[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

To make a long and very complicated story brief, over the course of a century or more, the Great Collective send additional machines to the other half of the binary system, using light-sails and the laser array orbiting its own star.

Individually, these payloads were relatively small, but the Great Collective sent hundreds of them, and when they arrived, they included robots that could engage in construction projects. Even with a seventy-day (or so) light lag, that was short enough a time that the Collective could somewhat supervise the work remotely, and it had gradually become very good at automation.

A second laser array was constructed near the other star, providing easier 'braking' power for the remaining payloads, eliminating the elaborate dance of secondary sails. The new laser array also made travel within the other star system far faster and easier. Further payloads arrived, bringing robots and equipment to survey the alien ruins that had been discovered, and within another Terran century or so, the Collective had learned much.

Through its robots, the Great Collective had studied the remains of machines abandoned megayears before and preserved by the utter cold. The Collective had sampled the strange life forms of the outermost planet, and learned something of their utterly alien biology. It student the samples of writing that it found, but though it could not read most of the strange scripts, it learned the mathematical symbols of the aliens, and some bits and pieces of the rest.

The Collective found that the outermost world did not match the usual composition of such bodies, or at least, what its planetological models suggested that composition should be. Worlds at that distance from their stars ‘ought’ to have been composed to a great extent of frozen volatiles, but this body was make mostly of rock and metal, though covered in helium oceans and layers of volatile ices.

Moreover, in studying the geology of the outer planet, the Collective discerned that the strange biosphere was not native to its world. At a point in the deep past, what had been an airless, dry ball of silicate rock had been transformed into what it now was, and that transformation had been, on the temporal scale of planetary evolution, very nearly instantaneous. It had probably taken no more than centuries, certainly no more than a thousand years of its own planet.

This led the Collective to reevaluate its knowledge about its own world. It had extensively studied its own planetary geology over the ages, of course, and its ‘ancestral’ collectives had done the same and passed down their knowledge to their globe-spanning descendant. It now concluded, however, that it had misinterpreted some of that knowledge.

In light of what it had learned from the other world, the Great Collective now concluded that the same thing was true of its own world. There was, throughout the ‘record of the rocks’ on its planet, indications of a sudden, massive discontinuity. It was much, much more recent than the one that had occurred on the other world. The helium-ocean world had been transformed well over half a gigayear in the past. The discontinuity on its own world, the Collective now estimated, had happened perhaps no more than ninety million local years before the present.

Still, the indications were that what had been a radically different world had been almost instantaneously, on a planetary scale, transformed. The Collective now calculated that what had been an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and methane and ammonia had been transformed into an envelope of nitrogen and oxygen. Surface temperatures had fallen by over one hundred degrees K, and atmospheric pressure had been reduced by a third. Furthermore, the Great Collective calculated that well over a billion cubic kilometers of water had been introduced as well, probably substantially more than that, allowing for crustal water. Even the rotation period of the planet appeared to have been sped up by a factor of perhaps four.

All this appeared to have occurred over a time period of, at most, one thousand local years, which was absolutely incredible to the Great Collective. There were indications, not certain but suggestive, that the time required might have been substantially less than that.

The indications had been glaringly present in the data all along, but the Collective, and its ancestral collectives, had failed to recognize it for lack of comparisons. Now, though, it had studied two worlds bearing life, albeit radically different kinds of life, and seen the same pattern in the data on both.

On its own world, shortly after the sudden discontinuity, signs of life appeared in the strata. Though the data were still far thinner for the other planet, what data it had gathered suggested the same pattern there: a lifeless world until a sudden transformation, followed by the sudden appearance of a complex biosphere made up of complex organisms.

The Collective and its ancestrals had some understanding of evolutionary principles, of course, but they had never really solved the transition problem. The fossil record on their world showed many sudden appearances of new life forms, new clades and classes, with no preliminary forms. It was possible to trace evolutionary changes within some lines, but the reason for the sudden, abrupt transitions so characteristic of the fossil record remained a mystery. [1]

Now the Great Collective began to consider a new possibility: that someone or something had intentionally transformed both planets, and seeded them with life in the deep past.

To be continued…


[1] In fact, the Eldren periodically had introduced new forms of life over the megayears, sometimes in large batches. Thus, the fossil record lacked not merely transitional species but entire transitional classes and orders.