Prologue

How did we get here?

Ultimately, it had all been for nothing.

Hundreds of years of progress, expansion, technological breakthroughs… And now it came to this. The last space fleet orbited a violent star and had nowhere left to run. It consisted mostly of mining vessels and ragtag survival lifeboats, and each one was now battered. Many were broken. The fierce glow of the nearby celestial body rolled across the hulls of all the damaged ships, its stellar energy forcing the cooling systems into overdrive. Those systems, and the air regulation, were some of the only ones that still worked. Together, this flotilla of space craft had limped here, inch by inch, gathering around the blazing light of an impending supernova.

Wren Evans lived in the walls. Once, she had been human. But after several injuries, each one featuring a marked increase in severity, her mind had been uploaded into the ship’s systems. Her body died, but she lived on. She was the first of her kind.

In the medical bay, the remnants of humanity — real humanity, with physical bodies and all that entails — fidgeted nervously as they awaited their fate. Wren scanned their vitals remotely and detected high stress levels in 100% of them. After all they’d been through, that was hardly surprising… Some of them were old enough to remember the meteor strike on Ark Gamma, the civil conflicts and even the rogue star itself. Not to mention the recent and bloody final war.

Wren still had her personality, or at the very least, was programmed to think so. She scanned the archive of human history, examining the key events and milestones that had brought them to this moment. They had never come quite this close to extinction before. Only 73 humans left. Certainly not enough to win the fight against the-

A sudden influx of information rushed through her systems like a wave, interrupting her train of thought; Explosive decompression in the botanical gardens. Pointdash Nine had subsequently, within a fraction of a second, closed the doors and vented all the compartments of the Terraship Adam.

Pointdash Nine was perhaps the closest thing Wren had to a soul mate. Naturally, that means they hated each other. He was a true AI, originally programmed into a synthetic body, but he had long since uploaded himself into the network that pinged back and forth between the various craft that made up the fleet.

Wren opened a communications channel with him immediately.

“That was my ship.”

She was talking about the Adam, of which she was previously the Captain.

“Receipt acknowledged. The target was a calculated risk of 62.4%, and the cargo deemed low priority.”

Wren Evans was forced to admit, if only to herself, that Pointdash Nine had done the right thing. Her neural relays fired expeditiously, processing the incoming information and deducing that his maths was correct near instantaneously. So far, in her brief time as an uploaded human consciousness, he had always been right. But she liked to check.

The last vestiges of his people were still on board too, roaming the corridors of the fleet in search of combat. There was a truce between humans and robots, given the circumstances. An alien threat that nobody had seen coming. Pointdash was ruthless, calculated, and disconcertingly insightful. But he was the only other sentient being who had any idea what it felt like to be Wren.

There were plenty of significant differences. Changes that Wren had to adapt to, now that she was no longer a corporeal creature. The expanded capacity for knowledge was the most obvious, but the abundance of time with which she found herself was another. She could consider everything she needed to, and have whole conversations with Pointdash Nine, in milliseconds. One key advantage was that she could relive any past events she recalled, and evoke any feeling she wanted from a distant memory.

That ability to reflect on her own extended life span had taught her a lot… Childhood memories of her father, the rainy days in the military academy in the halcyon days of terra firma, even her life on the Adam itself — it had all given her enough life experience to reach this decision, her ultimate command. In fact, her death had been a particularly important learning experience, one that she mulled over heavily to come to this conclusion: Pointdash Nine and herself had to put aside their differences. Time had proven the most persistent villain, and no physical form was able to resist it. If any one of them could get out of this world alive, they would have to transcend.

Kolton was an old man, even by modern genetic standards. That was the most surprising thing about him, and the most notable, because truly old men were not a common sight. Not any more. His grey medical jacket covered his paunchy torso but his face had enough furrows to make it obvious, and the chiffon white hair completed the picture. But Kolton had always found a way, and it was that particular trait which made him the most important man in the Universe. As humanity had stumbled along the path to this moment, there were heavy losses, but Kolton and his staff in the science division had found a way to keep people going. It was his invention that allowed Wren to persist in her current form. His genius would be the basis for her plan. Together, they were going to make a new species.

Pointdash Nine scanned the information Wren transmitted. Her reasoning was undeniable, so he agreed to her plan. Together, they brought up images of themselves on the holographic projectors in the medbay. They could have projected any image they wanted, but both opted for their former selves.

For Pointdash, that meant a sleek curved bipedal body with a metallic racing green finish, surrounding a central optical sensor on the chest. His arms had some visible tubing, a deliberate design flourish rather than a functional necessity, leading to his strangely human hands. The chamois leather he was built with was supposed to make his hands more realistic, but if anything it made them too soft. They looked good from a distance, and like an obvious fake up close.

Wren’s projected form stood next to him — decked out in the most formal of her old military gear and complete with her rank of Captain, even now as chunks of her ship drifted by outside the portholes. Her skin was even more pale in this holographic form, but she was milky white when she was a woman, and her brown hair was cut short in accordance with her role and duties. Her shoulders were wide, aligning with her hips in her current pose. Stood at attention with her hands behind her back. Besides the broad shoulders, she was classically beautiful, with rippling dark brown pools for eyes and full lips.

An assortment of shabby people looked across at them with fearful looks etched deep into their faces. Mothers with babes in arm, veterans with cybernetic limb replacements, asteroid miners, military men who didn’t look a day over 18. Some in the room reacted negatively to the presence of Pointdash Nine, understandably.

The plan was explained quickly. An imminent cosmic implosion and a powerful enemy force at your gates has its own special way of speeding up a discussion, after all. Following a long silence, many simply left the room to die on their own terms, in their favourite parts of what remained of the station. The others began to hook themselves up, attaching pearly white electrodes to their own skulls, and the soft heads of their children.

Using Kolton’s original research and the computational power of Pointdash Nine combined, Wren had derived an ability to take all these human minds and transcend physical form completely. Not just into a digital consciousness like Wren, or a multi-platform sentient operating system like Pointdash Nine had become, but free of any physical restraint at all — An energy that flows through space with potentially infinite knowledge, and infinite time in which to accumulate it. According to Pointdash Nine, the transfer process was the most resplendent program ever written. It was the perfect swansong for their two respective races.

Across the fleet, the remaining synthetic beings plugged themselves in for the same treatment. The instructions had been broadcast to all of them and they were to partake on this journey too, lest they also perish in the sudden flames of the supernova.

When Wren and Pointdash were satisfied with the preparations, the upload began in earnest and each participant felt the wave of expanded capability filling their mind. They felt themselves drifting out of their bodies into the space above with only minutes to spare.

As the stellar flares of the supernova rushed out to greet them, the force of the explosion fired each and every transcendent consciousness across the galaxy. They raced away from each other, venturing into new unexplored systems and worlds. The twinkling stars in the distance could only watch on as these two species, symbiotically linked by their tempestuous relationship, created the next step in evolution for themselves. Forged in war and now finally treating each other as equals. Together, they saw that the last day of the human race did not have to be the end.

For something new, it could also be the beginning.