44: FIRSTBORN

The long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle.

Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.

They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorous, in a young and energy-fat universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own.

The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to those left stranded between the dying protostars, it was a terrible abandonment.

And as they looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, as each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the debris of the last. There would come a day when there wasn’t enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star, and the last light flickered and died. Even after that it would go on, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.

Despite all their powers, they were not beyond the reach of time.

This desolating realization caused an age of madness. Strange and beautiful empires rose and fell, and terrible wars were fought between beings of metal and of flesh, children of the same forgotten world. The wars expended an unforgivable proportion of the Galaxy’s usable energy reserve, and had no resolution but exhaustion.

Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for an inevitable future, an endless future of cold and dark.

They returned to their abandoned machines of war. The ancient machines were directed to a new objective: to the elimination of waste—to cauterization, if necessary. Their makers saw now that if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest future, there must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.

The machines had been honed by a million years of war. They fulfilled their task perfectly, and would do so forever. They waited, unchanging, dedicated to a single purpose, as new worlds, and new life, congealed from the rubble of the old.

It was all for the best of intentions. The first ones, born into an empty universe, cherished life above all else. But to preserve life, life must sometimes be destroyed.