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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Fearadhach on 2024-10-28 06:46:20+00:00.
Julia wanted to smile at Aunt Yoro's exclamation that they believe the Old Machines were made of nanites, but Dad just looked grave and nodded. “That is the conclusion we keep coming around to. And, it gets worse.” Dad held up a hand to forstall a barrage of questions. The video of the slowly-appearing old machine had run to completion; the familiar – and massive – lines of an Old Machine now hanging stark against the black of the Void. The display then looped back to the start and ran forward at a slightly faster speed, allowing everyone to watch it again. A silence settled over the room as everyone watched the video loop, trying to find a hole in the argument.
Julia shook her head, still trying to process what had been dropped on them. It gets worse? Everyone else seemed just as lost in their own dark musings. Everyone except Aunt Yoro, whose hands had started to move so fast at whatever invisible controls she was working that someone might have mistaken it for a spastic fit.
Mom gave everyone a few minutes to process, then started to tap some controls. The starfield zoomed out to show a top-down view of the section of the Milky Way galaxy which the League occupied. Several well-known stars had been helpfully labeled. Beside many of the stars, however, were lines of text in a language that it took Julia a few moments to recognize. That is Old Machine!
Most stars had no text next to them, of course, and after a few moments for everyone to get the feel of what they were looking at, those stars faded a bit. This still left a lot of stars. Most which had text only had a single line beside it, but some had more and a few had as many as a dozen.
Dad spoke again. “Some years ago we – those of us pursuing and researching the Old Machines – made a discovery which we considered monumental, but few outside the community even noticed: someone figured out a query to get an Old Machine to provide what appeared to be an identification code. We were excited at first, of course, and querying for that code became part of the standard practice at a Sighting. The text you see next to the stars is the results that we have gotten back each time.” Mom manipulated a control, and the first few characters of text next to every star was highlighted in yellow as Dad continued. “When we started to compare results, the first thing ew found – because if we can recognize anything in the OM lanuage it is their numbers – was that each string has a number sequence here.” A few characters in the middle of each line of text was highlighted. The color of the highlight was different for each star, but the same for all lines attached to the same star.
Dad continued. “The second thing we noticed was that the characters before the number are all the same, though we still aren’t sure on the translation.” All text from the start of each line to what had already been highlighted was highlighted in yellow. The rest of each line was highlighted in various colors, though Julia noticed the same color assigned to lines at certain stars, and realized that the colors coded to specific character sequences. Her eyebrows drew down as her Dad continued. “We also don’t have translations for the character sequences after the numbers, but the numbers themselves lead us to a great discovery. You will notice that any star with two or more queries have the same number sequence. At first we thought the numbers were part of some unique designation, then realied that they are something else entirely: they are a coded numeric designation for that individual star.
“It took us a little bit of time and computing, but we are pretty sure that we have the patter for the numeric designations figured out. The last set of characters had us excited for a while, because we got unique character strings back and thought those to be designations for individual OM’s, but we have only identified a handful of sequences, and know for a fact that more OM’s exist than there are designators.”
Jake finally cut in. “Ok, Henry, enough. I noticed you suppressing the term ‘You See’ when you started this little bit about the character strings, and you are well past the point we should have called you on it. I guess the old phrase that ‘it takes one to know one’ is more true than I ever wanted to admit, but there it is. So, I’ll tell you like you’ve told me far too many times before: bottom line it for us!”
The remarks got Jake a lot of looks that ranged from reproof to gratitude, but he just sat there with an odd half-grin and looked at Dad.
Julia tried to hide her own amusement as Dad raised a single eyebrow at Jake and spoke. “Ok, I guess if you want the rest of the explanation of how we figured all of this out, you can just read the report. We believe the first sequence to mean something like cluster, gathering, concordat, or matrix. The last is our highest candidate, based on a few cross-references. The last sequence we believe to be some sort of role description, partly based on the fact that one of them is probably a word meaning ‘observation’ or something similar.
“So, it is our belief that not only are the Old Machines nanites, but that they…”
The hologram abruptly went blank, and showed an image of the Council-world solar system. Dad seemed surprised at the change, but Julia realized the display was probably a real-time feed of the system in which they sat. The image shifted, seemed to have a color-inversion, then settled to show a bunch of bands of striated particles. It looked a little like a flat display which was malfunctioning.
Yoro spoke. “Are everywhere, all the time, and we have never even known it. What I am displaying is a portion of the sensor ‘noise’ which is present in all star systems, but which all modern monitoring systems filter out: small particles of dust, rock, or even radiation pockets that have to be studiously ignored in order to identify things which we actually care about like ships , comets, or asteroids on collision courses with the former.
“This, though… this is a special filter I have been trying to create based on the information in Henry’s pile of data about the spectrographic and radiation profile of the dust which came off of their spacers at Vintus. I will grant that this feed is a bit of a mess, but…”
Julia felt her curiosity rise as Aunt Yoro stopped, blinked rapidly several times, glared at her father, gave a small laugh, shook her head, and waved her hands in the air a few times. The hologram changed in an instant. It went from a confusing jumble of striated bands of color to a more evenly dispersed set of bands of color.
Yoro continued with a heavy sigh. “Of course you already have a filtering program worked out that is better than I can slap together in the few minutes you have been talking. What I get for running ahead, I guess.” She gave another laugh at herself. “What you see here is a pattern of dust in this star system which registers on a specific frequency. It is… just enough to stand out from the background noise, but is not something anyone would ever be able to find unless they were specifically looking for it, and even then you’d need the frequencies Henry provided as well as…”
Yoro stopped herself, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “Suffice it to say, I, for one, believe Henry’s point: The Old Machines are actually nanites, and they exist all of the time in every star system in the League. Possibly in every star system in the galaxy.”
A series of shocked expressions and sounds went around the room, and Julia found herself unable to keep from blinking several times in surprise herself.
Aunt Golna, stalwart woman that she was, rallied first. “Ok, I think we are all willing and able to concede this point for the moment, ‘for the sake of argument,’ as that quaint Human saying goes.” Nods or, their equivalents, came from everyone in the room. “I still don’t understand the secrecy. I would have thought you and the other researchers would have wanted to spread this information far and wide and collect your accolades for your discovery? Surely you don’t contend that the Old Machines are the ones who wiped out all of those alien civilizations?”
Julia joined everyone else in expectant looks at her parents. The scene on the hologram changed once again. This time, it showed a pristine, green world hanging in space. Hundreds of images began to show above and below the world, showing untouched nature and virgin landscapes teaming with life.
Her Mother took up the narrative. “This world is one that the first Phoenix ship we mentioned mounted an expedition one year ago – nine years after they came out of FTL stasis – to survey. They chose it because it was listed as a primary colony of one of the three species they’d identified. It was supposed to be a world of over four billion individuals, which they had occupied for over two thousand years and had cities to rival anything on the planet where the Phoneix crew had made their home. This is the state they found the world in.”
Someone, Julia wasn’t sure who, let out a long, low whistle as everyone else stared in terrified...
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