The Worldbuilder's Journal

Baro was wan­der­ing in the Con­trol Cen­ter alone. By the look on his face, I could tell the Medan had never seen a Liv­ing Ker­nel before. That wasn’t unex­pected, since all of their DIVE ships were oper­ated by arcai. Nev­er­the­less, no arcai can catch up with soma and our ships are the most reli­able in the whole Com­mon­wealth. Soma does not make mistakes.

Soma was also the rea­son we retained the dom­i­nant influ­ence in every field of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and econ­omy. This bal­ance of pow­ers kept the Com­mon­wealth pros­per­ous and rel­a­tively peace­ful for thou­sands of years.

Our trou­bles began when a huge armada of Explorer ships dis­ap­peared while on a long-term mis­sion. When those same ships unex­pect­edly reap­peared sev­eral hun­dred years later, they brought some­thing or, rather, some­one, back with them. Since that day, the whole Galaxy has been engulfed in blood and ter­ror. For the time being, only a hand­ful of worlds on the out­skirts sur­vived. But they were going to be destroyed even­tu­ally, along with our home world.

In the blink of an eye numer­ous Nua colonies were left dev­as­tated and no one knew what was going on. No one was prepared.

All major ken­nar, includ­ing ours, gath­ered their forces and sent arcai to start a mas­sive con­struc­tion very far away. This is how Kan Diona was born. The rest of us were hold­ing against the unknown enemy, while every nation, all that remained of the enor­mous Com­mon­wealth, was evac­u­at­ing there. Not all of them, how­ever, made it in time.

Medas was one of such worlds, with their sys­tem fleet destroyed and no one to help while the pop­u­la­tion was being devoured by Hunters. Since there is no soma in the Medan blood, Har­vesters prob­a­bly weren’t inter­ested in them. But our pres­ence could attract them here, pos­si­bly already did. And if some­one indeed sur­vived on Medas, the suc­cess rate of such a res­cue oper­a­tion is still zero, sim­ply because all pre­vi­ous attempts in other sys­tems failed.

When the Hunters run out of food, they relo­cate to the next hab­world like a plague, but an intel­li­gent plague with space­ships. We know too lit­tle about them, except the fact that their tech­nol­ogy and power are far supe­rior to the most of the Com­mon­wealth. Still, we have one clue about the Har­vesters ori­gin: some­thing called Alima Ēni, a dis­tant and long for­got­ten mem­ory, sleep­ing in our soma. Some­thing nobody would want to remem­ber, if they could, like those with­out soma.

The enemy of our Ances­tor. And the very rea­son we exist.

Since ancient times the Danna had not favored con­tact; it was never peace­ful for us, bring­ing only destruc­tion and death, drag­ging us down into blood­lust and dark­ness of mind. Despite that, we were always semi-nomadic, trav­el­ing between places, explor­ing the world.

At the dawn of our civ­i­liza­tion we shared the planet with another intel­li­gent, only younger species, genet­i­cally very close to us. How­ever, they had denied soma, try­ing to erase it from exis­tence along with us. Heav­ily out­num­bered, we fought back, and we con­quered the oppres­sors. Although their num­bers were more than fifty times greater than ours when the slow assim­i­la­tion began, within a few gen­er­a­tions after the war soma has taken over all of their blood­lines, favor­ing our kind and adding only a few traits from the once dom­i­nant species into our genome. Now all is left of them are light skin, brown or golden eyes, or blond hair here and there. And those with­out soma even­tu­ally died out. But not every­one was able to keep soma until today. Those became Tue Nua.

Though not a liv­ing thing, soma is very car­niv­o­rous. It pro­tects what it wills to pro­tect, it feeds on what is in the way. We wanted to sur­vive and soma had granted our wish. Nei­ther soma, nor we desire destruc­tion. Our mutual ambi­tion is to travel among the stars in search of our Ances­tor to con­tinue our jour­ney by His side. Our ulti­mate goal.

Count­less mem­o­ries of things that existed before us were inher­ited along with soma. Even Somg, our Ances­tor, is one of them. We wouldn’t chase mem­o­ries if they were only things of the past, but soma had accu­mu­lated infor­ma­tion about our own peo­ple, who once were real liv­ing, breath­ing beings. Our tech­nol­ogy was born from those inmost mem­o­ries. This is why we are sure every­thing we dream of is or was real.

Soma is our gate­way to the immense Uni­verse that con­tin­ues end­lessly beyond things like space and time.

We want to know. We want to know who we are and what we are capa­ble of.

I want to know.

And yet we were dragged into another war. Another seem­ingly inevitable and grue­some legacy, passed down along with soma.

Before our beloved Sla was born, one of the Ancestor’s kin, fac­ing anni­hi­la­tion of her Moth­er­world, had sac­ri­ficed her soma and sent it to a world no one would find too soon. That soma con­tained all infor­ma­tion about her peo­ple. Arriv­ing to our home sys­tem at its birth, it seeded a young planet and had slept within every liv­ing thing, wait­ing for life to evolve towards intel­li­gence. And when first intel­li­gent life arose, soma fully activated.

That life was us.

Reluc­tantly, we had already accepted every chal­lenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least some­one very sim­i­lar to us, already died once, long ago in a far­away place.

But could some of His direct descen­dants have sur­vived somewhere?

Copy­right © 2012, Jelena Mosto­vaja. All rights reserved.

The infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Tele­scope of the Helix Neb­ula. So far, the Helix neb­ula is one of only a few dead-star sys­tems in which evi­dence for comet sur­vivors has been found. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.

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