FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: The Ship Of Millions Of Years

-The Dragon attempts to describe Its ship-

"It was seven-plus dimensional, of course, and so when it fell into a smaller universe that could only support three, and one for time, naturally it got a little.... compressed. It was pretty spacious, really, in its original form, because the volume was the seventh power of the length. Think one of those concept space stations you see in old illustrations, built in zero gravity, where the size-limit is the amount of material required to cover the external surface. The maths works out much more favorably with more dimensions.

"Anyway, when it fell through, all the purely material parts got squashed. Imagine something like an old cathode-ray tube television, lots of technology around hollow vacuum, which gets crushed in a trash compactor. Now imagine that there's an animal inside. That animal was me.

"Not all of the ship was purely physical, so parts of it maintained limited higher dimensionalities, in the same way that the television isn't quite flat. It ended up looking like an spiky billiard ball of wreckage, with entrained matter sticking out of it at various random angles where the extra space accommodated more stuff and it got squeezed out sideways.

"We were near center, which was the most heavily reinforced part of the ship, running a minimal cycling configuration, dead but dreaming in our primary sepulchure. We had the music going loud and the persistence support cranked to max to try and keep ourselves alive in whatever we were about to fall into. We had slithered ourselves onto and were stretched around a sort of structural support pillar, like swallowing a spoon or the taste of tinfoil, locked on with all our internal bits and clinging tight.

"Then, like the possum in the television, we got squished.

"What the ship looked like afterward is hard to explain. Imagine an insect, wandering around the inside of that destroyed television, trying to figure out what all the parts are for or what the order of the rooms means, unaware that it has been smashed flat and that all the components are now superimposed on one another. Some were even temporally skewed, in the relative past and future of one another from the point of view of other parts of the ship.

"The medical and structural support systems kept us just thick enough to stay alive, but the level of system degradation was unimaginable. The music somehow kept playing the whole time, being the least and simplest and stupidest system, like a simple little tinny speaker able to survive being hammered flat. We could hear it in our dreams, flowing across the external neural network which was conterminous with the ships remaining volume. Fortunately it was like light synths or maybe wave electronica, easy to ignore, like waves surging on the beach near the ocean, a background as we drifted. The physics of this new environment precluded mere bodily death, and so very slowly, across hundreds millions of years as we fell across the void, the ship worked out how to repair its own systems and remake us into something that could survive, incorporating what it had left, all but consuming itself to remake us into something finer and more dispersed.

"The material of the ship also changed, during the transition. Some of the tougher exotic material survived, but a lot of it rapidly became simpler substances that were stable, stuff resembling that nanofactured fake stone that was popular for Azatlani high-rises. The collapse made it incredibly dense, the cumulative weight of a small mountain, areas with their own gravity differentials from the mass difference slowly sagging toward one another. We became substances that were not only more stable, but also more plausible in the new universe, that could have existed from the start, a mass of tumbling core materials, heavy silicates and heavier platinum group metals, a skyscraper of polished basalt with iridium fittings like an inversion of civic architecture.

"As we fell, evolution happened. There had been living things on the ship small enough to survive the crash, tiny self-aware particles, and they started again under a radically different definition of survival, adapting themselves to lesser and straitened conditions. For the last few tens of millions of years there were skittery things roaming about, this time with only the four tentacles instead of a proper set of seven, hiding by swapping themselves out with temporally adjacent versions of all manner of small objects, and spinning new neural networks across empty space like webs.

"Finally, as we drifted toward a star, I awoke, and looked out with new senses that were not eyes."