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Chapter 1:- Metalogic Complex
It all started when we met our first aliens. What surprised us was that they were so much like us. Not outwardly, I mean they looked nothing like humans, or any animal for that matter. They looked more like walking trees covered in slime. But they had DNA! Scientists had speculated for years the slim chance that an alien species would have DNA identical to ours, and found the probability to be very low. There were just too many other ways to genetically encode information, including several that were more efficient or more readily formed in abiogenesis experiments.
Deeper similarities were found once we exchanged biological specimens. Some primitive organisms were practically identical, especially among certain archaea of the phylum Crenarchaeota. Old and discredited theories of panspermia were dug up and reexamined.
The aliens led us to more intelligent alien civilizations, and pretty soon we had acquired faster than light travel. And let me tell you, the physics to that are just off the charts weird. I mean, they make Einsteinian spacetime look like Algebra 101. But I digress. So we meet more aliens, and wouldn’t you know it, they have DNA too. The probability of all this happening at random was vanishingly small. And then they told us of the Metalog.
Alright, what is the Metalogic Complex? Imagine a sphere of space about 3 thousand light years across, containing around 10 million stars. Each of those stars has an average of eight planets orbiting it. Metalogic Complex incorporates nearly every planet within it. It colonizes gas giants. It occupies smaller, earth-like planets. It lives on ocean worlds. It penetrates the crusts of even dried-out barren worlds baking too close to their suns, and it etches into ice worlds far out in thousand-year orbits. Fly through the clouds of a gas giant and you will see thick wispy clumps trailing from balloons. Go for a swim on an ocean world and you’ll find yourself impaled in a jello-like substance a thousand meters deep. A dusty planet without an atmosphere might have a crust of metalog only a few millimeters thick, but a favorable world might be miles deep in living, throbbing organic material so vast you won’t find a single rock exposed. An upper-stage planet like this might be surrounded organic metalog space craft zipping around in orbit. But it’s all without a consciousness, apparently running strictly on DNA-encoded instinct.
The metalog colonizes in stages. The metalog sends out clouds of spores into space drifting in all directions. The spores are often little more than self-replicating molecules hardened against the harshness of space travel. It may take a spore hundreds of millions of years to reach a suitable planet, and most never will. But as stars and planets slowly swirl about the galaxy, eventually some planets may encounter a few spores. Once the spores reach a planet, assuming it is one they are suited for (there are many different types of spores, each for a different type of planet), they get to work. They multiply, spread and evolve.
Let’s take the example of an Earth-like planet. Each stage relying on the previous phase to setup a suitable environment. The stage 1 spores are merely self-replicating molecules. Not even DNA based, they simply function to incorporate carbon into a biological matrix and build up a latent energy source. Stage 2 brings in DNA and a greater degree of sophistication. Stage 3 brings photosynthesis, leading to an oxygen atmosphere. Stage 4 brings more sophistication. Stage 5 brings a new encoding more sophisticated then DNA, with additional base pairs, and an entirely new encoding scheme, though still able to interface with the ‘lower’ order of DNA. It may take hundreds of millions of years—or even billions of years—for a colonization to pass into the next stage.
This is the case at least in the dense center of the Metalogic Complex, where it has had time to spread to many planets and grow more sophisticated. What’s at the edge of the metalog? Planets with early stages of metalog colonization, and us. As well as every other intelligent species, surrounding the inner core of the metalog like a shell. That’s right, we are all descendants of the Metalogic Complex. Our planet is at phase 3, though of course over the billions of years since photosynthesis arrived, life on our planet has evolved into a wonderful variety of directions, transcending far beyond what the metalog ever intended at this phase.
We sent people to study the metalog, against the advice of the other aliens. The others are still in awe at the metalog, they even fear it. Can’t blame them, it is awe inspiring. Of all the known life in the galaxy, 93% is in the metalog core, and at least another 5% is, like us, based on the metalog process. I would tell you what percent all life on earth comprises of the galactic total, but I don’t want to crowd the page with so many zeros. Even if we had some reason to, there is no way we could fight a war with it. Even if it never fought back, all our weapons—including nukes—it’s so vast we would barely make a dent in it.
Anyway, we got there and studied it. The variety of metalog worlds was astounding. 92% of all planets in the metalog core are colonized by it to some degree or other. In some places our ships were attacked by metalog ships in orbit, or assaulted from the ground. But gradually, using game theory, we were able to work out a decent peace. Not through dialogue though, as the metalog never once gave any indication of intelligence. No it was all through tit-for-tat responses, and bribery. We found a slurry of organic slop that was quite eagerly accepted by the metalog, and once satiated it left us alone to wander through its vast forests, thick with moving and quivering life, more alive and diverse than the Amazon. Strange artifacts were brought back—bits of discarded bone-like structures, outgrown exoskeletons, etc. The people back home loved it, and soon a trade grew: commercial ships flew in with organic slop and came back with metalogic curiosities.
All along the scientists continued to study it. They figured out the colonization stages, catalogued the numerous biological matrices, one for each unique planetary environment. They learned in detail the metabolisms of the higher stages, so sophisticated as to point the way forward for what another few billion years of evolution on earth might look like. But through it all, one nagging question remained: why isn’t the metalogic complex sentient?
This is a huge mystery to the conscious species. Why would something so large and complex—and clearly capable of sophisticated information processing—not have developed a consciousness? How the heck did they figure out space travel without brains? Did they evolve it?!? So many times subspecies have split off and developed consciousness, all from simplistic enviro-establishment early-stage Metalog, as was the case on Earth. How can that happen and consciousness not form in the later, higher forms of the metalog? There seems to be a mechanism at work suppressing consciousness in the metalog, as consciousness is always missing at the 5th stage.
That’s all well and good, except it leaves another nagging question: why did the metalog decide consciousness was a bad thing? That thought is a little troubling, especially since it is far and away the most successful life form in the galaxy. Does consciousness carry within it a fatal flaw, a lesson learned so far only by the metalog, which all sentient species must ultimately fall too? Troubling thoughts indeed.
Another thing was noticed. Hundreds of millions—even billions—of years may pass between stages. During that time the lower phase may mutate and drift off in different directions, creating new life forms never intended. But the higher stages always correct that drift, enforcing a new order and bringing the earlier stage into line, such that it can serve the proper role needed by the higher phase.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed those strange red lichens popping up all over. We’ve finally figured out what it is. Our ships brought back something extra from the metalog. Spores, level 4. We’ve seen this on other planets. The lichens will spread, consuming oxygen, causing the oxygen concentration in the environment to drop. Temperatures will rise. A whole new menagerie of plant-like life will start growing up, actually a whole new kingdom of life. A thick mucus will coat the seas, killing off much of the sea life, except for certain critical ones, like algae. Most land animals will die off, as habitats shrink under this new spreading forest. New kinds of animals will develop at accelerated evolutionary rates.
We’ve tried killing the lichens. And we can, but only to a limited extent. To get it all would require poisoning the globe—a cure as bad as the disease. And it’s spreading ever faster. It may take a hundred years—or even a thousand—but the earth will be rendered uninhabitable, and the best we can hope for is to carry on in sealed domes, or perhaps on small and isolated colonies on other planets. We’ve appealed for help from the other species, but they have refused. They now see us as contaminated, and I can’t blame them. So my final words to you are, enjoy what you now have. Our civilization is entering decline. Be proud of what we, as a civilization, once accomplished, for our future can only grow darker.
