Chapter Text
The sky was getting darker.
The phenomenon was barely perceptible to the naked eye, let alone through the green sheen of the void veil. It took collaborations between entire iterator groups to connect increasingly demanding weather-control requests from patrons with the subtlest of irregularities in the daylight sky. Even then, the connection had only been made because those iterators were comparing data out of shared complaint.
One iterator recalled nearly blinding themselves when they were asked to look at the intrasolar atmospheres closest to The Great Luminary. They were rapidly scrolling through light spectrums and were hit with a grand crimson glow coming from the visible side of The First Planet. The streak of infrared started as wide as the planet itself, exponentially growing narrower until it appeared to almost pierce the Luminary with wild abandon. One would think it would come out the other side, if it wasn’t for the vague, mold-like dark spots appearing on the surface of the star.
Iterator instrumentation was not prone to error, which was exactly what unsettled even the most reliable of finders. The iterators coordinated amongst themselves (as they should) to send for a probe to investigate the streak further. There was little involvement from the ancient residents that lived atop them, outside of the occasional approval and status update, but when one attached a piece of themselves to a deep space probe and told it to collect, examine, and 'figure out' the red line, the administrators grew concerned.
Brachistochrone trajectories were seldom used for interplanetary travel, but there was little precedent for space travel in the first place. It took around fifty middle-cycles for the miniature supercomputer to park itself in low orbit of The First Planet and do its thing.
It was extremely fortunate that the reactionless void fuel drives used were much more efficient than they were powerful, even if it was at the expense of being quiet. It took three middle-cycles for word to come back, and another fifty for the samples. Nobody batted an eye until the flash of veil entry interface blinded half a continent, one evening.
"I have dubbed this, 'astrophage', as it, by definition, eats stars," The word from the probe followed. "It appears to be microbial in nature. Sampled specimens consist primarily of water, simple organic compounds, and an outer shell composed of some unidentifiable super material. This shell absorbs virtually all forms of radiation; observed wavelengths that do so range from low-energy radio frequencies to extremely high-energy gamma radiation, including all of the visible light spectrum. All images contrived of specimens show them as black blobs with no reflective properties. The shell may, however, be pierced and destroyed with a microscopically sharp physical object. Science had compelled me to poke it, so I did. Please excuse me."
"The specimens maintain a constant internal temperature slightly below the boiling point of water. This temperature remains very stable, despite substantial fluctuations in external conditions. Thermal equilibrium, or the zeroth law of thermodynamics, does not appear to apply... or is heavily dampened by the nature of the shell."
"Living specimens demonstrate instinctive locomotion through the directed emission of infrared radiation. Quite a lot of it, in fact. The emitted wavelength corresponds precisely with that of the observed Red Line from the ground. Any changes in trajectory are also seemingly actively controlled by each individual specimen; neighboring organisms practice different courses independently, despite identical localities."
"No observable reaction mass accompanies this propulsion. This behavior is very much consistent with that of a reactionless drive."
"In addition, the organisms are also able to practice sustained activity after long periods without any incident radiation or energy gain. The observed energy expenditure exceeds anything that would match what is immediately available in their surroundings. Some sort of anomalous, ultra-efficient energy storage mechanism must therefore exist."
"To top this off, onboard karmic instrumentation has failed to produce any sort of consistent result, suggesting individual-type behaviors or goals. There is no radiation from these cells outside of Red Line infrared, so measuring eob radiation is out of the question. Instant readings of individual cells give me actions of the fifth natural urge, to avoid death in and of itself..."
"... and apparent evaluations of the entire line culminate towards a 'collective fourth' vice."
There was an uncomfortably long pause in the recording. Someone listening to the message would have thought it sighed if they had forgotten iterators didn’t need to breathe.
"Migration patterns confirm this. Yes... in taking samples of the line from different directions, I found the density of astrophage returning to the Luminary is approximately double than that which is traveling to The First Planet. This suggests a migration pattern; astrophage absorbs energy from the local star, somehow finds its way to The First Planet, reproduces, and travels back to the Luminary with any remaining energy. The behavior is not out of the question, given the organism's previously observed energetic efficiency."
"I have secured several-thousand likely-living specimens of astrophage and will be expecting another fifty middle-cycles until my return to low orbit of The Home Plane. I hope this transmission finds you well."
That message spread far beyond those it had originally been addressed to.
First to neighboring iterator groups through private, obligatory scientific correspondence. Then to the few administrators curious enough to approve further study. Eventually, it found its way into the public archives, where it joined the countless other unresolved oddities that had accumulated over the centuries.
Few outside the scientific community paid it much attention. It didn’t help that the iterator population was, in fact, most of that scientific community.
A microbial organism that consumed sunlight was certainly unusual. Unprecedented, even. It was hardly the first impossible thing an iterator had calmly copied documentation of before a cache reset.
The samples, however, had proven themselves considerably more difficult to ignore.
Entire laboratories shifted priorities. Iterator manufacturing lines once dedicated to void drills and resource processing found themselves fabricating high-power microscopes, argon containment vessels, and standard mass spectrometers, instead. Requests for free access to the living specimens rapidly exceeded what the returning probe had even been capable of collecting, let alone what it actually returned with. Every iterator seemed convinced they alone would discover the niche answers everyone else had somehow overlooked.
The weather continued to deteriorate in the background.
At first, the changes were subtle enough to dismiss as coincidence. Additional heat-affect requests arrived from neighboring iterator groups. Water collection conduits froze a little earlier than expected during cold seasons. Farm-array districts requested slightly longer summers in compensation. The discrepancies amounted to fractions of a degree over dozens of cycles, though it was still nothing any iterator had not solved for, before.
But the trends were showing it happening everywhere. Independent iterator groups separated by thousands of kilometers began using the same methodology in compensating for the same inexplicable cooling. Thermal budgets rose and cloud-seeding became increasingly aggressive.
Some iterators quietly exhausted power reserves originally intended for emergency maintenance. Others reduced computational workloads to free additional energy for climate regulation. A handful postponed construction projects entirely, diverting their resources toward simply keeping their city populations comfortable.
Administrators noticed. The churches noticed. Even those who had dismissed the probe's findings as little more than a scientific curiosity found themselves signing increasingly unusual requests for heating infrastructure, agricultural assistance and the such.
Within a hundred middle-cycles after the probe's return, astrophage had become one of the most intensely studied organisms in recorded history.
Within another fifty, enough independent observations had accumulated that disbelief of the phenomenon was no longer a scientifically defensible position.
For the first time in living memory, the High Council convened not because of the Void Sea...
... but because the sky was getting darker.