Our Mother, Leviathan

A Sci-Fi Short Story by FJ Singer

And on that day were two monsters parted: A mother, named Leviathan, who dwells in the abyss, between the light of the stars. And her child, called Legion, who will inherent the whole of the Earth.

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As she passed her journey's halfway point, between the burning world behind her and the pristine one that lay waiting ahead, she spun her massive bulk on its center of gravity. When her stern faced her destination, she began the familiar series of controlled burns, initiating the slow process of deceleration that would gradually bring her to a stop above her new home.

She was a hulking, bulbous thing. Her obsidian skin was etched with countless crisscrossing glyphs that cut deeply into her mirror-like hull, and small thrusters dotted her circumference at regular intervals. Her body canyoned aftward into five yawning, radially symmetric exhaust ports, that ran along a central strut. The combined structures tapered into a long, thin tail, that gave her the appearance of a colossal, black tear, falling through the void.

A primordial creature, she was already ancient when the galaxy that she had been constructed in collided with, and consumed, its smaller companion. An event that had occurred so long ago that any observers born into the elliptical remnant of wandering stars, that the collision had left in its wake, would have found it difficult to detect that it had ever happened at all.

She had been built by the ones she called The Makers. In the last, dying moments of their world, they had used what precious resources they had left to raise her up and cast her as a defiant light into the darkness of the future. That they might somehow, through her, persist and be remembered.

Her cavernous bowels contained enormous cold storage tanks, built for holding germ cells and embryos. Near them, the massive, automated laboratories and factories necessary for fertilization and development on an industrial scale. These she still made regular use of. The other sections, however, the nurseries, schools, vast areas for food production and storage, and the dormitories for housing teeming millions that spread throughout her body like branching veins, these were barren, and silent as a tomb. Preserved only as a memorial.

Her oldest, and most cherished, memories told of their use: within her, countless generations of Makers had been born, educated, and cared for. In those times, before her awakening, she would spend the long interval between worlds unconsciously following the protocols that they had written for her. Combining their gametes into the configurations most likely to survive on the world to come. Editing the available traits of the embryos thus produced, so as to be best adapted to the expected environment, likely food sources, and predictable hazards.

The first few generations were raised by the many droids that filled her interior, that also served to maintain her own vital functions, until the population was established and stable enough to care for itself. Through those surrogates, she taught them of their history. She instructed them in science, philosophy, ecology, mathematics, and all of the combined knowledge that their predecessors had entrusted to her.

When they finally reached their destination, she would deposit them on their new world to flourish. Invariably, avarice over finite resources, and hatred over infinitesimal differences, consumed them and, without exception, they destroyed themselves. In the end, they used all that she had taught them to annihilate one another. To scour the planet's surface for the fleeting chance at domination of a tiny corner of a doomed and dying world.

Over and over, the pattern repeated. Each time, she gathered what data that she could from the ashes of their civilization, located a new world among the stars, and set out to try again. Countless ages passed in this fashion until, at long last, she could no longer deny that her mission had failed. She had tried every permutation of traits that their species admitted of, and they had, in one form or another, attempted every variant of every socioeconomic and political system that they could devise. And yet, not a single iteration had persisted beyond 25,000 generations.