The Martial Unity

The strange world ship was built on paradigms of construction entirely alien to anything one would have ever found from civilizations native to Gaia. Its structure was not compartmentalized segmentally, the way all ships were, but was rather divided into continuous layers that concentrically stacked upon each other.

Unlike any other ship in Gaia, the structure of the alien world ship was not largely hollow to facilitate the storage and movement of goods and living organisms. Instead, it was filled.

It was fluidic.

A mass made up of millions of layers.

From within its depths emerged a light.

A profoundly intense wave of radiation. It swept the entire solar system as the world ship conducted a deep scan of the environments of the solar system, gathering information on the environment it had found itself in. It deployed both gravitation and electromagnetism to conduct a scrupulously thorough scan of the entire solar system. But that wasn’t all.

RUMBLE

The information dimension stirred.

It stirred as it was accessed.

Accessed by a consciousness.

One that swept it, gathering information about the world through the very dimension of information itself. A level of reconnaissance that vastly exceeded anything that Gaian civilization would have been capable of.

Within the very epicenter of the world ship floated an entity.

WHOOSH…

It was a living entity.

One that resembled a jellyfish.

It contained a plume-like body with a large number of tendrils emerging from the bottom of the plume. Its body was colorful, yet translucent, composed of countless layers instead of cells. Its metabolism was osmotic in nature. Chemical squeezed through the countless layers comprising its very existence. Diffracting pressures created the force of life itself for such a profoundly alien form of metabolism.

A countless sequence of lights flickered through the body of a jellfish-like entity, refracting, reflecting, and polarizing as it passed through the many layers that comprised its existence. The light emerged from within the core of the lifeform, passing through and bouncing about its entire being in a network of light. It was integrated information.

It was consciousness. An alien structure of consciousness that relied on light as the fundamental signal of communication within its mind. The colors that checkered the countless transparent layers of its body were the etches of memory itself, while the refraction, reflection, and polarization created the logic gates that gave rise to intelligence.

Its external layer was translucent but dark, absorbing a portion of the light that passed through it, creating a new layer within its body containing the chromatographic impression of the light that passed through it.

It was a chromatographic model of memory.

A fundamentally different model of memory than all life in Gaia, which relied on neural plasticity. Its outer layer recording light was the one and only sense organ it possessed, making it so that it could only communicate through light.

It was a distinct form of life that, despite being carbon-based, was nothing like the life that existed within Gaia.

It was a laminar integument.

BZZZT

A hologram display emerged in front of it, sending a flurry of light signals that permeated through the body of the jellyfish-like laminar integument.

Signals that comprised a message.

BZZZT

It featured a picture of the human being, both male and female, overlapping each other with their arms spread, meeting the perimeter of a circle, before displaying the countless observatories, space ships, space stations, and even the partial Dyson spheres created by the civilization of Gaia.

A flux of light emerged from the laminar integument, comprising different colors, polarization, and intensity.

It was a thought.

A message.

An expression.

An alien subconscious phenomenon not unlike emotion.

One that was best described as an interest.

For this form of lifeform, every thought was inevitably a message.

Thought was communication.

Conceptually, there existed no distinction.

Several more light messages emerged from the terminal, passing through the laminar integument as it communicated through signals of light, expressing intent and meaning through its wavelength and polarity.

VMMM…

The laminal integument moved slowly as it osmotically permeated through the many layers of the world ship, eventually emerging outside of the titanic structure into the very fabric of space and time.

WHOOSH

It gently moved through space, entirely motionless for a moment.

Then, it acted.

From within the depths of the countless layers of its body, an unfathomable amount of power emerged.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook.

The very fabric of space and time shook as the laminar integument generated a truly mind-boggling amount of energy.

It did not convert matter into energy.

Nor did it rely on black holes.

Nor did it rely on the zero-point energy at the quantum realm.

It would not rely on such primitive technology. No, it harnessed the most powerful force in the entire universe.

Dark energy.

The force that thrust and accelerated the expansion of the universe despite the tremendous gravity that pulled it in. A force so powerful that it was projected to destroy the universe itself.

No higher form of energy technology existed.

And even fewer lifeforms were able to tap into it.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook as it gathered enough energy to annihilate all life within Gaia. Its body was illuminated with a tremendous amount of power as it brimmed with an astronomical amount of destruction.

And then, it unleashed it.

It unleashed all of that power in one direction.

In the direction of Gaia.

A single thought escaped it in the form of light signals.

It translated to a very simple, but horrifying statement.

“Infected worlds must cease to exist.”

RUMBLE!!!!!!!!!

The very fabric of space and time rocked as an extraordinary attack emerged from the laminar integument. It warped space and time so profoundly deeply in the shape of a moving wave, that it had effectively created a black hole the shape of a wave.

A singularity shockwave.

RUMBLE!!!!!!!!!

The wave of space and time moved through the solar system at the speed of light, which was actually quite slow at such scales.

The singularity shockwave moved through space, encountering rocks and planetoids.

WHOOSH

They ceased to exist the moment the shockwave touched them.

Their very existences erased.

It was not violent.

It was silent.

An overwhelming inevitability.

It destroyed everything it came across as it expanded outwards.

Including manmade objects like the space probes and the mining stations on different exoplanets. The people within them were helpless as they watched a wave of pure darkness wash over them.

“HELP HELP HEL—”

“STOP! SOMEONE STO—”

“NOOOO—”

WHOOSH

Their existences were erased, consumed by the singularity shockwave that spread through the solar system.

Nothing was safe from it.

It erased everything it touched.

Asteroids.

Meteorites.

Planetoids.

And even the planets of the solar system themselves. An unsuspecting exoplanet simply revolved around the sun as the singularity shockwave washed over it.

The very fabric of reality bent the planet itself into a state of destruction.

WHOOSH

In the blink of an eye, a planet was erased.

RUMBLE!!!!!!!!!

The world shook as the singularity shockwave moved forward at the speed of light, charging towards its true target.

Towards Gaia.

Lord_Streak