The berries were red. Really red. Even now that my vision was restricted to the paltry spectrum perceivable by biological human eyes, almost preternaturally red. I vaguely remember accessing that bright colors were nature’s signal to would-be consumers that this was a dangerous thing to eat, and most self-respecting herbivores would probably leave well alone. However, needs must, and thinking back over the past few hours, I felt pretty needy.
It had all started with what seemed a promising discovery. I’d registered anomalous density and magnetic readings buried just below the surface in some ruins, that were still somehow giving at least a vague impression of buildingness after nearly a million years of neglect. The ruins on Xanos V had been recently discovered by a team from the Institute doing routine data analysis of orbital scans.
The galaxy is a big place, but with automated probes replicated at a rate of several per hour and seeded across near-galactic space continuously for the past 50 or so years, there was a lot of data now available. Of course, we’ve known for a long time that planets are extremely common, but it turns out that life is also almost a certainty given a few initial conditions, that are also extremely common. The big surprise (at least at the time) was that intelligent life is also pretty common (statistically it seems about one in a hundred planets with a long history of life had spawned at least one intelligent species at some point in their existence). Given that we’d never actually met anything more intelligent than a slightly-dumber-than-average cow, and never received any proven artificial signals this presented a bit of a conundrum. The resolution, of course, is now well researched – intelligent civilizations just don’t last long. There is a natural cycle it seems, whereby species develop sufficient intelligence to gain a degree of control over their environment, and things go exponential from there. At some point they inevitably develop technology, and either learn how to kill each other sufficiently efficiently to win a posthumous Darwin award, or bootstrap themselves into transcendence, leaving nothing behind but a few scattered artifacts. It is these artifacts that make Xenoarchaeology the best-funded academic pursuit in the history of mankind. The Institute probably has more money than all but a couple of the remaining nation states on Earth, so funding expeditions when something shows up in a survey is never a problem. Nine times out ten, expeditions turn up a few incomprehensible artworks (at least that’s the best theory anyone has for what most of that stuff is), and maybe some left over technology that doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. One time in 10 you find something that remains from close to its creator’s transcendence event. Mostly these are incomprehensible too, but sometimes analysis reveals an underlying principal that advances the state of the art (and the Institute’s bank balance) significantly. One time in a thousand, something turns up that still works.
Anyway, Xanos V had some clear ruins (and not really that ruined, all things considered, given their age), so it’s probe reported a hit, drank in energy from a close orbit of the parent star for a few months, landed near the best looking ruins, and reconfigured itself into a wormhole terminus. Thus it was, that after a leisurely breakfast that morning, I’d collected some equipment a little too specialized to be part of my normal augmentation, and stepped through from my home to the small portal room that formed the bulk of what the probe had morphed itself into.
Ten minutes later and I was excavating the topsoil and dust from the area above the anomaly. As the glittering of dust swirling into nothingness subsided, what was revealed was distinctly unimpressive looking. A greyish disc, maybe 20 centimeters in diameter, and 3 centimeters in depth at its center. It looked like nothing so much as a discus designed by a minimalist with a fetish for anodized grey not-metal (I resisted the urge to see how far I could hurl it though). Standard procedure in cases like this, calls for shipping the artifact to a quarantined lab, in orbit around some star whose location is a rather closely guarded secret. To ensure no unfortunate interaction with the environment during shipping, the artifact is wrapped in a stasis bubble for transit. The stasis generator was one of the extra items of equipment I’d picked up on my way earlier.
In retrospect the problem with this protocol should have been obvious. Well, obvious in the way that it should be obvious to an ant that building a nest right by someone’s front door is probably a BAD IDEA
TM. It seems this particular artifact had about as much regard for the technology of stasis bubbles as a pest disintegrator has for the construction of ant’s nests. It definitely didn’t like though.
Several things became apparent in short order. I immediately felt the queasy sensation of my exo-cortext and datasphere links all going offline (if you’ve never experienced this, I don’t recommend it – trapped in just a biological brain you feel so terribly small). At about the same time it was obvious that the stasis generator wasn’t working – instead of a nice light-sucking black sphere of essentially walled-in-nothingness, the grey discus was still sitting there, for all intents and purposes shrugging nonchalantly at me.
I still don’t know exactly what it did, but basically it seemed to have decreed that all technology in the vicinity (meters, miles, light-years? I had no way to know) more advanced than the wheel had ceased to operate.
Shortly afterwards, when I discovered that this applied to the wormhole portal too, panic set in, along with a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. It wasn’t until much later, when hunger started to set in and the sun had gone down, turning the world uncomfortably cold, that I started to think about how I might survive. I had shelter from the portal room (well, sort of anyway – I could see why an actual physical door might have been useful now), water was plentiful, and from what I remembered didn’t harbor any pathogens I should be too worried about (genetic changes apparently didn’t count as active technology, which was a relief, so I still had a boosted immune system). The problem was food. Xenos V had its share of small animals, but nothing that looked like it would feature on the menus of any restaurants you’d want to go to. That was ok, I can handle vegetarian. The big question is what plants are safe to eat, given I can’t analyze anything except by the old fashioned trial-and-error method (and nobody else was around to wear the red shirt).
Oh well.
I popped a berry into my mouth.
