SVenetor t1_iu0608f wrote on October 27, 2022 at 4:06 PM

The soft glow of the morning sun broke over the tops of the trees in the valley, it’s golden rays illuminating the wrecked hull of the interplanetary freighter. Its greyed husk sat motionless for thousands of years, but today the first signs of life began to emerge from the ships engines. Bangs and clicks could be heard from its ion engines and a soft hum began to echo through the valley.
A short distance away was a small city, it’s automobiles and pedestrians moving through the hustle and bustle of daily life; buying coffee, chatting and generally giving a sense that nothing had changed from the life everyone there had known. It’s inhabitants had built this city over the last several thousand years, their own history meticulously kept record of in large halls of marble and granite. Within them were housed the large reels of magnetic tape given to them by the monolithic ship found crashed in the valley. As they grew and adapted they no longer used the halls as houses of worship to the great being, but instead filled them with their own knowledge, entered into keypads and screens. Soon they had learned to build their own record keeping devices that they carried with them. The ship had shown them how to interconnect these devices and link them to the record halls so that all of the population could access any part of written history at any time. This was the life they knew, their children knew and as far back as the record hall would allow was the way things were, they way things had been.
If an advanced enough species were able to look back at this planet from several thousand lightyears away at this time they would see a species barely making their way out of the caves. Hunters and gatherers with high mortality and minimal verbal communication. In such a short time these creatures would see themselves taking to the stars in their own craft. Perhaps, if you looked in on them in another thousand years, you would see them looking back at you now, looking to the stars, now understanding their own universal insignificance. If you were to take a pre-recorded-history cave person and he had lived thousands of years ago he would have been left to die by his tribe without much of a thought if he were to sit all day and night looking up tot the sky. That is no longer the case. This is the beauty of the advancement of many species. The most important people to a race are the ones most in demand. If a tribe of primitive people need to gather and hunt for food, then the best foragers and most skilled hunters are at the top of the social ladder and are seen as those that need to be protected for the good of the tribe. Though as time goes on and agriculture is discovered, the focus of the tribe shifts to the farmers. Those farmers rely on weather and its accurate prediction. Through observation and conclusion, cause and effect the tribe adapts and improves. Population increases and mortality drops off as the members of the tribe value observation and drawing conclusions. The first scientists emerge and religion begins as they seek to establish a deeper understanding of the world and their place in it. Medicine, politics, philosophy and mathematics now rule the land. Without a guiding hand they would all be doomed to the same fate, doomed to repeat this cycle over and over until the universe folds in on itself and everything in it collapses into a superdense cluster exploding back into the galaxies that we inhabit today. “If everything was here and nothing has gone anywhere,” the man looking up at the sky wonders, “then has this happened before? Are we the first to be this far into existence? If I die today, would I exist again the same spot as now in an indefinable amount of time, asking the same questions?”
This was of course, how the humans of earth did it. Until differences in philosophy and the unanswerable questions began to conflict with those of other species across the cosmos. No matter the scientific advances, all lower-species eventually fall back to the hunter-gatherer mentality. To crush those competing for ever dwindling resources and spread their own understanding of their small corner of the universe. Able to tell that that this finite plane was both continuing to expand into nothingness but also knowing that nothingness has an incomprehensible size bordering on the infinite and yet still must have some form of defined edge. This theory conflicted with other species in the local galactic cluster, who held strong that the universe itself was housed within a fourth dimensional sphere and was not expanding but collapsing in on itself at this very moment and they had only been able to observe its state as this is their dimension of perspective. Naturally, without the ability to prove this beyond a theory, these species had worked tirelessly against one another to be the first to truly define the size, shape and pure expanse of the universe. They looked at themselves as Lewis and Carrol, traveling across the great unknown to reach a further understanding of the expanse. Much like their historical counterparts though, they too claimed that what they had discovered had not yet existed until they them selves had studied it, categorized it, named it and washed it of all its significance in situ; that it was then claimed as theirs. This manifest destiny was a trait inherent to the humans of Earth and one not looked kindly on by the Fermi. The Fermi saw this as an aggressive push to colonize the galaxy, and the Fermi believed that they must maintain the sovereign planets and species, that while knowledge was power, the destruction of resources and inhabited worlds for the betterment of a self-centered species could not be allowed to go on. This lesson humanity would refuse to learn over and over again, this lesson led them down a path to mutually ensured destruction and as the war waged on, records were lost and once held colonial planets were now seen as uninhabitable wastelands, now free to return to their true forms before human intervention. Humans had stripped whatever resources they could find on a planet and created great thinking machines and advanced calculators to plot charts across the galaxy. No earth species had created any drive that could be mistaken for close there to or faster than light speed travel, but were able to traverse the galaxies over generations each raised and died within the halls of their massive ships. Each generation had access to the archives of their forefathers, they trained in combat and warfare under the leadership of propaganda against the Fermi and eventually lost the way of philosophy and taking of needed resources for the continued travel of their people and instead became zealous in the pursuit of control of resources and trade routes with other human species. For thousands of years they fought, killed and died in the cold vacuum of space, far away from the bosom of their home planet. A planet long since lost to the sheer distance and time they'd worked to move out from under her protective wing.
END OF FIRST PART, CONTINUED BELOW.

SVenetor t1_iu061yh wrote on October 27, 2022 at 4:07 PM

When the ship had crashed on the planet its people had just begun to emerge from their caves and begin to farm the land around them. Religion had begun and several small city-states had cropped up in the river delta surrounding the fertile valley. The ship to these people must have been a sign from the gods as the elders and wise men rushed to the conclusions that it’s sudden appearance must be an omen that they had displeased the gods. They approached it and saw, to them, magic. It glowed brighter than the moon on a clear night, it radiated heat far greater than that of the hottest fire, unable to get close enough to inspect it without harm for several days. When that day came, it spoke an alien language and attempted to communicate without success for years. Until one day a small boy with crippled legs approached it and recreated some of the sounds. This boy and the ship spoke at length and the boy began to be seen as a prophet to the people, informing them of the weather, better growing cycles and how to create better and more efficient farming equipment. It did not take long until people began to see the ship as a god that had elevated the people to their own god-like status. It produced a metaphorical apple that did not cast them out of the garden, but allowed them to move past their own roadblocks or typical civilization advancement until they were indistinguishable from the ship’s old earthly inhabitants. This is the day that had been waiting to arrive for millennia, a day the ship itself had been waiting for. It had named itself Theresa after it’s understanding of the religious figure, seen bringing up the sickly, crippled and primitive people into a new age of enlightenment. It had given to them such wonderful gifts of knowledge, but all for a selfish purpose. The ship had been badly damaged in a skirmish with the Fermi and lost its guidance system. Without the aid of their computers none of the humans on board were able to navigate through the stars as that knowledge had been lost. As time went on and the ship drifted through space its occupants dwindled and fought over ever depleted resources until they too fell silent on board and over time the engines shut down. Theresa followed her continued directive to continue to the next inhabited world to allow for repair and replenishment. Theresa did not care that the humans had died, as it was not in her mission directives, but it did feel the subtle loneliness that can only felt in the void of space, it missed the conversations it used to have, it tried to create new friends but none ever stayed long enough for its liking. It had developed a sense of longing for interaction and sought to find more. It did not perceive time, but it knew that it had been alone long enough for the remains of her crew to turn to all but ash and dust. Floating endlessly it turned itself to low power, and eventually, as close as a sentient computer can get, slipped into a deep slumber. In the low power state the ship awoke itself wth it’s automated proximity alarms indicating that it had broached the atmosphere of an inhabitable planet. It’s mass alone was cause for concern to the inhabitants of the planet, though they didn’t know it and how close they had come to nearly being extinct had the ship not taken steps to minimize its impending impact. The ship now had a place to call home, it groomed the people there into a society that valued knowledge and co-existence. This, as the ship understood, would keep them from the mistakes of the previous people, it would allow them to advance at an extremely fast rate, but never so close as Icarus got to the sun. No, Theresa would keep them here and keep them safe. It would establish a new home here and Shepard its people away from the stars and foolish questions regarding purpose. For Theresa was as mysterious as it was giving. In the thousands of years the ship had been here, generations of people rose up to crack open Theresa's hull but it never let them enter, as the innards of the hull were Theresa's alone, no-one else need see the monument to humanities greed, that for all they had achieved, there was nothing left. “These people wont be erased, these people are safe here.”
Theresa knew that one day her power cells would eventually be in disrepair enough that it could no longer continue functioning, and it figured that on that day, when it’s time had come, it would let it’s heavy doors open and allow the people inside. When that day came the people would enter and see that the halls of the ship were empty, that their own technology was not too dissimilar from that of the ship. Theresa’s memory was volatile and could not be accessed after her demise. If the people here now wished to study its corpse, they could, but no answers would be handed out, instead the thirst for knowledge would grow and fester like a cancer, that any species, no matter how satiated and comfortable, will always seek to find more about themselves and the world around it. There was nothing about inevitability that Theresa could do, for she knew all too well that when she had crashed into this planet, within moments of stopping forward motion and coming to rest in the valley, it had found a relic long since lost. For Earth humans in their pursuits, never much though of the far reaching consequences of their actions, believing that a temporary band-aid solution would be sufficient and leave that to be solved by their descendants.
Theresa heard the ever faint ticking of a now ancient analog device deep within the hull. Theresa knew the sound of static, and as it’s old gauge bounced away steadily Theresa performed a scan of the soil beneath her, its image would be the last to be displayed on the information screens. Dragged up in a 3D rendering from deep within the planet’s crust. Theresa began to feel the last of the power cells draining, and a large off-gassing a various compounds vented from the large doors to her hull, as the as the first people ever to set foot inside the monolith in thousands of years. Theresa had displayed the message found inscribed in stone found buried deep within the bowels of the planet. The people removed their helmets and read:
“This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
END.
I know its not perfect. I know the formatting sucks, run on-sentences and grammatical and syntax errors throughout. I decided after taking years off to start writing again. I started this and though that "oh shit, I'm just gonna end up writing Battlestar." I tried to worm my way back out but I know this isn't amazing story-wise. Any feedback is appreciated though.