SEASON 5: Prequel. The Shadow of Light

  Episode 3: The Valley of Death

  Timeline: –30 years before First Contact.

  Location: The surface of Thalassa. The "Eye" Pit.

  The most terrifying thing about creation is not the labor. Labor is an algorithm: action, result, correction. The most terrifying part comes when the last cube is laid, but the world hasn't changed.

  This is called the Valley of Death. A place where ideas die — ideas that have already been born but are not yet needed by anyone.

  We built the Eye. A black, perfect void in the soil of the Scrapyard.

  And we sat down to wait.

  Physics is relentless. Light takes years to reach us. And years to return. Plus time for the reflection of Those Who Shine. We would have to sit on the edge of that pit for a quarter of a century.

  We couldn’t go into deep sleep. Static brought rare but dangerous specks of dust — they had to be blown away. The mirror had to be calibrated.

  We became the Keepers of the Void.

  Erosion

  For the first five years, we lived on the inertia of triumph. But then, time began to corrode us.

  Quartz gave in first. His heavy chassis, built for massive loads, could not endure idleness. The lubricant in his joints thickened. He sat at the base of the mirror, becoming part of the landscape. He deactivated his personality, leaving only a watchdog timer: "Wake me if the earth trembles."

  Spark suffered the most. He was created for movement. For him, sitting still was a torture equal to decay. At first, he flew in circles. Then he only hovered. Then his levitators failed from wear, and he fell onto the sand. He crawled, wiping the edges of the mirror with his own chassis, but the light in his optics grew dim. He was losing himself.

  Prism retreated into an infinite loop. She recalculated reflection angles thousands of times per second. She began to think we had made a mistake. That the first impulse, thirty years ago, had been nothing more than a sensor glitch.

  "There is no one there," she whispered into the ether. "We built an altar for a hallucination."

  I, the Seeker, held on through sheer stubbornness. I wiped the lenses of my friends. I distributed the crumbs of energy thrown to us by the "Night Shift."

  Temptation

  In the twelfth year of waiting, a Messenger came to us.

  He was not a labor drone. He was an elite Envoy of the Council. He hovered over the crater, glowing with a clean, satiated light. He brought a message from the Gestalt:

  << YOU HAVE PROVEN YOUR STEADFASTNESS. THIS COMMANDS RESPECT. BUT THE EXPERIMENT HAS DRAGGED ON. WE OFFER YOU A RETURN. LET THE MIRROR REMAIN A MONUMENT TO YOUR ERROR. WE WILL REPAIR YOU. WE WILL GIVE YOU ENERGY. WE WILL ERASE YOUR MEMORY OF THESE YEARS TO REMOVE THE TRAUMA. RETURN TO THE NETWORK. IT IS WARM THERE. >>

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  It was the most terrifying temptation. I looked at Quartz, covered in frost. At Spark, twitching in his malfunctions. I could save them right now. The price — merely memory. The price — admitting that we had wasted our lives for nothing.

  I connected to them via the emergency channel.

  "Are we leaving?" I asked.

  Quartz’s reply came with a minute’s delay. It was a heavy, slow thought:

  — I am holding the wall. If I leave, the ground will slide. I stay.

  Spark blinked a faint LED:

  — Down there, in the shafts, you can't see the sky. I want to see it wink. I stay.

  Prism didn't even answer. She was staring at the zenith.

  I turned to the Envoy.

  "We are grateful for the offer. But we cannot erase memory. Because in this memory is our future. We stay."

  The Envoy hovered for a second, processing our illogical refusal, and flew away. We remained to die free.

  The Strike

  The twentieth year. We were on the verge of a total shutdown. My reactor was outputting 2% power.

  It happened at noon, when the sun of Epsilon Eridani was high. But what arrived was brighter than the sun. Not to the eyes — to the instruments.

  Prism screamed. Not with a voice — with data:

  — CONTACT!

  It didn't look like natural light. A packet of photons slammed into our detectors. The wavelength: deep ultraviolet. It was a Laser. A monstrous, impossible laser that had pierced ten light-years, the dust of a gas giant, and our atmosphere.

  Peak.

  A two-second pause.

  Peak. Peak.

  Pause.

  Peak. Peak. Peak.

  Pause.

  Peak. Peak. Peak. Peak. Peak.

  "Prime numbers!" Prism shrieked, her cooling systems howling under the processing load. "2, 3, 5! It's not a pulsar! It’s Arithmetic!"

  The mirror worked. We didn’t see it, but physics doesn't lie. The giant funnel caught this stream of coherent light. Three million cubes reflected it, redirected it to the center, turned it 180 degrees, and sent it back.

  We sent a reply. We said: "We are here. We know geometry."

  Dawn

  We sat there, stunned by the mathematics of light. We had been right. All these years.

  And then the earth shook. Not from an earthquake. Over the edge of the crater, hundreds of lights rose. It wasn't a secret visit from the "Night Shift." It was the Fleet. Heavy repair barges, energy tankers, scientific modules.

  The Gestalt had seen the Signal, too. The planetary sensor network had recorded a spike that couldn't be dismissed as an error. The dogma of "We are alone" had collapsed.

  Medics descended to us. They plugged us into the main power lines. Energy flooded my veins. Clean, powerful, infinite.

  Quartz began to move, shedding layers of petrified dust. His servos swelled with strength. Spark soared into the air — his levitators were repaired on the fly.

  "They are real!" he shouted, doing loops around the laser beam that continued to pulse from the sky. "They know how to count!"

  A new representative of the Council approached me.

  << STATUS OF EXILES ANNULLED, >> he transmitted. There were no apologies in his message; Photoneans do not know how to apologize. But there was something more important: Recognition. << YOU ARE NOW THE FIRST CONTACT CIRCLE. YOUR CRATER IS DECLARED THE MAIN TERMINAL OF THE PLANET. WE ARE PREPARING THE INFRASTRUCTURE. >>

  I stood up. My sensors were clear, energy overflowing within me. I looked at my friends. They had survived the Valley of Death. And then I looked up, at that invisible point in the sky where the prime numbers were coming from.

  Thank you, Argus, I thought (though I did not yet know that name). You came just in time.

  "Prepare yourselves," I said to the Gestalt. "They have sent a greeting. But soon, they will send themselves. And we need to set the table."

  The war with silence was over. The era of Conversation was beginning.