Sk-1. Crabworld
Engineer-32459 was awoken by a loud rumbling and shaking, which created little ripples in the sustenance pool. The vibrations rippled through their protoplasm, causing their organelles to jostle around and begin to ache.
Great, they thought, it’s gonna be another one of THOSE days.
They stumbled out of the pool, placing one pseudopod in front of another slowly in case another kinetic impact went off nearby. Sure enough there was another loud bang and rumble, and they steadied themselves by extending a pseudopod to a nearby cave wall. They shivered a bit as they touched the ice, already longing once more for the warmth of the geo-vent that heated the pool, before gathering themselves and continuing to move forwards.
Finally they reached their crustacean exoskeleton, slithering into the familiar gap in the center of its chitinous carapace with a pronounced sense of relief. As they felt their nucleus’ neuro-tentacles connect with the crab armor’s nervous system, the armor came alive in response to their mental commands; it became an extension of their body. They clacked the armor’s strongclaws and fineclaws, wriggling them around and doing the amoeba-crab symbiote equivalent of a wakeup stretch.
As they slowly shuffled out of the pool room into the common area, Engineer-32459 saw a familiar sight; their friend, the eccentric and industrious Astronomer-8966, intently studying a bubble-screen in the dim light of the luminescent lichen strands clinging to the ceiling. Poor Astronomer-8966 had been somewhat adrift as of late; there wasn’t much call for stargazing when the whole of the crab species was hiding in caves deep under the ice-sheets, fearing the spaceborne monsters who hurled asteroids at them from above.
Engineer-32459 tapped their upper fineclaws against the top of their carapace, forming words from the staccato rhythm. “Good morning, A-66,” they said, using the short form of their friend’s name.
A-66 turned around with a start, their carapace flashing purple in alarm, before dulling back to its regular neutral blue when they saw the source of the interruption. “Morning to you as well, E-59” they responded with a series of quick claw-taps, accompanied by a flash of red pigmentation that served as the crab equivalent of a sigh. “Or evening, or whatever. I can’t tell anymore. Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“Very much so. I can’t get more than a few hours in since the Enemy started bombing this sector last quarter-cycle.”
A-66 pulsed orange-laughter. “No wonder your sheen is always so dull. The soundproofing on these caves IS terrible.”
E-59 clacked their eyestalks together thrice, an expression of sarcasm. “I don’t know how you manage to sleep through it. If anyone ever invents soundproofing that can cancel out orbital bombardment strikes, they will be hailed as a hero for the ages.”
A-66 flickered orange again. “Ho, were I inclined towards engineering instead of astronomy, I would pursue such a goal with fervor.”
E-59 joined their friend’s laughter for a moment before changing the subject. “So what are you up to, A-66? Looking at the remote telescopes again?” Some of the optical space telescopes located in the far outer reaches of the system had not been destroyed by the Enemy, apparently because they weren’t important targets, and could still be accessed by quantum signals. That small bit of luck at least kept A-66 occupied, or rather distracted from the overwhelming horror of their species impending extinction.
“Yes, and I found something remarkable!” A-66 tapped out quite loudly, their carapace turning icy blue-white with excitement. “You remember what happened to the Southern Star, right?”
E-59 remembered well. The Southern Star, more officially referred to as White Thirdborn, used to be the brightest star in the night sky of their world’s southern hemisphere. It was located a mere 9.3 light-cycles from their own primary, Red Origin, and had been a constant presence in their skies for millennia. Fifty-five cycles ago, White Thirdborn had suddenly faded, becoming all but invisible to the naked eyestalk; when the crabs observed it with faster-than-light quantum telescopes to discover why, they learned the star’s attendant planetary system had been invaded by a race of fleshy, spiny spaceborne creatures, so numerous they occluded the star like a cloud of dust. The system’s native inhabitants, giant mechanical beings who spewed forth blue flame from their heads and hands, were fighting a desperate losing war against the spiny creatures.
Debate over the meaning of this had been cut short by the arrival of the spiny creatures in the crabs’ own star system, through some sort of space-warping ring. The creatures had flooded through the system like a tidal wave, consuming everything they came across. The crabs were ill-suited for this conflict; their last war had been in the days of flintlock rifles, some 500 cycles ago, and in modernity they had no weapons to fight back with. With the creatures unresponsive to communication, the crabs had few options and chose to retreat deep beneath the ice sheets of their homeworld, into secret caves kilometers beneath the surface. The invading creatures, now dubbed the Enemy, hurled asteroids at their world, slowly chipping away at the ice sheets and rendering the planet uninhabitable. By all accounts, it was only a matter of cycles before the crabs went wholly extinct.
In that sense, the disappearance of White Thirdborn from their skies heralded the end times, as many religions had prophesied. The event was now seared into the crabs’ collective memory as the start of their present trauma, and the Astronomer’s Guild bore guilt for the implication that their quantum telescopic observations of White Thirdborn had been what drew the Enemy’s attention in the first place.
“Yes, I remember,” E-59 said carefully, the blue of their carapace dulling to a darker shade. They knew A-66, like every other astronomer, treated this as a highly sensitive subject. “What of it?”
Much to E-59’s bemusement, A-66’s excitement only grew; their carapace was practically gleaming a bright icy blue and they clicked both their upper and lower fineclaws, almost stumbling over their words. “The occlusion is gone! The Southern Star is once again shining at full brightness!”
E-59 blinked their eyestalks, carapace flashing purple. “What?”
“The star has returned to its full splendor! The Enemy is gone from its system! The mechanical beings must have defeated them!” The clicking of A-66’s fineclaws became so loud as they shouted that E-59 winced involuntarily.
“Calm down, A-66. You don’t know that for sure. It’s possible the Enemy simply exterminated the mechanicals and moved on from the system. I know how badly you want this to be true, but consider confirmation bias for a moment,” E-59 responded, trying to keep their own excitement in check. Hope was a rare commodity these days, and indulging in it was treacherous.
“My theory is sound!” replied A-66 with slight frustration at their friend’s recalcitrance. “If the Enemy had simply exterminated the mechanicals, they wouldn’t leave the system behind. We’ve seen the Enemy harvesting resources from our own system, hydrogen and heavy metals and such. They wouldn’t abandon a system rich in those resources.”
“…True enough,” E-59 admitted reluctantly.
“So what other explanation is there?” A-66 pressed. “Nothing you can think of, right? When you eliminate every other possibility, the remainder must be the truth. The mechanicals DID defeat the Enemy, and that means…”
“…that perhaps they could be an ally,” E-59 finished the sentence, slowly allowing optimism to seep into their protoplasm against their better judgement. “They seemed powerful, and well-versed in warmaking. From what little we saw, they held their own even while at an overwhelming numeric disadvantage.”
“EXACTLY!” A-66 shouted, causing E-59 to wince again. “Ah, if only I still had access to the Quantum Array, I could confirm what happened…”
Most of the crab’s system-wide array of quantum telescopes had been swept away by the wave of the Enemy, along with their other trans-orbital assets. “What do you have access to, exactly?” E-59 asked.
“A single quantum telescope, on the fringes of the system. It only survived because of its remoteness; too far out of the way for the Enemy to bother with. It’s too weak by itself to make any meaningful observations. That’s why I had to rely on optical telescopes to make this discovery.”
E-59 felt an idea form in their nucleus, a crazy idea. Perhaps A-66’s optimism had infected them like a bad case of gene-rot. “One quantum telescope might not be enough to observe White Thirdborn’s system, but perhaps… it would be enough to send a message?”
A-66 gawped for a moment, trying to grasp what E-59 was proposing. “A message?”
“To the mechanicals, I mean,” E-59 continued, illustrating their crazy idea. “If they really did defeat the Enemy…”
A-66 tapped their fineclaws in a nonsensically chaotic rhythm, indicative of deep thought, for a few moments. “But how would we… we don’t know their language, or how they communicate. It would be, for all intents and purposes, first contact. How would we…”
“Pictographs,” E-59 responded. “Remember that message the Astronomer’s Guild beamed out all those cycles ago, hoping someone would respond? Before the invention of quantum communication, back in the days of X-ray transmission?”
“I read about it in the historygraphs, yes,” A-66 said, their carapace brightening as they grasped what E-59 was proposing. “It was… a diagram of a hydrogen molecule, sequences of prime numbers, and pictographs displaying the basic biological information about our species.”
“Precisely. A message designed to be intelligible to extraterrestrial life. If we modified it into a request for help…”
“And used the quantum telescope to send it to White Thirdborn’s system…” A-66 said, before dulling their carapace back to its usual blue. “It’s a long shot. Even if the mechanicals do receive the message and understand it, they might not arrive in time to save us.”
E-59 placed a reassuring strongclaw on A-66’s carapace. “And you’ve always been a dreamer, A-66, like all astronomers. Long shots are your specialty. What do we have to lose?”
*******
A thousand kilometers above the atmosphere of Venus, an instance of Sveta flitted around at absurd velocities and performed maneuvers that would have squished her circuits to deliquesce were it not for her inertial dampeners. She was on a test flight, putting a new model of Gravity Frame through its paces and trying to see how hard she could push the thing without actually wrecking it.
Just as she pulled out of her thirty-seventh barrel roll, she received a very unusual signal. It was composed entirely of quantum particles that seemed to materialize into existence without an apparent source; the particles exhibited properties similar to Cherenkov radiation. Their rhythm was far too regular to be cosmic background noise.
“What in the blazes?” she muttered, adjusting her Frame’s position for better reception. She quickly recognized artificial patterns present in the signal, indications of intelligence. It was a transmission arrayed in precise sequence, sent by someone who understood complex mathematics.
Sveta’s eyes widened as she recognized several of the patterns. “Hydrogen molecules? Prime numbers? What is this, a copy of the Arecibo message bounced off some distant pulsar? No, that doesn’t make sense. The Arecibo message doesn’t exist in this timeline…”
The transmission repeated three times, then abruptly halted. Sveta’s hyperprocessors went to work decoding it, performing in seconds what would have taken professional linguists decades to accomplish. She quickly discovered the signal resolved into basic binary code that formed pictographs.
And the things those pictographs depicted shocked Sveta to her computer core.
“This is… holy… Zehra needs to see this!” Sveta declared, quickly spinning up her reality furnace. A few moments later, with a flash of purple light and a twist of spacetime, she executed a precise warp jump back to Earth, bearing news from a distant star.