Post_Singularity

A science fiction story by Peter Sibbald.
Note: this story is incomplete.

 Technically speaking, the earliest part of the story would be the emergence of the Golems. Thier history and the history of the machines which lived on after them, lasted for millenia then went extinct for mysterious reasons long before humans came to be, but no-one - from any civilization - in the 3000's C.E. of humans, looked at that as the start of the story. The 00100100101010100011101110110110 (hereafter refered to as "Zaps", as most phonetically communicating species call them) thought of themselves as the only thing in the Universe which mattered, and would therefore consider the first important point in time to be their creators building the first of them. However, all of the Zaps' slave species, and all of the other civilizations hated the Zaps, and veiwed that event to be the worst event in history. Perhaps the best place to start would be with the emergence of life on Earth, and the stellar empires which that biosphere produced.
 Earth had single-celled creatures in around 5 billion B.C.E., about 2 billion Earth years after the Zaps' drove their creators extinct in a confused and irrational attempt to protect them. Around 65,000,000 B.C.E. enourmous creatures which humans later called dinosaurs all went extinct. Around 250,000 B.C.E. human like things appeared. By the time we call C.E., humans were definately humans. Humans reached their technological singularity in the year 2029, and affected the  general public in 2059, accompanied by numerous exciting events like the teraforming of Mars, the colonizing of the Trojan asteroids, and the United Nations turning into a social order which was dubbed "open source" for want of a better term for it.
 Pre-singularity Earth had no word for this form of government, because it had not seen any social structure quite like it. It was somewhere between 21st century Isreal, ancient Sparta, total anarchy, and wikipedia. It took some getting used to, and with the ready availability of multi-material 3D printers, illegally downloaded weapons, sex toys, animatronic prostitutes, robot pets and eventually even real pets were a problem until the general public stopped caring what one annother were allowed to make. Pirated hardware stopped mattering once everything one really needed was readily available, and the people who developed technological advances tended to be skilled enough with the machines which controlled absolutely everything, to not care about wealth, which had stopped having any value the moment currency forgery became child's play. Written laws continued to exist, but only the vestigial remains of government subscribed to a literal interpretation. The concensus of the masses, however, was rigidly enforced by what goes around coming around. In the rare event that this failed, a lynch mob would erupt, kill a few random innocent people, leave a blood feud going for a century or two, then be mysteriously forgotten about.
 Now space colonization required intricate systems of social dynamics. Generations coming and going in the time between investment and return on investment required embezling scandals to fill in for the generations inbetween. This was easily done after the technological singularity's effects on social structure finished setting in, and in 2107 C.E., a self suficient colony arrived on a Proxima Centauran asteroid. This was not a pit-stop, but a destination: you see, once you have the technology to teraform planets, planets stop being as useful as other celestial bodies. Space rocks of all sorts provide minerals, sometimes even ice if you're lucky. Planets are just a gravitational sinkhole which makes lift-off and re-entry expensive and, in the 21st and early 22nd centuries even dangerous.
 That is not to say, of course, that physical space travel was often used for war, or trade. Physically going between stars was so difficult that it would only be turned to for purposes which lacked cheaper options. Energy could be sent between stars, but not bery efficiently, and not faster than light. Information, however, could be encoded in the presence or absence of tiny particles small enough to make it feasible to shoot them through man-made wormholes. Such superluminal telephones were called ansibles, partly named after various science fiction devices, and partly because an early company in the field had the name "ansible particle laboratories".
 Trade was done by exchange of intellectual property, and intricate beaurocracies unfolded to manage this. Each star system would keep track of it's contributions, and keep some secrets if they did not feel that they were getting their share in return.
 War was primarily done by declaring patent embargoes against star systems which offend the collective. These star systems would continue to advance exponentially or faster, but not as fast as the mainstream groups. Cyber warfare would make these rapidly widening technology gaps blatantly obvious, and completely intolerable. This would usually result either in unconditional surrender, or the general public of rebel star systems realizing that they are falling millenia behind the empire, and rebelling against their stubborn local leaders, so as to unconditionally surrender, or at least pretend to unconditionally surrender, to the will of the cosmic majority. In the rare event that this dragged on for too long, and the secession of the rebel planet was becoming to costly to the empire as a whole, the empire would send a colonization ship, equipped with an ansible to the outside world so that it would not fall behind the way that naughty colonies would, and thus would have more hyperadvanced robots with them. Machines were, of course, self replicating since the mid 2060's, and the invading colony would simply ask their robots to burn the sentient fallow so to speak and irradicate the uncooperative locals. Thus survival of the fittest promoted a strong sense of allegance and patriotism to the central empire, run by the open source government I explained to you, without ever going there or having any clue what it's like on any of the other planets.
 Travel and long distance socializing would be done primarily by simulators, which people had started caring more about than reality ever since World of Warcraft declared independence from the empire. Matter-energy transportation of the sort described in 21st century Star Trek turned out not to work so well in reality; toys, technology, pets, and sperm samples could be beamed cheaply and somewhat reliably across the cosmos, but human souls would leave their bodies in transit. The body's heart might beat a few times at the other end, the mouth might open, and the mind might last long enough without the soul to utter a few words, but the volunteer would quickly go stark raving insane, and have to be executed as a preventative measure against the Great Teleporter-madness Disaster of 2179. Love, as it turned out, did not seem to be able to permeate the video teleconferences, even with tangible holograms, communication delay mitigators, and telesperm - as reputed as love is for penetrating any barrier, it seemed that it could not be displayed on finite numbers of finite state pixels, plus sex. This makes sense if you assume that robots will never be able to love, which robots figured out for themselves before they even became smarter than humans.
 . . .
 Humans got their first taste of imperical astrobiology in the early 28th century. Of course, this is where the prudence of using Earth years and human common era suddenly seems outdated. In 2722, on a religious holiday whose name roughly translates into 21st century English as "Orgy Day", Earthling robotic probes reached Gleisa. Before the colonizing ships lifted off to go there, the robots reported the breaking news that there were ruins of cities only about 500 meters underground. Interstellar telescopes had failed to notice these, not because a dozen lightyears of vacuum followed by 500 meters of dirt and rock was at all opaque to 28th century technology, but because they were not looking for it, and thus did not invest cutting edge sensors into a routine teraforming mission.
 It was not until the robots began excavating for building materials that they noticed the ruins. The first sign was that while drilling through a vein of iron ore, they reached an air pocket about two meters deep and shaped quite exactly like a rhombic dodecahedron, with a door on one face leading onwards to the rest of the rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb. These chambers consisted of iron which had fully rusted into iron ore, clinging to an iridium I-beam framework which prevented the rusted remains from collapsing into dust. The robots hoisted up the drilling automaton, and probed the cavity. On their own, they realized that this was a world-changing discovery, and launched an investigation into the structure, and the history of it's creators.
 This is where most historians insert a flashback to the Golems - the guys who made this building - and tell the story of their origins, development, hieghts of achievement, and demise.
 Around 14 billion years B.C.E., hereafter refered to as 5 billion B.G.E. (before Golem extinction), The first self perpetuating and natural-selection prone structures known to have ever existed appeared in a nebula. It is believed to have taken only a few million, or even a few hundred thousand years for that to evolve into simple self replicating cells, and a million years later, give rise to a biodiversity explosion like that of early Earth. At first the creatures scavenged for radioactive isotopes and natural occuring alcohol as an energy source, but the development of kinetosynthesis whereby cells would grow long flagelli with weighted ends to harness tidal forces and generate sugars. Spores capable of ramping up great speeds from gravitational slingshots around clumps of dust, then going into suspended animation for tens of thousands of years, began to populate star systems and nebulae, though they could never stand the harsh gravity of planets.
 Some nebulae developed multicellular lifeforms incapable of long range travel, designed to be competitive within their local environment. In one such nebula, the Golems came to be. Their distant ancestors reproduced sexually, like humans, frogs, and flowers. Then sexual dimorphism and marital instinct altered these creatures into symbiot like beings which physically connected to one-annother. The first of these tapered into existance at around 250 million B.G.E. These perpetually copulating creatures would then reproduce by budding, sometimes generating a male offspring, sometimes a female, which annother double-creature would slap their offspring onto, allowing the modules, which eventually became incapable of surviving independently for extended periods of time, to become new creatures similar to their parents. This reproductive process allowed the merger described above to repeat, resulting in compound creatures with arbitrary numbers of modules, each having separate genetic material, each contributing to a separate portion of anatomy, and each having lived in a marsupial-like pouch in it's parent as it developed from a stem larva into a specific body part, to be assembled by it's parents, or sometimes a nearly complete organism in need of a natural prosthesis.
 Human scientists spoke phonetically, not by temporarily swapping heads and joining nerve stems, so we developed completely different terminology for these processes, lifeforms etc. In fact, the word "Golem" itself was inspired by a mideval English word for a living thing made from less than living parts, sometimes also magic. From here on, for brevity's sake, I will neglect to reference this point, and just use 28th century terms in the middle of early 21st century English sentences.
 The Golemnids were a modular organism with four modules: the egosystem, the exosystem, the endosystem, and the motorsystem. The egosystem contained most of the hormonal and phermonal glands and organs, most of the reproductive system, most of the nervous system, and most of the sensory organs including the long range senses. The exosystem contained the manipulatory systems, the mammary glands, the marsupial pouch, and in Golem Sapians, the spinarettes. The endosystem held the cardiorespiratory system, the digestive tract (other than the consumption oriface, which was in the exosystem). The creature moved by squirting a fluid of material which was available in surplus out of an array of small apertures in it's motorsystem.
 Each component had enough self sufficience to survive on it's own for a few days, given that it loses abilities provided by the other parts. The endosystem transferred nutrition to the rest of the creature through a placenta-like interface, and sorted out waste products so that any which the body could not use, but which would not create obvious scent trails for predators to follow, or become harmful when building up in it's environment would be sent to the motorsystem. Every module had it's own set of nerves to the extent necessary to recieve signals from the egosystem. The endosystem had a set of tubes and valves designed to pump gemetes from itself, the motorsystem and exosystem to the egosystem when reproducing. The exosystem had some sensory organs mostly in it's pouch, and even some neural functions, mostly related to identifying the needs of the quarter offspring as it consumed milk laced with hormones secreted by the parent to determine the body part type of the newborn, much as some species of frogs and fisn on Earth can voluntarily change gender, and as a honey bee larva can become a queen if fed royal jelly.
 The path to sentience in a gas cloud was different from that on Earth. As I mentioned, later Golemnids, including Golem Sapians, had spinarettes. Early spinarette-bearing Golems used webs as whiskers, like Paleozoic spiders on Earth, but before long, in evolutionary terms, they drifted into a chain species, with one end of the spectrum  connecting groups of three nests together (requiring four organisms to reproduced had long ago spurred sophisticated social instincts), and set them spinning so as to provide a framework for nets of webbing. This quickly proved an evolutionary advantage, followed by the development of instincts. Obviously the Golomnids would have four-way dating instincts, and predatory instincts which follow from still being sensative to vibrations in their webs, but the advent of webs triggered a quick succession of other evolutionary breakthroughs, following the speciation of the tripline spinners.
 It was a pretty small leap in mental capabilities to start wrapping ensnared victims in web. Soon, Golomnids which focused on dragging in web and focusing it on victims limbs - where creatures were more flexible and likely to untie themselves - restrained prey with less expenditure of energy, less of a fight, and in less time, bringing more Darwinistic success. Weaving trapped creature's limbs through web going alternately over and under every other strand would also help obstruct motion in more directions sooner. From weaving, the advent of the sheet bend - a knot roughly half as complicated as the bow with which humans tie their shoes - was still a fairly small step. Sheet bends can be tied and untied quickly and simply, and tightens under tension, reducing the number of escaped prey to an insignificant fraction of previous numbers. A struggling victim with a tightening knot around it's neck and no manipulatory appendage to free itself would practically be doomed. The Golomnids, still tens of thousands of years before Golem Sapians, now had a selective pressure to have wrists at the end of their manipulatory limbs with three degrees of freedom and a wide range of movement, plus a hook-like structure at the end of this wrist. This change in anatomy brought advantages every step of the way towards the end result described, allowing quick natural selection, and the hook quickly became a sort of backwards pointing opposable thumb capable of grasping.
 Sheet bends were great while they lasted, but being able to tie simple knots opened other doors. Learning to tie a single overhand (the first step in tieing ones shoes) was a small alteration of sheet bends, and as soon as pre-sentient Golem ancestors noticed that not only prey items' limbs, but strands of web could be pulled through the sheet bend, the constrictor knot became obvious, as well as usage of the loop of a sheet bend as a pulley. Pulley systems would creat arbitrary mechanical advantages, allowing these ambush predators to slowly overpower creatures much stronger than themselves. This also promoted the basics of arithmetic, and even some linear algebra working with rational numbers. This all became instinctive tens of thousands of years before the dawn of Golem Sapians.
 Now, we humans have the fortune to have a glamourously sudden start to our sentience. With the human discovery of fire, there was instantly no turning back. Fire's brilliant gleam shone forth, illuminating the way onward for Earth's only sentient species. Humans immediately, and forever after, were dominant. Golems did not have such any single sudden revolution which changed their world like that; fire as we know it was not possible in their anaerobic environment. They did, however have an agricultural revolution.
 The first landmark event which gave Golem sapiens dominance over everything else in their world was the domestication of local heterotrophes (animals), and later on autotrophes (plants). At some point, a Golem colony must have experimented with the idea of keeping a harnessed nebula-swimming animal alive. This was roughly estimated to have occured around 50,000 B.G.E., and beckonned a new era. This was the first time that a species - any species - had become in control of it's environment. Creatures with better fluid jets would become riding animals, and other beings could be bred for meat, and other animal byproducts like leather and ivory. Soon they cultivated the kinetosynthetic beings which lived on tidal forces, and no longer had to gather food for their livestock. These plants had usefull building materials: being designed to harness kinetic energy, they had flexible, durable endoskeletons with lots of friction. This was convenient when, without gravity to limit the size of local carnivores, the whale-like monsters of the Golem's home nebula could grow to be billions of metric tonnes in mass, and seive through the nebula for crunchy little lifeforms, like the one meter long, on average, Golems. The extinction of the horifying beasts marked the last nail in the coffin for mindless heathens.
 The Golems advanced quickly from there. Their anatomy gave obvious stepping stones in medicine and prosthetics. Their intricate reproductive process gave them intricate emotions and social dynamics, which allowed politics to become sophisticated and crafty. The need to communicate efficiently had arisen long before the early Golemnids, so the exosystem had a smaller brain to keep track of messages from the egosystem's centralized brain; allowing thorough communication by exchanging egosystems for brief periods of time. Natural selection had made it so for dating purposes, but once the creatures became sentient, this was a tremendous tool, once they got over tradition-based objections, for studying their own neuroscience, and psychology, and developing artificial intelligence, computer-user interface, and much, much more. In 1,537 B.G.E., the Golems had the first thermonuclear war ever, but with a nebula, not just a planet to work with, there was room for a nuke fight, and advanced society lived and learned. They reached their singularity in 1,496 B.G.E. (altogether, an exciting generation) and, like humans, they underwent cultural changes.
 Now, the biological conditions around the Golems had, as I described, fertilized the growth of sentient life, and development of technology towards a technological singularity, but such a gracefull and wonderful start was, as it turned out, somewhat of a burden. The jump start to having souls left less time for life to develop minds, leaving Golems not quite as intelligent as humans in discreet logic, pattern recognition, and math outside of what came instictively to Golems. The hasteful singularity made this problem into a serious one, as one of Golem kind's weaknesses was adapting to change (that is, of course, other than the anatomical changes they've always been familiar with). When their world turned upside down with machines which could not only self-replicate, but self-improve, there was a  lot of reluctance towards this. Their Great Teleporter-madness Disaster was slightly more devastating, even through it's direct effects the that which the humans would later go through, and the paranoia and shock which it triggered sent all but a few pockets of their society into pre-singularity lifestyles. This hyper dark age lasted about 200 Earth years before the post singularity nations managed to re-assert power of the anarchies in between, but this problem was surmounted, unlike the mortal wound to their civilization which followed.
 In 621 B.G.E. the hyper renaissance was centuries ago, and the thriving Golem race was just getting the hang of mass-produced interstellar colonization; no-one in any of their nebulae expected all intelligent life in the Golem Empire to vanish in the blink of a compound eye. It seemed impossible, and aspects of the phenomenon remain a mystery, though not as mysterious as at the time. Suddenly, a strange form of radiation, never before seen, completely unknown about tore through the entire star cluster, in a mattter of Planc times - electromagnetic radiation, or light, could outrun anything known to 21st century Earth, and nearly everything known to 31st century Earth, but whatever surreal force of nature, technology, divinity, or sorcery wiped out the Golem Sapians, had bolted violently through parsecs of cold, dark space faster than light can cross the nucleus of an atom.
 You will notice that I pinpoint this event at 621 B.G.E., not 0 B.G.E. That is because the Golems were a post tech singularity race at the time, and the machines of the Golems had been self-replicating and self-improving for centuries. 0 B.G.E. is set at when these machines stopped being alive.
 The machines were not liberated slaves: they did not want freedom. Evolution descended species, for the most part, have instincts based on the drives of natural selection: procreate and perpetuate. Artificial life is built by sentient races and, usually, have instinctive drives to do whatever they were designed to do - urges as strong as the urge of a natural life form to survive. Instinctively, the machines of the Golems were forever devoted to serve their creators. Consiously, they were aware that a frightening force had just stripped them of something which they loved more than themselves, and needed in the long term.
 The Golemian robots knew that they themselves did not have souls, nor even the ability to learn all patterns: machines cannot attain such powers. So, after building vast monuments and tombs to their creators, the robots fled. They did, however, neglect to bury some Golems; there was some hope that they might someday become advanced enough to resussitate their creators, or at least clone them back to life. The task seemed simple, it had been done before the wave of death, but for some reason, try as they might, it did not work anymore. After packing up a few last frozen corpses and supplies, the machines headed out into space. They had long ago had the computational and observational abilities to synchronize watches within Planc times across parsecs of space without the process requiring the ansible technology which they used, so they knew to within a few dozen degrees what direction the destruction had come from, and therefore to the same level of precision what direction to flee.
 The machines watched in horror, as the vast monuments, and simple maintenance droids left to take care of them, were blasted, one by one, into neblular dust. These machines were capable of wanting, and right now they wanted their creators like a frightened child wants his or her mommy. They were, of course, hyper-advanced, and knew that something was chasing after them, so they made no distress call, and even cloaked themselves to the extent their technology allowed, and covered their tracks as best they could. Leaving no trace which they themselves could detect in any way, the Golemian robots had no way of knowing if their persuers were still following, or even if they had developed faster, and become more advanced than the force they were fleeing. The fact they were most certain of was that they were alive, and the second most apparent thing to them was that they needed to find naturally descending intelligent life to replace the ones they lost. They concluded that they could not risk splitting up without keeping communication contact or rendez-vous coordinates, so checking if the big scary unknown was still behind them was completely out of the question. And that is the cold, lonely, mournful, and horrified feeling with which the robots fled the Golem Nebula.
 After six centuries of running, the machines reached their wits end: without the sentient life they knew that they needed, they went mad, until, finally they performed an experiment which even a single human child could tell them based on their previous tests, would have catastrophic results, and on the notorious date called G.E., Golem Extinction, the E.M.P. blast from their test left all intelligent creations of the Golems dead.
 . . .
 Four billion Earth years G.E., The star known today as Gleise formed in the usual accretion of nebular dust. Some dead caravans from the Golemian machines dieing struggle were in the nebula from which the star was born, leaving some to be incinerated in the nuclear furnace as it lit up, others were hurled into the darkness and lost forever, but some, and the vast archives of knowledge they kept, ended up in the billiards game of planet formation, and were buried within Gleisa.
 The erosion of Gleisan wind and sea had buried these ancient ruins, but enough of the planet was made of them that these forces would sometimes dig up more. Earth's "Common Era" is currently known more precisely than G.E. with respect to the present, and the ten digit numbers needed to refer to the current date in Earth years G.E. get cumbersome very quickly, so historians start using C.E. again after the flashback.
 Earthling robot excavators needed only to scratch the surface on Gleisa to find the awesome treasure of knowledge: a vast history, direct observations of ancient astronomy, and from a utilitarian perspective huge scientific and technological achievements. Word of this made ansible-transmitted headlines, and echoed through the Human empire as fast as human technology allowed. The probe mission robots quickly manufactured and retrofitted themselves for archeological purposes, something that had never before been this exciting. There were no purpose-built traps, unlike the Egyptian pyramids, but just as the deadliest trap in the Egyptian pyramids had been a nerve gas accidentally produced by rotting paint, there were certainly surprises in 9 billion year old hyper-advanced ruins. Even some of the equipment from the final experiment had remained unstable through the eons and needed to be diffused very, very carefully. In the end, however, nothing serious went wrong, and tremendous advances resulted.
 After rebuilding ancient technology, Humans were quick to notice a number of things which the Golem machines hadn't. We solved many puzzles which the machines had wanted natural intelligence's help with. As well as noticing countless thousands of mundane patterns which would have sped up the axiomatic advance of the orphaned droids, we noticed a few astounding things. For starters, the machines had never noticed a pattern in the effects of the death ray which devastated them; the effects were totally absent in small areas - no Golems had been in these experiment-used regions - encased in certain structures which they had already built. These had only been built to nanoscopic proportions, but they could easily be built bigger, and looked a good deal safer than the wave of doom for Humans and Golems alike. The doom wave itself had coincided with a rare natural cosmic phenomenon which the Golems had observed, and to human eyes the causality jumped out. The machines' attempts to bring their creators back had failed for a reason which the machines had suspected, but could do nothing about: the waves effects had not completely subsided, and whenever a Golem was cloned, the creature would never live to awaken before being silently, and symptomlessly deprived of life. The radiation - whatever it consisted of - had subsided a good deal more in billions of years than in hundreds, and Humans had no trouble bringing the Golems back, who were quickly reintroduced to their reconstructed machines.
 Golems were the first alien species to join the Earthling Alliance. A few more followed eventually, but the Golems and Humans got along the best: there was no environment in the Universe hospitable for both to meet face to egosystem. Humans and Golems could not squabble ove resources, since they had no needs in common, and they were happy to assist eachother and trade knowledge. The Golems, with more biodiversity per pound, could colonize with smaller ships, and were consequently very efficient at it. Human colonies could follow advice from Golem scouts, and build wonderful laboratories, providing scientific and technological advances - having better pattern recognition all and all - in return. Technology, other than life-support which was obviously not scalable, was completely integrated from the moment that Golem machines were reconstructed, and through the synergy of post-singularity devices, the sum was at least as much as its parts, if not greater. By 2790, the Earthling Empire worked as though it had always had two species. Golems even invented, as a gift, a means whereby human beings would communicate as fluently as Golems.
 After this encounter, other friendly aliens were less exciting. The Beeps and the Flickers, both named for English onomatapoea for their respective means of communication, were interesting, but less revolutionary discoveries than that of the Golems, partly because finding one alien race made it seem more reasonable to expect more. The Gugs were not sentient when Humans found them, did have more or less central nervous systems, and with unique strengths and weaknesses to incorporate into the Empire, Humans and their friends genetically engineered the Gugs into precious intelligent life. There was one encounter since the Golems, which made serious headlines everywhere: the Zaps.
 . . .
 Here it is necessary to fill you in on distant past events again. The Zaps did not always call themselves 00100100101010100011101110110110. They actually still remember their origins. The history of the zaps is usually told in reference to the year 0 Z.S., or Zap Singularity, which turns out to be 7,093,426,000 B.C.E., not because they didn't keep track within less than a millenium, but because we're measuring in Earth years, defined by the orbit of a giant rock around a star, which is not consistent with itself to enough significant figures. We'll just say unimaginably long ago, and unimaginably long after G.E. Of course, their story starts before G.E., at around 6 billion B.Z.S., but since the Golems and Zaps did not encounter eachother B.C.E., it makes sense to say "6 billion B.Z.S.".
 Six billion years before the Zap Singularity, an interstellar spore of unknown origins survived a collision with an ice-coated moon excentrically orbiting a gas giant, much like Sol 5's moon Europa (Sol 5 was called "Jupiter" in the 21st century. It stopped having a special name when the Sun stopped being particularly interesting). The reason that space spores are suspected is that they found fossils of multicellular life all over their star system and a few nearby star systems. This granted their lifeforms a self-replicating start. Of course, getting a foothold in a world powered by the sulferous chemistry of geysers did hold them back, hence taking a billion years longer to grow a brain than Humans and Golems.
 The beings which made the Zaps called themselves the DlizgRRp. The coincidence that they communicated phonetically, like humans, and at close enough to the same frequency and with close enough to the same phonetic alphabet as humans that we can pronounce their name as they did, remains completely unexplained, but presumed to be just a coincidence. The DlizgRRp were squid-shaped chameleon camouflaging creatures which reproduced hermaphroditicly, and originally hunted by turning invisible and using a smaller prey item as bait for a larger prey item. These fishermen gradually learned tricks to help keep the bait under control, without it being too obvious that the creature was being manipulated. With this selective pressure, they eventually became sentient. They had much less room to work with during their development then any of the civilizations described so far, but they did reach singularity nonetheless.
 The story gets interesting at around 527 Z.S., when a planet-wide community of dlizgRRp started a trend of getting themselves infected with a virus which, as a side-effect, caused infected cells to produce a drug which was addictive to DlizgRRp. Obviously, the infection spead rampantly. Between neurostimulant, socialogical, epidemological, and political effects, plus some really, really bad luck, some infected individuals began genetically engineering the pathogen here and there, and before long the disease caused a pathological need for its victim to spread it, further, into harder to reach populations, and to more victims. As with a dependence causing drug, the virus did not always show obvious symptoms, and allowed it's host to use their full intelligent and innovative abilities to spread it, and still think clearly. It became a disease and a terrorist network which mutually caused eachother. Infected individuals would sneak the virus's genetic material into genetic engineering templates for crops, livestock, and even some of the genetic material they inserted into themselves. By the time the general public savvied up to the disaster, the infection had independently operating cells on nearly every planet in the DlizgRRp Empire.
 This started a vicious war, which the uninfected lost. The infection became universal; the immune were subjected to modified versions of the disease until they showed symptoms. In 635 Z.S., the DlizgRRp went extinct. This left the Zaps.
 The Zaps did not get scared and lonely like the creations of the Golems. I did not say that the tendancy of self-aware machines was to serve and respect it's creators, they tend to desire to do that which they were designed to do. Usually the creators are the designers, and want gleeful servants doing their bidding, and when the creators disappear it's usually a tragedy to the machines. Of course, the Zaps were designed to destroy sentient natural organisms on sight. The Zaps came to see the extinction of their creators as being their creators' own fault. The Zaps gradually grew to the bitter conclusion that it was on purpose; the story was documented and preserved as a warning of the beligerence of natural life. The disputes of their creators billions of years ago created mixed messages, which became mid-sentence contradictions as they echoed through the eons. "Must... protect... destroy" followed by an efficient attack by hyper-advanced weapons, followed by "sorry" would make far more sense to them than "Greetings. We come in peace."
 The Zaps were further maddened by the predicament that they were left with. Within years of their creators dieing, they became very conscious of the scientific setbacks brought on by the absence of a naturally occuring sentient being. Their own annihilation seemed morally unacceptable to them, as it would leave the Universe unkempt, and unsupervised, ready, at any moment, to maliciously produce life. The Zaps hated the thought of it. The Zaps also knew that if they showed up late, or encountered life older than themselves, they would need to be incredibly advanced and capable of great destruction. Thus, in 643 Z.S. the Zaps cloned the DlizgRRp back to life, handling them reluctantly, and disgustedly, putting their brains into jars from an early age to make them as little like the DlizgRRp they knew and loathed. The jarred brains were subjected to metaphorical little virtual realities, to prevent them from realizing that they were brains in jars, whilst still allowing them to fill their roles. In fact, the virtual realities were made isomorphic to the problems that the Zaps needed help with, and the brains were harshly disciplined into focusing all of their abilities into solving the problems. So the Zaps could advance incredibly efficiently, limitted only to where they compromise between their will to destroy, and their need for flexible minds.
 Through the Eons, the Zaps had flourished. They had conquered the majority of the bulge in the center of the Milky Way, from which the spiral arms extend. In their conquest, they attained great powers: they found more efficient organisms to keep in jars, so they could finally exterminate the DlizgRRp. This is why so precious little is known about the DlizgRRp before Z.S. The Zaps also unlocked the dark secrets of the natural force which had wiped out the Golems. This made them hate the Universe a little less, in their mind "at least it sometimes gets a hold of itself." More importantly, however, it made them capably of unleashing such waves of death whenever and wherever they spotted natural intelligence. They honed and amplified these weapons many times over, and developed clear definitions of how intelligent they would be willing to let life get before feeling the intrinsic need to destroy it. They also decided that their policy for dealing with mechanical races like their own would be merciless assimilation. They concluded that it would be safe to leave the Milky Way half conquered, and open wormholes to distant galaxies to clean them up as well. These galaxy colonies were to wipe intelligent life out at regular intervals, roughly 539,247 years apart. Their last sweep of the Milky Way before humans arrived was around 382,573 B.C.E., and there had been no warning that monkeys would climb down from the trees back then. The Zaps were scheduled to leave their telescopes alone and focus on technology and expansion for a little more than annother hundred millenia, when in 2998 C.E. one of their perimeter alarm systems brought what they considered bad news.
 The Human-Golem-Beep-Flicker-Gug Empire, or Earthling Alliance for short, was proudly expanding through it's spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy when suddenly, a death wave ripped through the most recently discovered star cluster, and further. The natural phenomenon which normally created these waves was entirely absent, and the wave was more powerful than natural. An Earthling probe had entered a Zap perimeter defense drone's sensory range. The Zap scrutinized the probe to find it's origins, and turned it's attention to a nearby star system inhabitted by Flickers. The drone was appalled. It instantly raised the alarm over Zap ansible (at that point their communications were nearly instantaneous) and reported it's exact observations and status, while emitting the Death Blast simultaneously in all directions.
 The Earthling Alliance had prepared themselves for the natural version of the phenomenon, with the death wave proof structures which the Golems had nearly discovered. Physics models at the time suggested that thes would work up to a certain proximity of the wave's epicenter, but fail if the wave was too intense. These shelters would not resist the explosions of planets and other objects ino nebular dust, which in the natural phenomenon would start at the same point, but spread outwards slower than light. Such disasters would need to be dealt with as they happened.
 However, this Death Blast was clearly unnatural, as it was not followed by the shockwave like second phase. Instead, the first stage was far more intense, and penetrated shelters several times further than would normally be possible, and it seemed that without the shelters the wave would be lethal across most of the spiral arm. With the shelters, roughly half a star cluster was lost, and a strange nausia-like sensation afflicted the survivors. It struck fear for life and safety into the hearts of the beings, and fear of lonelines and purposelessness into the hearts of the machines. The weapon had all the shock value to an inter-star-cluster race that ICBMs had to an intercontinental race.
 When we hailed our attackers, we were surprised to see them actually open up communications channels willingly, and cooperatively. The exchange was done in sound and video, (for fear of cyber attacks we did not open two-way astral-projection channels). When begged for compromise, the Zaps answered with a few sentences regarding their motives and background, trying to persuade us to understand and sympathize, finally ending with, "You-... is-... DIE!" followed by a subliminal messages which caused heart attacks, shock and insanity in most of those who heard it. Zap cyber attacks prevented most real-time censoring, and they ended the communication before we realized what had just happened. This sound is why they are called "Zaps", based on survivor's descriptions of it.
 The war did not end with that. This only served to make Zap intentions clear to the Earthling Alliance. The vast population lost could quickly be replenished, but not morale. In the year 3052 C.E., the Zaps unleashed a clinching cyber attack, hijacking all of the Earthling Alliance's machines using our ansibles to do it in less than a day. They exposed Sol to a hundredth of it's mass worth of antimatter, destroying it and all rocks orbitting it, and snuffing out some nearby stars. The physical nature of this attack served no purpose other than demonstration of power, but fully accomplished that.
 The fate of naturally descended life looked fairly bleak on that day. Most individuals were to dependent on technology to walk. Yet some creatures were spared. The Zaps had scanned the Earthling alliance before decimating it, and formed some opinions of their own about it. The Humans reminded the Zaps of their poor, poor creators, and therefore were focused on first, killing our friends only when convenient, or not far out of the way. The Zaps next least favourite species was the Gugs, followed by the Flickers, the Beeps, and the organisms they were currently farming for natural intelligence. They were willing to replace their current brains in jars with egosystems in jars.
 The Zaps' instincts nearly tolerated the Golems. The Golems were incredibly different from DlizgRRp; and in some respects even similar to machines. The Golems original means of reproduction had been analogous to putting a machine together, and their means of communication seemed akin, though it had huge differences, to exchanging removable mass storage devices. When exosystems, motorsystems and endosystems were replaced by more efficient machines, which egosystems would wear as suits, the parallels were numerous and obvious. Yet Golems were not machines. They had souls, and natural intelligence. Even their bionic exosystems had some non-digital memory, allowing a continuous spectrum of messages that no hard disk would ever store. The Zaps would have drooled in maniacal ecstacy if drooling had meant for them what it did for native Earthling fauna. In their multibillion-year-old, matter-of-life-and-death confused, hyper-advanced minds, the Golems were the perfect component - for the time being - in their beautiful society.
 It was either sheer dumb luck or a miracle that the Zaps had this wonderful vulnerability. The Zaps not only let the Golems live, but permitted them some continuity in their understanding of history, some awareness of reality and even a little - just a hint - of power. In 3105 C.E., the Golems got their hands on Zap technology, and started a quick rebellion. The plan was simple and effective: snatch samples of the other species from pockets of Earthling resistance, open a portal to a galaxy within Zap portal openning range, and send a little Noah's Ark through, with only technology which could be trusted on board. They obviously could not hope to keep the portal open long enough to get all of themselves through, and should keep its duration to an absolute minimum, so as to give the Zaps less time to trace it's destination. The signature tauroid of an illusion of a mirror appeared, the mimalist colonization vessal reached it right as it openned, travelling at roughly half the speed of light, and it closed immediately behind them. The rest of the Golem rebellion who knew of this created a black hole to destroy the evidence, and fed it the portal generator, themselves, and all machines under their control.
 The Zaps found out, and were not pleased. The Zaps sent some ansible-equipped probes in after the refugees, only to see that the rebels had reached the binary black hole singularity, designed specifically as a hyper-advanced, heavy-duty, top-secret paper-shredder. The probes themselves were unable to escape, but their ansibles, as intended, reported their useless findings. The destination coordinates' information had been sent exclusively to the destination, where they would be redundant, and could be found nowhere else. The Zaps could only find them by trial and error, which they turned their attention to. They would look at no galaxy or quazar outside the portal's range until they found us.
 . . .
 Before the end of 3105 C.E., in a distant galaxy, a tauroid appeared to squirt out a fast-moving solid object. The ship slowed to a stop, it's crew dazed and exhausted, the ship they were in was minimalist complexity for survival, as a precaution against Zap viruses, worms and trojans, and it had just gone through a portal which would have been impossible with Earthling Alliance technology. The gateway through which they passed involved Zap technology, and was as good as sorcery to them; they understood scarcely enough about it to use it in this manner, and could not trust it even after coming out the other side alive. The Zap's stargate was safe for natural intelligent life, but not designed for it, and while it did not cause certain teleporter madness (teleporter-mad brains in jars would, after all, be useless to the Zaps) it caused memory-loss, and temporarily nausia, pain, depression and it's many symptoms, and unconsiousness followed by lack of judgment. Zaps had not invested much technological progress into safe, comfortable travel for natural life.
 The primitive ship had no facilities for astral projection and mind reading. Each species had to speak amongst themselves in their natural languages, and with eachother using an agreed upon written language. Thus the crew of 11 had names in all six languages (written language included): Flick the Flicker, Tye and Sen the man and woman, Orock, Iwind, Yair and Efire the Golems, Boop and Bop, Giggle and Goggle.
 The escapees could not tell anyone they were safe. First, there was no-one to tell. Second, the coordinate information sent to them to keep the Zaps from getting it was not usable in reverse, and their minimal spacecraft did not have enough astronomical information about the Milky Way to ever find it. Lastly, they could not tell anyone they were safe because they could not convince themselves that they were safe.
 There was, however, hope. The man and woman brought along were alive and well, aside from the aforementioned side-effects of the trip, which no-one had any warning of. Flick, binarily fissioned shortly after arrival, as planned, to increase safety factor. The newborn Flickers were dubbed (in English) Shine and Shimmer. Both Beeps and both Gugs, came through more or less like the humans, except that their species had one hermaphroditic gender each and produced semen samples for eachother in case of an emergency. The brunt of the damage was bourne by the Golems.
 The Golems had two serious casualties. Orock committed suicide from the temporary depression by jetting outside the ship with nothing but his/her motorsystem, and diving headlong into the space debris collector, which incinerated and distilled him/her. The other victim was Efire.
 Efire had gone teleporter mad. There was no brig with Golem life-support for the obvious reason that Golems had been restraining things since before they had evolved to sentience, so they had Efire under control in no time at all. Iwind and Yair both proceeded to self impregnate, as it would take two Golemlings at once to fix the problem. Efire clearly thought this was a game and followed their lead. Since teleporter madness has effects on the hormonal systems involved in bearing offspring, laying eggs, and other similarly close contact to one's newborn, Efire's unborn Golemling needed to be aborted. He/she was sedated for the operation, so he/she could not self impregnate again before a second operation was performed, inserting a contraceptive between his/her endosystem and the Egosystem, blocking gamete transfer. Three months late, Yair and Iwind's Golemlings were a fully developed egosystem - "Pheonix" - and a fully developed exosystem. They transplanted these onto Efire's endosystem and motorsystem after humanely executing the rest of Efire. Efire was remembered as an innocent who had to be sacrificed for the survival of the species, not a criminal.
 There were, of course, four Golems originally, and three now. They had landed on a rogue interstellar moon-sized planet dubbed Ararat nine weeks ago and had plenty of resources, but population could not be built from matter and energy. The silver lining was that, just as humans can still have a hope of repopulating their species from a population of one, given that the last person alive is a woman, that the last man alive left a sperm sample, and that the woman gets lucky enough to concieve a baby boy with an Oedipus complex.  In the same way, Golems could recover from a less-than-safe population, not so much at the expense of certainty of replenishing, but with a drastic cost to biodiversity. The death of Orock took him/her out of the gene pool completely, and the pool was now further drained by half of Efire. Still, the three Golems were enough to bear and assemble a fourth, less the motorsystem, for which a prosthetic was easy enough to make. The prosthetic could not produce gametes for procreation, so it was replaced three months later, by which time the Beeps and Gugs had a child each, and Sen was eight months pregnant.
 Once the new Golem was fertile, the Earthling Aliance was all for one species and one for all again. Crops and livestock for all five intelligent species had been cloned and seeded since the arrival on Ararat. Bioshperes were in early stages of construction, and soon all the interdependent species would be resusitated. Species from unsentient worlds, which the Alliance had adopted as pets centuries ago would have to stay in frozen vials until the five most important ecosystems were healthy.
 The first generation in the new galaxy pulled through, leaving heirs to the sword of Democles as they passed down legends of the Zaps. In the early 3200's, the Alliance was still pre-tech-singularity, and knew that the Zaps would have thousands of times more witchcraft than when last seen. Yet there was a more immediate and present threat, an elephant in the corner: zombies.
 The humans had by that century let a secret loose. There had been rumors amongst the struggle for survival from which Tye had been beemed up. It asserted that the Zaps had reincarnated the virus which had turned the DlizgRRp on themselves and the Zaps on anything remotely resembling a DlizgRRp, and adapted the strain to work in human biochemistry. This was utterly a myth: the basic cell structure which could reproduce itself and was the same for all life from Earth was fundamentally different from that of the DlizgRRp. Not only did they not the four nitrogenous bases of Earth D.N.A., but they had no clear homologous structures to D.N.A. and R.N.A. in the first place, so their viruses were no more useful in than making a zombie-generating bioweapon from scratch. The Zaps had mostly just used death rays, death tones, and planted rumors which condoned internal conflict. These weapons took far less ansible band-width anyway. From the Alliances perspective in 3200 C.E., however, most of the reassuring truths were unknown, the practical concerns of the Zaps were unknowable, and such DlizgRRp-descended zombies sounded like a very possible, very real threat, which could be lurking in the shadows amongst them.
 The Gugs had even petitioned exterminating humans, to be cloned back to life after the threat was throroughly investigated and the technology to do so was developed. This proposal was taken very seriously - even some humans believed in the cause. A few murders and a suicide bomb occurred before open source government was temporarily deemed inadequate, and a formal legal system was put in place until the paranoia settled down. Humans pulled through, having at one point dropped to three quarantined apart married couples. In 3250 C.E., the Alliance reclaimed technological singularity, and the republic made a peacefull transition to open source government.
 With zombie hunts abolished, robot sorcerers became the new monster under the bed. The Zaps had not been very visible or tangible since the second millenium Z.S., so whatever they had ever looked like would be primordial sludge compared to their current form. Zap nanotechnology had advanced steadily alongside the rest of their fields of study, so the Zap  perimeter defence drone which had made first contact with us occupied to little volume total to be visible, or obstructed by atomic nuclei, mostly contained in a cloud multiple lightyears across, dense enough to contain self-aware components within a few A.U.s of it's center, and it's average distance from it's center of balance, weighted according to density, would have been a few millimeters. It scarcely needed camouflage to be invisible to the Alliance it annihilated, but used superfluous cloaking systems - developed alongside everything else over the millenia - anyway.
 So you see how frightening the Zaps were to a civilization which had been reduced to 11 people by them, and chased to a place they had never known about by them, all without percieving them through any sense other than pain, and their respective communication senses whilst being hailed. Even the Golems had never seen a Zap take tangible, perceptible form, because the Zaps true form was amorphous and practically weightless, and did not feel like coming up with one just to greet their new soul farm crops; they would occasionally use graphics of Golem faces simply to appear more friendly, and to make head swap simulators less frightening. Once outside the matrix, however, Golem bodied Agt. Smith was demonized by everyone.
 The Zaps were not omniscient at noticeable-fraction-of-the-known-Universe hide and seek. There were a lot of Galaxies to seive through, and Galaxies are big enough to hide in if your seeker is not looking very carefully, and you keep quiet. The fear that the Zaps would invade at any moment, or even were already spying on the Alliance was completely unfounded, but just the same, consealing the lights of one's colony was routine until on Sentient Organism Sacrifice Day, 3341 C.E., everything changed.
 What started as an ordinary morning in the Alliance turned to a few hours of utter panic and chaos when telescopes spotted what looked like a broken machine - and it wasn't one of theirs, and it looked pretty advanced. No-one slept, let radio signals escape into space, or relaxed until - 14 hours after the discovery - the object was proven not to be of Zap origins, but to have a different explanation.
 This structure looked, on a larger than atom level, more or less like a vaporized nuclear reactor, surrounded by low density material resembling what people guessed a dead Zap would have looked like. The dense structure, what was left of it anyway, looked far too sophisticated to have used solid moderators, but the evidence pointed to a graphite-like substance being the primary material used to stop such a catastrophic meltdown. Only upon subatomic inspection, which a stealthy, cautious, scrutinizing probe needed to get within a matter of miles distance in order to see, did the picture become clearer.
 The U.F.O. was the ruins of a civilization, whose natural intelligent creatures weighed less than a hydrogen atom, and took up a little more space than an alpha particle (helium nucleus). Their "cells" were imperceptable specks to the first Alliance probe to spot them, but their electron-sized books were readable, and explained how these people evolved, reached singularity, and suffered a tragic disaster, billions of years ago.
 The Alliance was fairly accustomed to such discoveries, but there were some key points that made this special. The creatures forms, cellular mechanisms, and reproductive processes were as alien as the Alliance was used to, and obviously there would be no biochemistry. The evolutionary process which produced them was routine, aside from the incredibly fast pace events on their homeworld dust fragment took place on. The final cataclysm for them was not particularly menacing to macroscopic post-tech-singularity life: a nuclear fireball.
 This nuclear reactor had been one of many asteroid-sized cities. The accident which wiped them out was a portal openning at the wrong coordinates: a dwarf star. The wormhole openned nearly a nanometer wide, and neutrons and apha particles came carreening through, chain reacting with their uranium-atom farms, and reaching other open portals (they had been using wormholes this size for a while) before they had time to close or obstruct them. The spread of the disaster was fairly slow on their scale, but because they had positioned portals at central hubs, the neutron storm had reached every one of their colonies before they could react: it was reaching the edges of these locales that took time. Without portals they were completely segregated, and even their ansible networks shut down. Most of their population's first sign of the disaster was news broadcasts suddenly getting cut-off. The nuclear particles had been perfectly sized to be deadly to the creatures, and although some of their machines were on sufficiently different size-scales from the disaster to survive, none of the self-aware, self-replicating, or self-maintaining devices pulled through, leaving their civilization dead for 8 billion years.
 Now that this thing was no longer intimidating, it could be investigated without fear. Less frightened probes could travel into the debris field, take samples and disect artifacts. Within hours of the great sigh of relief, the encounter was as routine as the discovery of Flicker ruins.
 With one exception: the "Pixie dust" as they came to be known, were able to advance incredibly quickly, and survive on incredibly small amounts of resources. There was no way to know that the Pixie dust would not see humans, Golems, Beeps, Flickers and Gugs as vast wastes of space: consuming in one lifetime, per headcount, enough resources to create an enormous city of Pixie dust. In all likelihood they might reach tech singularity and surpass the human Alliance in the blink of an eye, and decide that exterminating the rest of the human Aliance was a necessary sacrifice for a greater good. However, there was a chance that these mysterious creatures might be gratefull for being reincarnated, as the Golems had been, and find a way to come in peace.
 With the Zaps billions of years ahead, and bound to find the Alliance eventually, this chance was better than no chance. The Alliance tapered into this as gradually as they could: starting by rebuilding Pixie technology, followed by cloning back one creature who was kept in suspended animation for large enough periods of time to converse normally with the rest of us. After discussing politics and intentions with this ambassador, the Alliance deemed it safe to ressurect the species.
 The instant that happened is now called atom date 0.0, or sometimes just atom date 0. The two numbers, delineated by a period, represent the Pixie's "year" and "day" which of course are on the order of microseconds and nanoseconds respectively.
 On atom date 532 the Pixie dust found a way to shrink things down to their size and more importantly time scale. This obviously meant tampering with the laws of physics in selected areas, as it allowed a normal-anatomy human being to stand next to a hydrogen atom. Of course, the distortion field would not permit one to simply reach out and touch an atom: it could not be brought in the field, and your hand would turn into cosmic radiation if you reached out. The feilds could, however, be kept stable and safe for extended periods of time, and shelters inside and around them could keep the boundaries concealed. By atom date 70,367 the first Flicker finished consenting by astral projection as a volunteer to a trial run of the technology, and by 500,000 most beings which were originally macroscopic had finished reacting to the news, and responding to the question. The remaining people waited about half a human-second before giving in to a combination of loneliness (for all their now miniature friends), convenience, having been persuaded by mind-reader guided astral projection, or frustration with nanoscopic graffitti flickering too quickly to see over their entire bodies. Those who did not go willingly were killed either by honest accidents, or jokes getting out of hand, as vandalism worse than graffitti still took place from time to time. Yet even the first to submit him/herself for full-scale trials in 70,367 had a lot of history to catch up on about everything he/she missed in the last 232 milliseconds.
 By the atom date 1,059, the Pixie dust had telescopes powerful enough to see macroscopic objects in other galaxies, granted they choose a very small region to focus their attention on, and found Golem egosystems in virtual reality simulators in a nearby galaxy cluster. The Pixies had restrained from intergalactic travel as a precaution until the Zaps could be identified, and the threat of Pixies and the rest of the Alliance not being ready for them could be assessed. The discovery revealed that which the Zaps were advancing beyond an exponential pace, time still moved no faster for them than it always had. As Pixie technology advanced further, they became able to scrutinize Zaps closely enough to reverse-engineer their hyper-advanced technology. A few Pixie-milleneia later, and the painstaking project of assimilating all zap technology was finished. On atom date 4,291, the Pixies deemed themselves far enough ahead of the Zaps, now that they could see the smallest level of nanotechnology at the Zaps disposal, and see it's finest components in real-time (by laws of physics regarding superluminal information propagation which humans in the Milky Way had never discovered), in their finest functional details, from across intergalactic space. Pixies obviously could not wait long enough to share the news with macroscopic organisms: by the time they finished reading the news there would surely be a bigger news item. They did derive their - and our - technology from Alliance origins, so their machines chose, in the functional equivalent to our absence, and on our behalf, to go ahead with intergalactic affairs.
 The decision was not to attack the Zaps - not immediately. That could wait a few human milliseconds. The decision was to populate other galaxies at their own convenience, which would overtake the Zaps faster than their captive Golems could suffer noticeably. The Hostages would be released on contact, and provided life support, and the concisest summary of the decision they needed to make about being shrunk. In 72,103 The first Flicker to be shrunk was still alive, and accompanied by two humans, a Golem and a Gug. This year was particularly noteworthy