The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us—visiting

This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower—

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

 It visits with inconstant glance

 Each human heart and countenance;

 Like hues and harmonies of evening—

                                             Like clouds in starlight widely spread--

                                             Like memory of music fled—

                                             Like aught that for its grace may be

                                             Dear, and yet clearer for its mystery

                                                  Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

                                                  Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817                                             

 Entity

Dark space is not really dark.

Neither is it empty.

Nor lonely.

Beings roam the corridors between galaxies and the gargantuan tracts of dark energy. These creatures, though self-nourished, will on occasion merge and barter their knowledge of the universe with each other - the true nature of neutrinos for anti-quark jokes, the complete catalogue of variations in time/space rifts for amusing anecdotes about the behavioural idiosyncrasies and anomalies of their most exotic particles, the reason for the left-handedness of the universe, for…love.

They adore collecting data and keeping secrets. But more than anything they enjoy arguing the truth about death.

Gluttoned with knowingness, they pride themselves in their comprehension of the incomprehensible. No concept is beyond their understanding. No action is beyond their ability. They attain knowledge from the exponential synergy of interaction.

Yet they are denied the knowledge of one thing…

Applied history download, alternative version (including aural anecdotal evidence).

Accessed by Artificial Intelligence 339997^ Wanton.

Extropist stream to Vreal Studium via Scolar hub.

Jo-Jo Rasterovich’s verbal recount of first contact:

‘I got lost way out past the edge of Orion’s Belt on account of crap uuli navigation software (don’t buy it people!). Last inhabited place I’d seen was some naff planet called Foregone that wouldn’t even give me closecast rights.

‘I tried to mag-beam right back to Mintaka’s civilised world’s to get some new nav but my beam credit expired (lousy floating banks). I sent a SOS to the nav centre on Foregone but the naff buggers probably thought it was a local radio station.

‘I had no choice but to use res shift. I ran a de-bug on the nav and it seemed to work so I charted a shift back to Hum-Uuli figuring if they paid me to keep quiet about the nav I’d have enough lucre to top up my mag credits (course I never would have kept quiet afterwards). It was a dumb risk, I know, but without shifting, I was likely to be stuck gassing around beyond Foregone so far past my next rejuve that the salvage crew’d be lucky to find my bones.

‘Turned out the nav was still bugged. I calmed way too close to unmapped space about 30 LY’s from Hum-Uuli. The particle analyser went jammy on me. Told me the atom count had fallen to .04 and that I was on the edge of a gas tube that tracked way up out of the galactic plane. Last thing I remember was the infrared array playing shadow puppets. These…things…like freaking huge leeches were hanging, sucking at an area in the tube. One of them, a great bloated bastard, dropped right off and shot out at me. I only had one thought in my head as I watched it come.

‘I am so fucked.

‘It swallowed me whole. I felt like I’d been dropped down the bitch of all volcanoes. Life support died and so did I. Amazing thing was, I woke up again.’

End verbal recount.

Studium Narrative Summary:

After Jo-Jo Rasterovich returned to inhabited space, news spread through the Nations of Orion Sentients that he had encountered a new being. Governments sent envoys escorted by nuclear-armed warships to meet and greet. It was concluded that the mysterious Entity that had re-animated Mr Rasterovich - quickly attributed the name Sole - was not only benign but of an order of intelligence greater than anything known or imagined.

Sole, it appeared, was God.

Better still, Sole seemed willing enough to share information with the Sentients of Orion. But only on a strict system of barter, one clearly delineated feat of cleverness on the part of the Sentients in exchange for new knowledge or a key to knowledge.

This turned out to be a cryptic and often unsatisfactory arrangement but crumbs from Sole’s table were valuable even so, and anyway, sentient history has been built on never understanding anything fully.

NOS exported a select few of their best minds to Sole’s local area (a couple of rather inferior ones managed to squeezed past as well) but Sole, though patient in the manner of any quasi-eternal being, didn’t seem able to interact successfully with the chosen minds.

For a time a stalemate occurred, without an exchange of…anything. Sole and the chosen academics eyed each other off from a ship-to-God distance.

The ship’s little colony of eager minds with not enough to do turned quickly to a nasty claustrophobic cauldron. The first murder occurred within three Foregone-weeks – a Geneer vac-ed accidentally after winning the daily Minds Tournament twelve consecutive times.

Whether motivated by a desire to stop the obvious disintegration of the colony, or not, Sole instigated some bridging steps to enhance the communication process between quasi-eternal and sentient.

How Sole communicated effectively its plan to the proletarian wastrel Jo-Jo Rasterovich is a complete mystery to Sole-a-files, and it has been deemed that in their initial contact Jo-Jo had been somehow altered to make it so.

Jo-Jo Rasterovich conveyed Sole’s desire for a selection process preceded by a procedure.

Sole-chosen Sentients submitted to an event they dubbed shafting where their brains were altered so that their minds operated in distinct layers. In humanesques like the Lostol’s and Cerulean’s (rumoured to have originated from a singularly blue planet on the far edge of Orion) the procedure occasionally resulted in psychoses. Non-humanesques like the uuli displayed no observable change.

The selected Sentients called their tutelage an apprenticeship a tyro and once the ground rules for selection had been set, the race began in earnest.

Scientists came first, all types and species. When it became obvious most would be rejected, they were forced to look outside their fraternity. Reluctantly they invited in professionals from other disciplines - all fine thinkers as well, but because of their place in the course of things, intransigents.

Radical thinkers from the philosophers’ city of Scolar also bid for entry but were resoundly denied a chance to meet with Sole by the multi-species organisation set up the whole event.

This body of bigots called themselves called Group of Higher Intelligence Affairs and rejected the applications of Scolar-based academics on the basis that their unquantifiable methods were likely to endanger the sentient-Sole relationship.

Even the outlawed, secretive trans-humanists (indeed, that’s what they call us!) attempted to place a member using subterfuge. The member was discovered and expelled.

Jo-Jo Rasterovich the 33rd, contract minerals scout of rather dubious integrity and the original ‘discover’ of Sole, remains the only un-learn-ed person to have open access to New Bubble space. He was, after all, the first contact and no one could take that away from him.

The Studium concludes that this humanesque should be the focus of further attempts (by us) to contact the Sole Entity.

N.B. It should be added that these days, he is more entrepreneur than scout, having sold his personal recount the length and breadth of Orion’s Arm for an untidily large sum.