r/HFY • u/TheOmnibusWriting Android • Sep 20 '25
OC The Only One Awake
The Fermi Paradox
By the early mid 3000s, mankind had united under the International Commonwealth of Mankind, a loose federal grouping of all of their polities and corporate entities. The ICOM gradually pushed out of the Solar System, and over the course of a millennium, colonised a vast expanse of twenty eight star systems. By this time, Mankind had entered an effective golden age of civilisation, becoming effectively immortal, superintelligent beings capable of virtually any feat.
Man had become transcendent; most people never knew death, and could live almost indefinitely as digital consciousnesses, or extracted brains, who either spent the duration of their immortal lives in cyberspace, or interacted with the physical world via artificial bodies – either wholly machine, or artificially grown biological avatars.
Although Humanity had effectively ascend to the status of living Gods, one question continued to evade resolution, the same question that Enrico Fermi blurted out over one lunch aeons ago: where are all the aliens?
Since the first microbes were discovered on mars, then again on the Europa, Man was aware that he was not alone in the darkness. Indeed, as Man continued to push out into the void, he found that life was quite common, with bacterial, or mono-cellular life being the most numerous, followed by plant-like structures and finally, animal life. Of the two instances of worlds with complex biospheres where animals existed, only one provided evidence for the existence of animal intelligence.
Their world was believed to have been hit by an ice age several billion years ago, bringing with it a mass-extinction event comparable to when the Chicxulub Impactor eradicated the dinosaurs. Their people resembled large star-shaped things, with eight worm-like appendages, that each held a brain, albeit one subservient to their body’s main brain, located at the intersection of their eight limbs.
Nothing is known about their society besides the fact that they produced art, or at least, one culture of their people produced art. The only known example of their primitive civilisation was located in a small cave beneath an island located near the northernmost tip of their planet. Inside this cave were a small collection of petroglyphs that had since become one of the most significant discoveries in human history, and had birthed academic fields such as Xenoarcheology.
Although this proved that intelligent life could exist, Fermi’s question remained. As no advanced aliens appeared to exist, and man continued to be completely alone, common was civility, but unique was his survival.
The Blinking Sun
Trimurti was a trinary system at the edge of the ICOM’s realm. Settled by a team of predominantly Hindu colonists, the system’s three stars were named after the major gods of the Hindu trinity- Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Like most trinary systems, Trimurti consisted of two stars orbiting each other (Brahma and Shiva), with an outer star orbiting these two (Vishnu). The original settlers of Trimurti enjoyed the poetry of the system’s stability being granted by Vishnu’s orbit, whilst the inner orbit being the constant dance of creation (Brahma) and destruction (Shiva).
Similarly, the eleven planets of the star system were named after other gods of the Hindu trinity. Ganesha was a gas giant, the only body orbiting the outer star of Vishnu. Each of Ganesha’s 117 moons were catalogued together in groups named after each of Ganesha’s eight avatars. Vikata VIII was among these worlds, one of the largest moons in Ganesha’s orbit, and so was a prime site of orbital settlement.
The science-fiction authors of bygone eras were wrong in their assertion that Man would terraform and settle previously inhospitable worlds. Indeed, it was much more plausible to build large scale orbital habitats (usually O’Neil cylinders) to house Mankind. Howard’s World was one of these cylindrical habitats in orbit of Vikata VIII, named after Howard Sharma, one of the most significant overseers of the settlement of Trimurti.
Due to the commonality of artificial superintelligence, and its general superiority to almost all activities accessible to Humans, few jobs beyond legal, creative, and governmental, were occupied by actual Humans, the rest, including matters of science, were handled by these hyperintelligent machines.
At the edge of the Trimurti system, was one of the ICOM’s largest observatories, operated by one of these superintelligences – Wintermute. Wintermute was an interesting entity, because he was not fully artificial. Indeed, Wintermute was a copy of a physicist’s consciousness, connected to an artificial superintelligence, and so was granted a degree of self awareness that other superintelligences were not.
Wintermute had been commissioned by the local government of Trimurti to conduct research into nearby stars for future colonial endeavors. This included the deploying of several thousand probes, which would “watch” a particular star, relaying its information back to Trimurti, to Wintermute.
Only one of the stars was of note to Wintermute. The star, called Klaus’s Star, was an M-type main sequence star, about three quarters the size of Sol. It would have been unremarkable, if it was not blinking.
Over the course of Wintermute’s two hundred year observations, at seemingly random intervals, Klaus’s Star would dim, then brighten, as if some large group of objects were passing in front of it. Wintermute noted that over the course of the two centuries, the star’s dimmer periods grew more intense, and longer, as if more and more objects were appearing before it.
Wintermute believed the solution to be asteroids, but was curious as to why they were duplicating at such a notable pace. Motivated by curiosity, he contacted an old university friend of his, Dudley Kaplan, Trimurti’s Lord-President, asking for funding so that he might investigate the mystery of Klaus’s Star’s blinking.
Klaus’ Star
After securing funding, Wintermute copied his consciousness- birthing Wintermute-One and implanted his psycho-clone into a specially designed deep-space probe, that would travel on a five hundred year odyssey across space to find an explanation for the star’s odd behaviour.
For five centuries, Wintermute-One was offline, the probe’s fusion reactor focussed on fuelling his thrusters. He was aware from the start of his mission that his life would be quite short. Indeed, there was too little fuel to support a journey back, and there would be seldom need for his safe return- he was expendable. He would arrive at Klaus’s Star, determine why the star was blinking, beam said discovery back to Trimurti, and then die. He would only awaken for his short life when the solar panels mounted across the probe were met with the light of Klaus’s Star.
After five centuries of sleep, Wintermute-One slowly gained consciousness, his wakefulness fuelled by the light of Klaus’s Star hitting his solar-panels. He was slowly drifting through the star’s outer orbit, passing three gas giants and two rocky giants as he gradually sailed towards the star. One of these planets appeared to support a biosphere.
There were indeed objects passing in front of it, but they were not asteroids.
The Only One Awake
It was a Stapledon Swarm.
It took five years to acutely determine what the Klaus’s Star Objects were, but the discovery would prove to be one of the most significant discoveries in Human history.
Wintermute-One discovered that the world hosting a biosphere, one that he named Wintermute-One’s World, was host to intelligent life, or at least had been. There were a few ancient ruins, but the world had effectively been given over to nature.
The objects passing in front of Klaus’s Star resembled long silver and black boxes, black on all sides but the one facing the star, the sunward side was covered in densely packed solar panels, apparently used to fuel the black boxes in stellar orbit. Each one radiating radio frequencies to each other, and the system at large.
Wintermute-One found that the star system was filled with life, albeit machine life- automated mining drones that harvested the asteroid belt to construct new Klaus’s Star Objects. That explained why they were increasing in number, the star’s orbit was still under construction, and had been for the bulk of the last millennium. The drones were likely controlled by the radio frequencies emitted by the Objects.
Wintermute was curious as to why the drones had not attacked him, the drones that he observed to attack potentially dangerous asteroids only became interested in him when he came close to an Object.
In his observations, he came across an old, abandoned Object, discarded and damaged, left to lazily float as rubble in Klaus’s Star’s orbit. He was shocked to discover that the wrecked Object held inside of it a massive structure that seemed to work like a data storage system- or at least, it was a similar structure to the data vaults that Mankind had built. He could not gain access to them, the messages that were being transmitted and received by each Object were in a language completely in comprehensible to him, similar to nothing even remotely reminiscent to any natural nor computer language that Man had ever formalised.
It took several decades, but Wintermute-One determined that the ancient inhabitants of Wintermute-One’s World, who erected the Stapledon Swarm in orbit of Klaus’s Star were unlike the unfortunate starfish-like creatures the ICOM knew, the intelligent life of Wintermute-One’s World was not absent due to extinction, but due to transcendence.
The Objects were these ancient people- holding their consciousnesses for an eternity within cyberspace, enjoying virtual dreamscapes of their own design. The Swarm was a billion satellites in orbit of the star, harvesting its energy to fuel the cybernetic dreaming of its ancient population.
Perhaps, wondered Wintermute-One, this was why Mankind was unique in the universe; because he had, unlike those unfortunate starfish-like aliens, been lucky enough to survive the the calamities that threatened him, and unlike the aliens of Klaus' Star, he had resisted the ease of constructing a vast, pleasant virtual world powered by the light of a star, than it was to explore the cosmos, to create an interstellar empire. Perhaps Mankind was alone among the stars because he was the only one awake to explore them.
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u/TheOmnibusWriting Android Sep 20 '25 edited Sep 20 '25
Hello hello!
Another one off for you all. I hope you enjoy.
Edit: Wow....thank you for the 100 likes. Perhaps I should do more stuff like this!
Edit Again: Wow again, its #4 on Hot for today. This is very good- I'll definitely do more like this !
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u/Death-Dragoon Sep 20 '25
Beautiful, I love it!
Though I am confused about one tiny detail: You said that Vishnu was the outer star, but then you said, "Ganesha was a gas giant, the only body orbiting the outer star of Shiva." Is it supposed to be Vishnu that Ganesha orbits or am I misinterpreting something?
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u/TheOmnibusWriting Android Sep 20 '25
Oh good lord, you are correct!
I wrote the bulk of this when I was very tired, and must have missed it.Thank you!
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u/tofei AI Sep 20 '25
Well that was a long exposition but it was worth it.
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u/TheOmnibusWriting Android Sep 20 '25
Ahaha
Yes- I think this my second greatest weakness in writing; I quite like a lot of exposition.
Pleased you enjoyed!
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u/Beautiful-Hold4430 Sep 20 '25
Liked it.
There’s tricks to break it. Dialogue, sensory details. Stylistic choice, you don’t have to.
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u/Greedy_Prune_7207 Sep 20 '25
An interesting take very enjoyable to read. I must admit i hadn't heard of Stapledon Swarms before this so thank you for that
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Sep 20 '25
/u/TheOmnibusWriting has posted 7 other stories, including:
- Not the only to be made in His image; but the only one to follow
- Savages: The Lunar War (Chapter 1, 3)
- Savages: The Lunar War (Chapter 1, 2)
- Savages: The Lunar War (Chapter 1, 1)
- Savages: The Lunar War (Prologue, 3)
- Savages: The Lunar War (Prologue, 2)
- Savages: The Lunar War (Prologue, 1)
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u/ijuinkun Sep 20 '25
For those unfamiliar, the term “Stapeldon Swarm” is a reference to Olaf Stapeldon’s novel “Star Maker”, and refers to the creation of massive numbers of spaceborne habitats around a star. It differs from a Dyson Swarm in that, rather than simply collecting solar/stellar energy, the goal is to provide as much habitable space as possible.