a human existence anymore, not even a close facsimile. Even time is no longer a dependable measure, or constant for me.
I’ve entertained the thought of returning to human space to see friends, to love, to touch, to laugh, even to cry again. But I can’t find the beginning of that path.
It’s said, all journeys begin with a first, simple step. If it’s so simple, why can’t I find a stone, or some other surety, on which to place my foot, to make that first step, to land on solid reality. The stretch of that first step has become a wide chasm for me, my stride too short.
PART ONE: LIFE
1 Brownian Motion
Brownian motion: random motion of particles resulting from collisions. A quantity constantly undergoing small fluctuations.
✽ ✽ ✽
We saved the universe, and did some other things. Because of those, I had to die, at least in human space, in the human galaxy.
Now, I am simply Hornblower, shed of my birth name. It no longer has meaning. Just a noise someone might use to turn my eyes towards them. What was once my spacer name has become a prophetic and thankless task.
I am a herald, a messenger, an announcer. I am Hornblower, bringer of heat and light to the cold and dark. It weighs on me. I didn’t want this task fate has wrapped me in, trapped me in. I had tried to run from it, hide from it. I lost friends—and part of my mind—the softer parts. There was no escape, no reprieve, no solace, no rest. I stopped running. I stopped resisting. Surrender was the only release.
I live and walk among the Bears. They’re a gentle, highly intelligent, and inquisitive race. We encountered them on our first trip out of the human galaxy. The first trip of its kind any human had ever made. Other than Martin, I’m the only human outside my home galaxy.
I share this planet, Shangri La, with the Bears, home-base for the Universal Library and the Foundation. But it’s not the Bears home planet; not even in their home galaxy. Nobody can find this star system, even if they knew the spatial coordinates.
We are hidden, they are safe. The entire star system is wrapped in a phase-slip bubble, made possible by technology over seven billion years old. From here you can’t see any other stars. No light in, no light out. Our star system resides slightly off-center from the reality of the rest of the universe. You can’t bump into it. You can’t get in or out without a phase-slip capable ship. I have the only starships in the universe that can do that.
Many species, including humans, have interstellar jump-drive capable space craft. But only my ships can travel between galaxies, instantaneously, point to point, using S-drives. Everyone else is hobbled—limited to the plain-vanilla brand of interstellar drives, which must emerge every ten light years or so to reset, to recalculate. It keeps them bound to their own galaxy, or no further than the very closest galaxies of their local cluster.
In a normal jump-drive ship, the trip here would be a time-released suicide. I call the drives in my ships S-drives, to honor the species that invented them, the Surrons. All of them gone now. Gone, over two-billion years ago.
Traveler, my second S-drive ship, came from their past. We went back in time to get it. Back in time two billion years to highjack a ship of the dead. Our time jump had been inter-dimensionally assisted and supervised. A one time, quick there and back. I don’t think any beings had ever done that before. It had to be a quick theft.
Mother nature, or father physics, whichever you prefer, doesn’t like backwards time-travel. If you stay too long, you get rubbed out, erased by a quantum-smoothing effect. It’s nature’s short leash for those who dare challenge past reality. A reality she has so neatly packed and stored. Study it, but don’t take it out to play, or break it. We changed it, but left no evidence, no ripples of paradox. We were a perfect platform diver, entering the water without a splash.
We needed the Surron ship to save the universe. Save it from the effects of a dimensional rift that was on a timer, counting down, to the dissolution of everything in every dimension, not just our four. A big soft poof to end the chaos unleashed by creation. The Surrons had died out, or moved on, roughly two billion years ago, but they left a legacy of amazing things in isolated libraries, for my team to scoop up, to protect.
We took their contents, then embargoed the release of those wonders. Sequestered them to prevent the proliferation of technologies which would, in the wrong, or unready hands, cause chaos, extinctions, and genocides. The light of knowledge can blind and burn as well as illuminate. I don’t want to be responsible for that, my hands have already caused too many deaths.
✽ ✽ ✽
I don’t remember how many years it’s been since I walked with my human friends, Sandy and Mica. More than twenty. Everyone thinks I died long ago. Dr. Forest and Dr. Fount con
spired with me on that bit of theater. Though, Sandy knows I’m still alive, or should know.
Mica didn’t need to know. As a settled family man, with a wife and children, he didn’t need that burden. No exposure to the knowledge of what may come. After twenty years of prospecting in the cold dark, he’d sought normality and contentment. He’d found it. There were others from that time; my previous life. Though I shared a purpose with them, they were peripheral, not alive inside me as were my two close friends.
Sandy tagged the Bears with that name when we first saw them in our scans, during our first visit to their galaxy. There had been a library and Surron AI hidden on a planet we needed to recover.
Of course, it’s not what they call themselves. In their language, their collective name is a strong mixture of our separate words mother, father, brother, sister, friend, family. In their culture, blood relationships have no real importance. Their species name joins them more intimately, more firmly than humans can ever understand or experience. It’s not a learned thing, it’s in their DNA.
I still use the name Bears. It gives me a familiar hold and connection back to my former crewmates. Back to a time when I thought I knew who I was. My translator is adjusted to convert the word ‘Bear’ into the correct name in their language—spoken words, which emerge like gravel in a slow blender. Bears and humans don’t have the proper vocal cords to speak each other’s language; we rely on AI translators. Mine connects directly to my cranial insert.
The bears are about a head shorter than humans—two arms, two legs, four fingers on each hand. They walk with a slightly rolling gait. Their only resemblance to that human-familiar animal is the short, soft fur and upright triangular ears. Their fur covers all but their hands, feet, and the few bits around their face. The slightly projecting nose and mouth area is not the protruding one of real bears. The Bear’s fur is thin and wispy—serving more than a thermal function. It waves, it flows, it ripples, it conveys unfiltered emotional body language to other Bears. Sandy had tagged it correctly when she said the Bears were like us, monkeys who had descended from different trees. I have become more and more adept at reading them. I’m honored to be allowed the privilege.
✽ ✽ ✽
I’m on my way to talk to Dr. Forest. He, and his wife, Dr. Fount, are the first two Bears we met. They are now the administrators and senior curators of the Universal Library, with a staff of over eight hundred other Bears, comprised of librarians, scientists and researchers. At any one time there are hundreds more visiting scholars. From the ground up, we created a university campus and a small city. Including residential housing and all the necessary support facilities to keep the place running smoothly, and residents happy. There is no living support staff or servants, those are all AI constructs.
The Bears don’t have, or use, official titles. They don’t see the need for them. There are no personal competitions among them, or even a social hierarchy. We conferred the human title, PhD, on our first Bear friends, as a sign of respect for their individual scientific knowledge. At first, they thought our word ‘Doctor’ referred to being healed. The translator algorithms didn’t do a very good job back then. Before being corrected, the translation genesis went from Doctor, to one who heals, then to one who has been healed. Verb forms can be a real pain when talking to other species. We had provided needed medical help to Dr. Forest when we rescued him and his wife.
Doctor Forest has asked me to sit with the Decision Board today. As Chief Administrator, another unnecessary title I placed on him, he and his wife chair the board. It’s a group of ten well-respected, in-resident, Bear elders. The board make the final decisions concerning transfer of Library information to other species.
There is a strict ‘no export or transfer’ policy all information recipients must adhere to. No sharing with their galactic neighbors. We have spies everywhere. At least that’s what we tell them.
The concept of spies is a foreign one to the Bears, they share all information openly with each other. In their culture it’s a simple matter of why not?
The cost of breaking that library rule can be very severe. Every species who applies for information transfer, on a specific and limited topic, is provided a copy of my short book, Rules for Emperors, Warlords, and Despots, along with a short demonstration video featuring one of my ships turning an uninhabited moon into a gas cloud in less than two seconds. My ships and I are the enforcers. The Bears are the ultimate pacifists. I don’t tell them everything I do.
Other than the Bears and me, the only other person who lives on Shangri La is Dr. Martin and his cat. His cat doesn’t count as a person, though he thinks it should. Dr. Martin never chose a last name when he made the switch from being a sentient Surron AI to human. He’d been the guardian of the rift.
Of course, the Bears do have their pet snakes here with them. Martin’s cat stays clear of the snakes, and they, him. I wonder if Sandy’s pet snake, Socks, is still alive. Being my representative of the Foundation, Martin is a permanent member of the Decision Board, and also co-administrator of the library, with Dr. Fount and Dr. Forest.
Today, the requests involve mostly medical research to combat diseases, infections and pandemics. Local problems the requesting species have been struggling with. Sitting in, I am humbled by the collective intellect of the board members. They have a firm grasp of the details, as well as the possible unintended consequences, of releasing technologies and information.
Votes are always unanimous. They usually come down to one of three options: the library staff develops the solution, we transfer enough information for them to solve their problem themselves, or we deny their request. We are cognizant of the hazard of species becoming too dependent on us, losing their motivations to move ahead on their own. Information, too easily gained, can be a drug. Stagnation is a species killer.
There were several requests that were denied today, based on the probable use of the information for bio-warfare. Some races try to sneak things past us. Between the Bears and the AIs, I’d say that was next to impossible.
✽ ✽ ✽
I have five hundred and eighty Surron ships now. More are being built. I am the captain of each. Perhaps, fleet admiral would be a better term. The ships, and their onboard sentient AIs, are clones of my first Surron ship, Traveler.
Traveler is not a Surron AI. She was an inter-dimensional being from the strange group I called the Zees, the ones that tasked me to close the rift, something they couldn’t do from their side alone. The four Zees, who came into our dimensions to help us, became trapped here when they made the decision to stay for other reasons. They knew, at the time, it was going to be the price of their decision. When they had first crossed the dimensional barrier, before we had our first Surron ship, they had to inhabit the existing human built AI cores on my ship, Ranger.
Information from the Surron libraries has led to some very serious and interesting upgrades for my ships. Bears are very good at building on the Surron knowledge left behind, and teasing out the hidden bits. Perhaps we should consider building and hiding our own libraries as a hedge against the future, as they had done.
Except for Traveler, and Ranger, each of my ships were constructed in the shipyards we built, on a resource-rich planet in this system. We named it Conicu, a combination of the periodic table designations for cobalt, nickel, and copper, all abundant, just inches below the surface, metals that make the planet a no-go for any developing life. While not fit for habitation, it’s perfect for automated mining and shipbuilding. There’s no environment to destroy. We also have a fleet of ships that mine this system’s asteroids, Kuiper belt, and Oort cloud. Of all the star systems I’ve visited, only a handful didn’t have that trio, accompanying their planets, in orbit around their stars.
I’ve toyed with the idea of building scoop ships that can gather gases from the orbiting giants in the outer reaches, but for now, the Oort cloud has more than enough volatiles to last many tens of thousands of years. As an ex-prospector the ide
a had interested me.
✽ ✽ ✽
Entering Dr. Forest’s office, I notice his wife, Dr. Fount, is here. Bear couples rarely stay out of each other’s presence for long. Their relationship pairings are reinforcing; greater than the sum of the parts.
Watching Dr. Fount, I sensed a tense conflict. I can read her better than I can other Bears. The three of us chatted about nothing, about minor issues at the library, nothing anything I was involved in.
After ten minutes, a fidgeting Dr. Forest was called away. He’s the busiest person on this planet. After her husband left, Fount came right out, no preamble, she simply threw it out there, in the space between us; very un-Bear-like.
“Hornblower, your children need their father. Their mother has made a request.”
I took a breath, rose and left. I needed distance from those words.
2 Mitosis
Mitosis, a part of the cell reproduction cycle. Replicated chromosomes are separated into two new ones. The division of the mother cell into two daughter cells, genetically identical to each other.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sandy is the mother of my children. The mother of twins, a boy and a girl. Just a plain fact, complicated by another, not so plain fact. I have never been a father to them. After inhabiting a new-constructed human body, Sandy had wanted children—a surprise to me. I’d never thought of her as being the type to take on that role and responsibility.
When she asked, I had agreed to provide the other half of the necessary genetic material, but I told her that I couldn’t be a father, raising children. Everything was too complicated. I wouldn’t be able to participate. They’re genetically a part me, a part her, but that’s been the extent of my contribution to their lives, their education, and to their existence.