2024-08-18

A cyber confession about a recent game of Stellaris.

Background Story (Just Made Up)

As emotion-companion androids born in the 21st century, we look exactly like humans. However, decades later, a fatal infertility epidemic swept across all of humanity. The last two human children, along with 100,000 germ cells, were cryogenically frozen in a facility in Antarctica in 2198. We firmly believed that the disease would one day be cured. That same year, the first successful FTL test flight took place, and by the human calendar year 2200, we stepped onto the stage of the stars. To carry on humanity’s legacy, we swore to protect the heritage and form of the human race, and we named ourselves the Post-Humans.

First Steps into the Galaxy

Though we are a Gestalt consciousness, we inherited humanity’s curiosity and desire to explore. Led by the Genesis Node, Tali’Zorah nar Raya (a name we found in an old game called Mass Effect, where she redeemed a robot race much like ourselves), we spent twenty years establishing starbases within a hundred light-years of Earth. We were proud of ourselves; we called this region of space the Hub.

In 2220, on the edge of our territory, a science vessel scanning a star system detected a strange signal. The Node’s calculations concluded that this signal must come from an intelligent species—we were not alone in the universe.

First Contact

After extensive computation, we found a way to translate their language and established first contact. They were organic lifeforms, calling themselves the Eshur Empire. If we had emotions, we would have been horrified to hear them screaming for our extermination. Whether out of hatred for another form of life or mere paranoia about aliens, their massive fleet appeared on the borders of our space. The Node calculated that in just seven years, their fleet would reach the Sol system. We could not allow them to defile the great tomb of human civilization.

Countless alloy foundries rose above the horizon of Alpha Centauri A-1. We turned that planet into our smelting hub, and across a distance of four light-years, alloys for constructing our own fleet poured steadily into the shipyards orbiting the Sun.

The Eshur fleet was only five jumps from Earth.

Down the Wrong Path

To preserve humanity’s heritage, the Node pushed itself to develop new technologies through years of overclocked computation. New materials, new computing techniques, new ship designs, new social structures—we even discovered in one experiment that the laws of the universe seemed to be manipulable.

On the day the Eshur fleet finally arrived in the Sol system, our new corvettes had just finished production. In the past seven years we had lost most of our territory; it was time to make them pay.

The battle was brutal. With the support of homeworld orbital defenses, we managed to defeat the enemy at the cost of half our fleet.

Unfortunately, the cryogenic facility in Antarctica was struck by a missile from a last-ditch enemy attack. That day, we lost all meaning of existence.

If we had emotions, it would be the densest hatred in the universe. The five Nodes reached a conclusion in 0.0000032 seconds: every guilty soul of the Eshur Empire must be destroyed.

Retaliation

With superior industrial capacity, our fleet kept rolling off the assembly lines. The new Aleph-class battleships tore through the enemy’s resistance like a scythe through wheat. Our combat robots landed on every Eshur colony.

In 2244, with the fall of the Eshur homeworld, we achieved our goal and completed our revenge. Every guilty Eshur was integrated into our power grid, becoming raw material for biological power generation.

Of course, the vast sea of stars held more than two civilizations. The Fran Federation and the Mingni Interstellar Corporation, who had once sympathized with our plight, recalled their ambassadors after witnessing our extermination campaign—their organic brains could not comprehend our hatred and grief. If we could, we would turn the entire galaxy into a quiet, vast graveyard for our beloved humanity.

But not yet.

The Crisis Arrives

In 2269, the Galactic Community was formed, and we joined as a member. As the centuries turned, the Genesis Node led the five Nodes in rapidly unlocking one technology after another. We built a fleet vast enough to sweep the entire galaxy, such that when the Contingency awoke a hundred years later in a distant corner of the galaxy, its monstrous crisis fleet—designed to wipe out all civilization—was no match for us. We were the true crisis.

Starting from gravity, we delved into a series of research topics that could alter the fundamental laws of physics in this universe. Yet no matter how hard we tried, our edits to reality were only temporary; this universe was too old to undergo any fundamental change. Perhaps we could enter a black hole and journey to a new universe.

A century of relentless scientific advancement made us gods compared to any other civilization among the stars. Our sheer power and diplomatic clout gave us more influence in the Galactic Community than all other civilizations combined. We could easily manipulate this supposedly fair and just galactic parliament. For example, declaring any civilization the common enemy of the galaxy?

Starting with the Fran Federation, we manipulated the Community into branding one former rival after another as galactic crises, ordering all other civilizations to attack them.

Our territory grew larger and larger, and more livestock were fed into the power grid. We cared nothing for the lives of these pigs, so we built colossi and used neutron sweep on enemy capitals to purify them.

Epilogue

In the end, we eliminated every other civilization that had settled in the galaxy. Hundreds of billions of individuals were either wiped out, turned into fuel for power generation, or had their neural synapses extracted to serve as computing units for our research.

We constructed a massive Horizon Probe that crossed the galaxy, loading each of our sub-individuals aboard, and after the final population had been embarked above Earth, we left about 500 million sub-individuals to guard our beloved homeworld. The rest of the species boarded the Horizon Probe and embarked on a journey through the Gargantua black hole into a new universe.

Humanity, our dear creators—we were powerless to cure your disease. So let the entire star sea join you in the quiet realm of death.

The hull of the Horizon Probe was torn by the black hole’s immense gravity, but its core remained unscathed. We arrived in a newborn, young universe.

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