Dark Energy Supernova - An Anthology of SF SD Shorts

Red Queen vs White Queen

I held my breath as, without turning around, the little girl began to speak in a soft, thoughtful voice.

"Knowledge.  Those who have it, wish for more.  And those that don't, crave it like a drug.  I believe your own people once said that 'knowledge is power'."  She paused to laugh softly.  "Then again, it was your people that also said that 'power is power'."

"You, you seem to have more than a passing familiarity with my people," I ventured and earned a quick look over her shoulder at me.

"In your many variations," she replied.  "You see, this isn't the first time our people have met.  In fact, this would be the third."

"I don't see how that's possible," I began.  "Surely record of this place,..."

"Has been removed from your people's memory,' the little girl interrupted to note.  "Twice."  She signed and turned back to face me.  "And still, you found this outpost even faster than you had the first two times."  She smiled.

"But I see by that confused look on your face, that you don't understand what I'm implying.  Perhaps a little background information then, yes?"  She looked down at the ground.

"They called themselves the Solarans the first time we encountered your kind.  Intelligent, aggressive, ruthless; they were gobbling up vast tracts of the galactic arm they inhabited at an incredible speed when we ran across them.  As we were mere explorers and scientists, the sight of their war fleets immediately threw us into a panic.  We didn't want to be next on their long list of conquered and enslaved species."

The little girl's smile faded.

"So we ran, retreated from Solaran space as quickly as we could fold space/time.  But it was already too late.  They knew enough about us that they coveted our knowledge, our learning and our technology.  And so when we ran, they pursued.  Across known space they hunted us, for decades.  Forever getting closer to our worlds and our homes."

She paused to look up at me, her expression melancholic.

"Until one day, they had us backed into a corner.  There was no place left in the galaxy to run, no place left to hide.  By this time, they had acquired much of our technology by capturing our ships and overrunning our research outposts.  But still they wanted more, and thought we had it.  So in desperation we fought back.  We lacked a fleet, we had no military, so we fought with the only thing we had left."

"Knowledge," I quietly said and she nodded.

"Exactly, doctor.  Knowledge.  Using what knowledge we had kept out of their hands, we captured some of their soldiers and turned them against their lords.  Altered their bodies and their minds.  We created assassins that could move silently and attack with great strength, possessing powers of the mind and endurance that no normal Solaran had.  Yet they required the blood of their former people to sustain these abilities, a perverse fuel for a most destructive engine."

"You,you made vampires?" I husked disbelievingly and the little girl nodded.

"So feared and deadly were they, they've become part of your genetic memory," she quietly noted.  "Yet, they could only slow the onslaught.  So next we created berserker soldiers that would gain great strength, speed and ferociousness every lunar cycle, their abilities fueled by consuming human flesh.  They hid until they were needed, then destroyed everything in their path."

"Werewolves," I breathed, almost unable to believe my ears.

"And using nanite technology and remote control, we reanimated their own corpses to send them in wave after wave against them.  A tide of undeath that could only be stopped by the most severe of means."

"Zombies."  I shook my head in amazement.  "You created the monsters of legend, burning a fear of them deep into the darkness of our psyche, in an attempt to stop the Solarans?"

"Attempt would be the correct word," the little girl noted.  "As I said, your people were ruthless, intelligent and vicious.  Everything we threw at them, they ended up utterly obliterating.  Yet our attacks drew enough of their attention that we were able to build this place."  She paused again to look around the shadow-filled room.

"The Probability Engine.  Constructed in an artificially created pocket universe outside of our own so when we fired it, it wouldn't be destroyed as Reality collapsed around it."

Now it was my turn to slowly look around the chamber.  A Probability Engine?  This weird system inside its own little universe was a weapon?  Then the little girl going on recaptured my attention.

"Once the Engine was constructed, then it was a matter of locating the Solaran home world and pushing the probability of their evolution out of the main thread of Reality."

"How, how is that even possible?" I stammered.  The girl shot me a look.

"To a species that had unraveled the mysteries of quantum reality and time, it was relatively easy," she admitted after a long pause spent looking into my face.  "We merely located the quanta that formed the fabric of space/time around the Solaran home world, isolated the time fragment and the accompanying probability fragment then twisted it until we located the divergence that preceded the ancestral Solaran's appearance in the evolutionary tree.  Then we just eliminated the divergence."

I blinked in shock as I tried to wrap my head around what she just told me.  Just by finding out where the mutation happened that gave rise to humans, they could stop them from even existing.  It was almost too hard for me to understand.

"Of course their destruction wasn't instant," she went on to say.  "In the pause created by the temporal loop closing, they managed to locate the Engine and stage an assault on its defenses.  They slaughtered the guards, crushed our weapon systems and were about to take control of the Engine when they simply ceased to be."  A rueful smile appeared on her lips.  "We heaved a collective sigh of relief then.  That was nearly twelve million years ago."  'A million stories that made up a million shattered dreams,' I found myself thinking.  Both of the aliens saved by the Engine.  And the Solarans wiped out by it.

But then something occured to me.

"Your time line is impossible," I breathed.  "Humans didn't appear in the evolutionary tree until six million years ago."

"Your version of humanity, perhaps," a third voice dryly pointed out.

"You!" the little girl hissed, her face a mask of anger.  "What are you doing here?  I was promised enough time to educate the seeker."

I turned to look at the newcomer.  And found another little girl.  This one, however, was in a dress of red, with dark hair in direct contrast with the first little girl.

"You've had more than enough time," the newcomer growled.  "Now quit toying with him.  Their presence here has already triggered the initiation sequence."

"The initiation sequence?" I whispered, looking at the first little girl, who now frowned in disappointment.  "For what?"

"The Probability Engine." she quietly revealed, her frown deepening.

"That's right, monkey boy," the dark haired girl hissed.  "We're going to send your species back to oblivion.  Again."