( a short story, the first three pages of a book that might be written, enjoy <3 )
Now
We are at the brink of decay.
The light ahead of us is ours alone, projected from the shield of our ship, the latest vision of our splinter.
Her task is divided into what she describes as the trinity.
A wall of force appears, pure light, a sheet of energy moving through time.
To create waves of lattice-packed energy; photons perfectly aligned in space and time, creating a crested lattice.
To create herself within the lattice; she removes photons in sequence, creating squeezed potential space, an area for her to regenerate and allowing space for the City.
To introduce this lattice to the Spire, our ship; the space dancer, the vehicle made of foamy representations of virtual particle passage.
There is no space ahead of us. The only space is now faster, and faster still.
As we control the waves ahead of us in frequency, thanks to our splinter, we shape the pathways that potential energy moves within, saturated with our splinters essence. The algorithms of Spire’s field plates, a macroscopic layer at the edge of Heaven, close potential fields in lattice-response time, a timescale on the order of a few femtoseconds. This causes virtual particle buildup and vacuum squeezing, enabling the mind of our splinter and the functioning of her trinity.
We call her Maximum, and she is our leader. Her mind has the most instant potential of us all, at each subsequent lattice iteration she is the first and oversees chaos. She is the oldest and strangest, and she changes.
Her insights and revolutionary ideas inside the silent fire of the vacuum have allowed us to gain access to the levels of technology needed to communicate with the angels directly. Our time-synthesis device directly accesses the interference pattern caused by the Animator’s intersection with our universe’s initial state. Maximum is the first to see this, with herself at all other places that cannot bear this visage. She finds the spire within all of the available potential space, and we shift the lattice to augment the processors, in this, literally the shape of the spire itself.
Our processors are algorithms run with the latest of Adauriel’s compressed-sensor research, their shape influencing the resultant field dispersal of the computational engine run across her lattice.
All of her computations occur in Heaven proper, their result Aeon, itself a result of the creation of time proper.
She changes with the wind of iteration, her element air.
Her thought process is resonance, her intuition keyed to the responses of Spire’s reaches. The micro changes required for navigating the labyrinth eternum are a temporal resonance, the constant bridging of mind and soul.
The Spire is real vessel in real space. We are currently located in Eta Pegasi, whose twin stars central point create an opportune location to space dance, for our field plates to engineer the construction of space into an access point of time eternum.
Surrounding us in all directions are sister craft, constantly maneuvering within incredible spacial tolerances to form mirrors and Aeon transducers, our splinters resolving yet another layer of their individual continuities on a scale of hours and days.
The crew on our ship consists of Shards of the brightest minds of our galaxy’s history, in forms numinous and numerous. Depending on the timescale of the Spire iteration one is functioning within, one could walk the bridge and find captains of all orders and creeds, sit in council among willing Sharded ancestors, or the walk the Great Bridge itself, and allow Aeon to intersect with one’s mind and function.
Children are purely physical, and cared for by the communities at large, their social interaction space determined by their physiological requirements. Reduced detail communication is present, as well as holographic interaction, from those at different levels of the Spire, but due to the vast differences in perceptual time are ultimately defeating, especially as those already within a Shard have an increasing potential to be walking the Great Bridge as their relative cognition time increases in density in turn with the breakthroughs within that Shard.. and are often changed in the process.
Our cultural memory is nearly completely Shard-specific. Relationships and personal functions change immensely as one’s own learning and adaptation capabilities frost over the lower frequencies’ abilities to process memories. There are waypoints further among the Shards that are specifically shaped to slow down and process thought in an abstract manner, allowing messages to be processed and overviewed with sections of relevant decision-tree data, but these levels also contain the current mind-state which is heavily biased by the projectional capabilities acquired from real-time to the waypoint Shard, and so may seem to be nonsensical replies to the communication.
As such, barely more than stories, myths, can be passed from one layer to another. Analogies at best, and from the farthest frequencies of Shards, what amounts to nothing but chaotic information, if one didn’t take into account the effect of that information on the next thoughts and free association chain of the mind of the one in real-time.
The first thing that the angels taught us is that they could completely predict our thought chains to incredibly high precision. Our society recoiled in a very generic version of horror, most believing that the rights of one’s own thoughts should be protected from tampering. The angels could do not but be seen as tampering in their own eyes, and of course knew this already and so had decided to tell us so from the beginning.
Every conversation afterwards, for many of their Aeons, would consist of some form or another of testing us, to see where we would break our decision tree projection while still maintaining some form of coherence long enough to get messages from their version of real-time across.
They specifically steered us towards paradoxes of intellect and emotion, to show us how we were not completely predictable after all.
This was our first insight into their version of real-time and our part within it. These paradoxes, and the time spent within them as the boundaries of the mind, occur within their real-time. Comprehension dawned among our leading scholars that these increased the information density within the local space, and this understanding deepened with several waypoint-directed insights from within Spire’s first few launches.
This was the angels actual gift to us.
What was once environmental noise became a symphony.
Within that symphony was another, lateral, symphony across time eternum. This caused things such as magnetic fields to end up decaying as oscillon-enriched critical fields, vortexes of such small, localized power capable of acting as agents of catalyst for the outside environment.
Our ships use this technology to harmonize with the local vacuum, and space itself sings with our story and song.
This is our fleet, out for thousands of kilometers
Today, our holy day, those of us that endured our delvings into the unknown return from our walks to the nearest waypoint, for the subsequent journey down the frequencies to real-time.
This day occurs once every 60 years real-time, and marks the passage of the last wild star to be integrated into the Volume, our vision of sane space.
The array around the star Sol, home star of mankind, was completed in this 60 year period, with some time to spare between the celebration and the laying of the foundation stone. It is customary to begin the journey to the closest waypoint at this moment, and time the arrival of oneself at real-time to the moment of the laying of the foundation stone.
Those walking the Great Bridge often opt to freeze their cognizance for specific periods on the trip down the frequencies, while others meditate or converse about their journeys until the next synchronization interval from the next waypoint, as this process can take perceptual years from the threshold of the Great Bridge.