One pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, mirrored, sized up and down, and with a background tweak
“I have lived 82 years as a human in the galaxy, and I have seen and studied wonders far and wide, and yet, as yet, I have not seen or heard of anything more alien and sinister yet too close for comfort than human nature in its depravity seeking to take that meant to preserve life and use it for death and destruction.”
That was the warning shot Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson fired across the bow of those who were examining the data from his latest successful scientific triumph and already trying to weaponize the results – specifically, as a kind of computer virus that could be loaded into vessels of rivals to the human-led consortium that would destroy them when they went to warp too near their home stars. The reason this was floated as plausible is because of what little they understood of the science.
The reason it never happened was because of how little the person proposing this bad idea actually understood his own situation.
“See, Ben, what you could have said was 'Look, man, do you even know who Miguel Alcubierre is? Spell Alcubierre without looking at your communicator – I dare you – but since you can't even do that, what you're going to do is sit your tailbone down and be quiet until we get a remedial warp physics class opened up at the Academy for you so you can be a fool on the Academy's time!' But instead, Ben, 'just go to the brig and tell him, 'You had one job, Admiral – one job!' ”
That of course was Capt. Almira Banneker-Jackson, wife to the admiral, and both of them were aunt and uncle to me – so we got that laugh in, but none of it was a laughing matter.
“The problem is,” I explained to my own husband, Capt. Rufus Dixon of the commercial fleet, “that a lot of fleet bigwigs are missing that more powerful beings are basically considering humanity as on probation right now after that big trans-warp accident that left parts of that ship in fifty different centuries.
“Actually, Khadijah, the problem is, humans don't understand the word no,” he said. “It's like Kirk and Dixon Shipping can't ship everything through everywhere – we don't ship weapons but we can't even take materials that could be used to make weapons through some star systems. Every other month I have new captains complaining about how we could make more runs if we ignored that, and I'm continually explaining that's not how to stay alive this far from home. Aunt Almira is right, though – a bunch of people in the fleet do need to go back to class on this 'no' thing, because what happened on Ghjotlan was not OK.”
“Agreed,” I said. “All they had to do was not bring ballistics to the planet – but the admiral in question is really belligerent and didn't enforce. At least the settlers didn't suffer, because they would not have had time.”
“After the most beautiful sunset in that portion of the galaxy,” my husband said, shaking his head, “the Ghjotlan Protectors would have shown themselves, and long before the human mind could figure out what they were … death bloomed out of the night and vaporized them all.”
“456,789 people,” I said, “over not understanding the word no, in a consortium that is supposed to be about exploring, not belligerence.”
“Well, death bloomed out of the night on said admiral's career, so he won't be weaponizing Uncle Benjamin's new tools and getting us all piled back into the Solar System as our permanent prison house just yet.”
“High place to pay in humanity for the sake of humanity, but, it wasn't our call – they all knew the rules. 456,790 people all messed around and found out, and one more planet has been lost to human settlement forever. I hope it is enough to wake some people up.”
The silver lining, sparing potentially hundreds of trillions of sentient beings' lives, was that no one else suggested weaponizing my uncle's work on warp drives, and thus the horror of interstellar war, at least that way, was nipped in the bud before it could start.
“What I still don't understand is the kind of mind that thought making it so other beings can't even go to warp in their own star systems by wiring them for our Sun could and should be turned into malware,” Uncle Benjamin said. “Does anybody understand you can't make malware work for things that need to be hard-wired, this long after the 21st century?”
“Ben, you are dealing with people who can't even spell Alcubierre, and are probably still looking on Google to figure it out, this long after the 21st century – come on now!”