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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Fearadhach on 2024-11-04 06:04:31+00:00.

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Julia tried to keep the tension out of her muscles as she faced down the threat that something out there was wiping out entire civilizations… apparently when they got to a technological level pretty close to where the League was at.

Paying attention was a little hard as her Dad continued to speak. “No, there is something else at play here. Let me rephrase that: there are several things at play here, and we don’t know what most of them are. What we do know is that the ‘trigger’ seems a set amount of time which is quite fixed, and arbitrary. We are still trying to nail it down, but there is a symmetry to the timelines that can’t be denied.”

Ballud leaned forward. “Wait, there are two more things in this that you haven’t addressed which I find quite suspicious, both of them having to do with proximity. You are saying that each of these regions of space had a number of sapient species reach FTL tech levels at ‘approximately’ the same time? That… is a bit hard to believe. Here in the League we are ever expanding outward, and coming on more and more sapient races as we do… are you suggesting that – if we expanded far enough – we would stop running into planets which evolved sapient life?

Dad answered. “Yes, and no. The region of space around the oldest of these lost civilizations, here, has been found to have three planets inhabited by nominally sapient life. One of those species appears to still be evolving, and is still in what modern science considers a ‘nascent’ stage of sapience.”

Julia sat up a little straighter as excited whispers sounds spread through the room. The League has only encountered one ‘nascent’ sapient species before, and it is still thousands – maybe even hundreds of thousands – of years away from even getting close to building structures or agriculture. The chance to study another such a species!

This time Mom’s voice cut through the chatter. “The science teams haven’t been able to get much information on the sapients of the other two planets: they appear to live mostly underground. They wouldn’t have been found at all except that they hunt above ground, and the orbital surveys found large prey which had been downed with weapons.”

Ballud gave the odd Arabso-approximation of a nod and spoke. “That is all interesting, and I do want to hear about it further, as well as ways to get our science teams in touch with your expeditions! However, it doesn’t address the question of all of those species just happening to evolve at roughly the same time, in the same region. I believe you Humans have a saying: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is sapient action’ or something like that? And, here we have it happening not thrice, but four times we can verify, if we count ourselves.” Ballud waved a hand through the air. “Still that can rest a moment while I get to my other question, which you addressed in a way already: There has been no evidence of living technologically advanced sapient life encountered by any of your Phoenix ships?”

Dad shook his head. “None. After the science teams started to confer with those of us here and, through us, one another, they started searching their respective areas of space for evidence of current activity and found nothing. Not within a volume of space at least half as large as the League around themselves: Not so much as the slightest gravitational anomaly which suggests even testing for FTL.”

Silence reigned, and Julia felt like she didn’t even dare to breathe. It is incredible, I…”

Aunt Yoro spoke. “It is just too much! Henry, what you seem to be suggesting… that the Old Machines are seeding nascent worlds in a region of space to create groups of sapient civilizations which will encounter one another, fight or cooperate, and then sit back to watch? Then, after a set period of time they… what, just wipe those civilizations out so that they can do it again somewhere else? It makes no sense!”

Julia’s spine stiffened. Her parents had made a good case here, and – while she agreed with Yoro to a point – she also felt a little defensive on her parent’s behalf. On the other hand…

Dad answered before she could finish the thought. He stared Aunt Yoro straight in the eye and said the last thing she’d expect. “I know.

“It doesn’t make sense. There are too many gaps, too many things we are missing, and too much we still don’t know about, well, everything. The most obvious question, of course, is ‘what if we are completely wrong, and our little narrative here is just a house of cards?’ Of course, we don’t consider that likely, but it is possible that tomorrow some key piece of information could come along and totally destroy everything we think we know.

“The other questions still unresolved are myriad, the biggest one being ‘why?’ Why would the Old Machines do this, why would they act this way? It has been very clear by every action that they have ever taken, and every response we have gotten from them about their purpose and programming, that their purpose is to act in defensive of – and to see to – life in general and sapient life in particular. Yet, here we have evidence that they routinely wipe out entire civilizations, based on a schedule… and we have a countdown timer that they won’t tell us the meaning of, and that only has about three hundred years left.”

Julia felt herself gasp. She hadn’t thought about the timer in this entire discussion. Words tumbled out. “Wait, you don’t mean to say that we are in the time-frame of…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

Her mother gave her a somber nod. “We only have the timeframe nailed down to a thousand-year or so span: We are dealing with intervals of hundreds of centuries here… but yes, we seem to be in the timeframe for another…” Her mother gestured vaguely towards the star chart showing the fallen Empires.

Dad continued. “There are far more questions unanswered, as well: When did these cycles start? How long have they been going on? One unfortunate thing that seemed to happen with all of our societies is that, once we found the League, we got a lot less interested in the pre-history of our own worlds. Much of that is because, by the time a civilization reaches FTL tech, the civilization in question tends to have – or at least believe they have – a pretty clear timeline of their world and what happened from its first formation up until they figured out things like writing and tablets.

“Then, there is an entire galaxy to explore and new races to meet, and trying to dig through thousands of years of your species mucking about on your planet to try and understand what happened before becomes a bit harder sell… and is getting more difficult by the day as new cities are built and new areas tamed for agriculture, obscuring the archeological record. Sure, you still have some researchers for whom ancient pre-history remains their passion, but they find, more and more, that they do better studying artifacts and notes from earlier digs than getting out and doing their own.”

Several eyebrows drew down, and Julia found herself looking at the gathered people in shared confusion.

Uncle Kaz spoke first. “Henry, hold on. What does the pre-history of all of our worlds have to do with any of this? I don’t see anything…”

Henry shrugged, then waved his hand. “Something. I don’t know what, but I’m not the only one who believes it. The most recent example of this cycle is before any of our recorded history, and we don’t know how far the cycles stretch back. It had to have started somewhere, sometime, though. There is hope that some clue may lie in the pre-history of all our species; these are galactic events, after all.

“The pre-history question is a tenuous one, but it is only one piece. The most important one, it seems to us, is to find out more about the Old Machines, and about why this cycle might exist. And, of course, to advance science as a whole: If the Old Machines are going to try to wipe all of us out, we need to be able to defend ourselves, and the collective technical level of the League is just not up to the challenge.”

Julia sat back, her head spinning. The implications of all of this staggered her. Extinction, of everyone. Nothing less than that, and they had only a few generations to find out why and put a stop to it.”

Dad sat down, and Mother spoke. “I am going to ask a small conceit from all of you at this point: Can we all agree that Henry has left the room, and has no part of anything else that is said here?”

Murmurs and side-long looks went around the table, as well as small, sly smiles. Julia had to work to keep such a smile from her face, then she glanced at Uncle Kaz and saw a look of irritation. Of course: Dad ran off and stuck him with the Prime Minister job. The fact that he has loved it, for the most part, doesn’t detract from the fact that he didn’t really want to take it. So, I can see him being a little annoyed at Dad doing an end-run around the restrictions, even now. Still… She caught his eye, lifted a single eyebrow, and shrugged at him, then gave a hand-sign they used for ‘crushing load.’ Uncle Kaz gave her a lopsided grin in…

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