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From the mémoires of Avery d'Arc, Space Orc
GNACHOs: Gravitationally Negative Anomalous Compact Halo Objects.
That's what we called them at first.
They were just a hypothetical curiosity, until one of our deep space probes actually spotted something that matched the parameters. Then all bets were off and there was an avalanche of scientific papers. Most were wild guesses, some resurrecting long-discarded Kaluza-Klein models and other such oddities. Some managed to get parts of it right. Nobody expected them to be inhabited artificial bodies.
Stellar systems in general and planetary bodies in particular — especially those with conditions similar to one's home planet — had long been assumed to be the logically preferred habitat of any developing species. Some science fiction had posited viral lifeforms in Oort clouds and nebulae, some even going so far as to imagine life evolving within stars (or as stars) or on their surfaces or in their atmospheres, some even imagining such things going on at the crust of neutron stars and even within the accretion discs of black holes.
Turned out they were all wrong.
Not entirely wrong in the premise of life needing someplace to come into existence in the first place, no, but wrong about where it might choose to live.
Gravity wells are expensive. They bring in a fair amount of material over time, but at high speeds. This results in continuous bombardment, debris everywhere, and an uphill climb to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbors.
Explains why we never found no Dyson spheres, I guess, though Billie (my alien girlfriend, for those who don't know) insists that those are inherently unstable and ultimately just silly. So who said silly's a bad thing? C'mon, man — it'd be cool !
It's all in the psychology: only primitive hubris and lunatic species argue for the low-lying fruit of active galaxies and their supermassive black hole cores, brimming over with novae and supernovae on a monthly basis. Oh sure, it's fine if you shrug off lions, and tigers, and bears — but what if you don't hunt anything more dangerous than a head of lettuce? If your home world offered no greater threat than the philosophical shock of sunrise?
Living interstellar — or intergalactic, even better — keeps you far from any little issues that might come up. You want to go where the action is? The sprawling, bustling cosmic megalopoli? You go to the cosmic voids between superclusters. You live in some filthy, dangerous wild-land of galactic mass? You're risking your life every second you're there, and probably have more parochial taste than Plato's cave-dwellers.
Just to be on the safe side, they cocooned themselves within hills of gravitational repulsion, minimizing issues both with the Unruh effect and accelerated masses from any direction. Objects and waves of energy almost literally go out of their way to avoid you, whereas a gravitational well pretty much paints a target on your back. It also has the relativistic effect of watching the universe around you proceed at a slower pace than normal, kinda like watching something in a lower orbit near an event horizon: your own time marches along at a brisk pace1 when compared to relatively flat spacetime, permitting you the luxury of studying and adjusting for any outside contingencies well in advance of their arrival.
Combine that with the fact that they could turn stuff into relatively short-lived WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, one kind of “dark matter”) 'til it was far enough away again not to be a problem, and something like that for energy (I asked Billie if she meant that they turned radiation into dark energy, and she went on this really sweet but long-winded explanation that basically added up to “No, and here's why...”). OK, so maybe not — but don't tell me they don't have some kinda inside track on phantom energy, at least in some weird way local to themselves.
For centuries, we had watched the stars, sometimes picking up elusive hints of signals, but never localizing them, never drawing a plausible parallax, never spotting conclusive signatures of negative entropic processes or statistically significant radio emissions at any frequency.
We conjectured apes and angels — life out there being either insufficiently advanced to make such impacts, or so far advanced as to have become invisible to our analyses; we considered the Great Filter, killing species by various mechanisms. We came close with the Dark Forest scenario, but for the wrong reasons. They were hidden, but they weren't in hiding, or at least not from anyone else, just the deadly conditions that massive bodies engendered.
“Why didn't we at least hear 'em squawking? ” you ask?
We weren't listening. Simple as that.
It was right there, and we heard it all, but we didn't hear that there was any conversatin' bein' had. It was just so much random noise to us, like a large crowd's many conversations sounding like a flock of geese.
Any sufficiently advanced encoding and compression is indistinguishable from noise.
Once we finally realized where they were, thanks to Billie, it wasn't long before we at last established communications. It helped that she'd also shared the basics of her computer — that's about as accurate as calling it an abacus, since it works with a grain of sand frozen in time (she says it ain't, it's just sitting at a specific Planck moment and accessed with retrocausal transactional waves, but that sounds close enough to frozen time for me), giving it something like an exabyte or zetabyte of storage and processing (again, sorta: it takes time for it to do its job, but the answer's already there before you ask, and there's this weird feedback loop where you get the exact answer you want, because if you didn't, then you'd refine your question, and then that next answer replaces the first one... I dunno, somehow you end up asking a million questions at once, but never get around to asking any one of 'em in the first place) with all of the nucleons and electrons just sitting there and biding their time. Funny thing is how she wishes she had a collapsed membrane computer2 instead; I'm not real sure about the details, but I gather that it's a black hole about the same size (maybe a millimeter in radius), and somehow that means it can do a lot more with its total entropy (makes sense, I guess: it'd have about ten to the twenty-third or twenty-fourth kilograms in it, and that's a whole lot of grains of sand) — don't tell her this, but I'm plannin' on getting her one for our anniversary.
Anyway, the natives were friendly. They all were.
That made us a little nervous for a good while to come.
Eventually we figured out why.
They had no need of further resources, and we were technologically about as much of a threat to them as some horseshoe crabs in a Pacific atoll might be to us — and that was just the ones who were still at stages where interaction was even meaningfully possible for us. Others had already gone on to embedding themselves into M-space, sort of like uploading themselves as far as we could understand, and who knew (or could even guess at) what those before them might have gone on to by now. The explanation wasn't deflecting none, just difficult to interpret.
There were some species here and there who were more or less on our level, of course, it's just that nobody stayed there for very long once they'd dialed into the cosmic chat rooms.
That's where we came in.
The species at our level are less adapted to the universe. Or maybe we're over-adapted to Earth. Either way, we turned out to be like armored tigers in a landscaped lawn of hothouse flowers. They'll panic at a gentle breeze while we go swimming in hurricane tides and bask in radiation because it feels nice.
They have their issues at times, but they're alright. Mostly.
Some of them are obnoxious, but there's plenty of real estate for anyone who cares to bother.
All of that's yesterday's news though.
The real fun is just beginning, now that we can go to new places, poke things with sticks, and pet all kinds of small furry creatures!
Speaking of which, I'm glad Billie's ship has plenty of space. The tribbles are fixed, so that's no problem, but then there's Ryo-Ohki the cabbit, and the stellar-fish tank, the gemstone leaf-slug, Bob and Madge the skutters (semi-sentient mechanical life forms we saved from a derelict ship; they're more like mascots than pets), another tank with a pygmy jawanda3 (sort of ephemeral gossamer sheets that live way out in the galactic rim and soak up interstellar dust and stray light), some comet lobsters4 with their little sand castle and tunnels underneath, neutronium jellies, the new puppy5, and a few others...
Well, Billie's waiting for me. We have a candlelight dinner planned and a little “private time” together. And boy, lemme tell you: her food-o-matic6 can make things from thousands of worlds' cuisines, and even do a fair job with just descriptions (she also says that we should be able to get a good work-up from preserved genetic samples, and there are a few extinct species I wanna try); tonight is coquito, salmon and avocado involtini, some nice fat venison sirloins done rare in white wine and rendered lard, lime-drenched seared scallops with onions sautéed in a light syrup of brown sugar and paprika, wild rice with pecans, artichokes, chopped duck, and chorizo, and topping it all off with dessert is mint ice cream (she kinda caught a hankering for that particular “sweet deathworld torture-poison ” as she puts it, so it comes up a lot) over flan with mango flambé and vanilla fudge ice cream on the side. As good as that food-o-matic is (and believe me: it can take the worst ingredients and recipe and spit out an amazing dish), I can't wait to upload Earth's complete repertoire into it! Then there's this all-female Cat-girl species that she caught me eyeballing the other day — I wasn't thinkin' on them none, I swear — and she kind of decided to surprise me today with her little body-snatcher routine; turns out one of her friends, raʔûR (that's a trill at the start and a uvular at the end — you pick this up around a lot of weird alien lingoes), is a Cat-girl.
After that, we're looking ahead to this nice little vacation spot to explore. A bit of a wild world with miles-high mossy plateaus and hot springs that interconnect through a series of natural bridges over deep canyons filled with mist and some kind of ghostly flying carpet critters made of quasiparticles blipping in and out of existence. Should be a real kick. I don't know why nobody else ever wants to go there. Crazy aliens.
Signing off for now,
— Avery
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