The Martial Unity

And only then did the light from the solar system, after the gravitational wave spread through it, reach Rui, because it only traveled at the speed of light. It could not travel faster than a gravitational wave, which also traveled at the speed of light.

Thus, only then did Rui see what had become of his native solar system.

It had been greatly destroyed.

Planets.

Asteroid belt.

The many meteorites.

And all of the human lives working in space infrastructure across that segment of the solar system had been lost along with the infrastructure they resided within.

The blood-red suns shining with blinding brightness in his eyes flickered with horror as he beheld the destruction inflicted upon a large portion of their solar system.

It was a realm of destruction that greatly exceeded anything he had ever seen in his entire life. The blood-red suns in his eyes flared with grave severity as his attention focused on the titanic world ship that hung at the edge of the galaxy.

His eyes sharpened as he focused his vision on the floating entity outside of it.

That one entity was responsible for unleashing this kind of destruction.

A single entity was capable of power beyond anything he had ever fathomed in his entire life.

RUMBLE

The world shook as Rui activated Worm Step, boring a hole through the very fabric of reality as he crossed the vast expanse of the solar system in the blink of an eye.

WHOOSH

He emerged through the hole in the fabric of reality as he appeared some distance away from the alien entity, studying it with the blindingly bright blood-red suns in his eyes.

The alien entity resembled a jellyfish anatomically, possessing the familiar umbrella-like bell at the very top of its body with a descending nexus of sorts from which a variety of tendrils emerged, floating weightlessly midair. That was where the resemblance ended, however. The reality was that the alien entity was unlike any model of life that existed on Earth and Gaia.

Its fundamental model of life was entirely different from anything that had evolved in Gaia.

Its outer layer was transparent, unveiling the colorful depths within its body. Rui’s eyes detected countless concentric layers stacked on top of each other to comprise the entirety of the alien entity’s existence.

Each layer appeared to have a vast chromatographic spectrum and distribution, coloring, refracting, and polarizing the light that passed through its body, whether it came from the outside or emerged from within its depths.

It seemed to shine ethereally.

Not to illuminate the world around it, Rui could tell, but rather because the light passing through its body resembled processing.

Light was the signal. It was to this entity what electric impulses were to Rui’s brain.

That meant that its entire body wasn’t just its body.

It was also its brain.

Light bounced in and about the many colorful layers of its body in a sequential, almost algorithmic manner. As if they were logic gates in a computer’s programming.

It was shocking to realize, but the very nature of this alien entity’s consciousness was unlike any life native to Gaia.

Its consciousness was not bioelectric in nature, the way that his and virtually all life in Gaia was. But rather, its consciousness was electromagnetic radiation. It possessed a holographic consciousness.

It was so unfathomably different from Rui’s own model of consciousness that, like with Gaia, he had absolutely no idea how to communicate with the entity. The language barrier between different civilizations was not that difficult if they belonged to the same genetic family or even species.

But when the two parties were of fundamentally different models of life, communication was exponentially harder.

However, what truly shook him was not the nature of this alien entity’s existence.

No.

What shook him was that he expected he would never, ever have seen anything quite like the alien entity in his entire life.

But in reality, he had seen something like it before.

In fact, he had seen something extremely similar to it.

‘The manifold tree.’

The manifold tree was an alien species that didn’t exist within the Tree of Life of Gaia. And just like the alien entity before himself, it, too, was composed of layers instead of cells. That felt like one conclusion.

‘The alien virus must have infected the home world of this alien lifeform,’ he realized with chills. ‘And it must have succeeded in exploding that world.’

Otherwise, the alien virus in Gaia would have never had access to a manifold tree from that world. The seed planted in Gaia must have come from the explosion of the home world of the laminar integument before him.

It meant that Rui was connected to this alien entity in a strange twist of fate.

A fate of destruction and creation.

WHOOSH…

The two entities simply hovered in space at a cautious distance, clearly sizing each other up. From what Rui could tell, this creature had only one sense organ, and it appeared to be the outermost layer of its body that was transparent.

Most likely, this creature possessed one omnidirectional eye in the form of its outermost layer that could absorb light. The fact that it he could visibly see its internal processing meant that its very concept of ‘communication’ was likely ontologically different from what he considered communication.

For him, thought and communication were fundamentally different phenomena.

But to a creature whose entire cognition, mind, and thought process was broadcast to the entire world, consciousness was communication. And communication was consciousness.

It was a radically different ontology from the very fundamentals of human civilization.

In human philosophy, there was something known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’

It was essentially the observation that nobody knew what was occurring in someone else’s conscious experience. It was possible that our subjective experience of the color ‘red’ was different from each other, and we wouldn’t know because we couldn’t access each other’s conscious experience.

But this fundamental philosophical problem would not exist for a species whose consciousness was broadcast to the entire world. That meant that each moment it was thinking, it was also simultaneously communicating with him. And he had failed to reciprocate its communication this entire time because neither communicated nor thought holographically.

From the perspective of such an unfathomable alien species, communications had completely broken down.

That left only one option.

War.

In the blink of an eye, one of its tendrils teleported through the very fabric of reality itself, spawning on his neck, threatening to decapitate him then and there.

And yet, it missed.

WHOOSH

A combination of Eye of Prophecy and Autocorpus allowed Rui to evade the inevitable.

The unavoidable.

The blood-red suns flared within the depths of his eyes as the alien, the laminar integument, mobilized an astronomical amount of power that shook the very fabric of reality itself.

RUMBLE!!!!!