The above video (Part 1) is the account of Dr. Barton Hallow, a British astrophysicist, regarding the discovery of the Travelers. Selected from Annex C-9541E.
The story below (Part 2) is the account of Tahayogrash-1B, a traveler from the void. Looking for the audio version? Click here!
“TRANSLATION COMPLETE. WARNING BROADCAST SUCCESSFULLY DELIVERED.”
Had he still possessed the three lungs his original, biological form once used to breathe, Tahayogrash-1B would have sighed in relief. The message was too little, but NOT too late - it was the only assistance he could afford to render unto the primitive technological species his long-range sensors had detected as he had at last entered the galaxy that the found life forms called home. It was the same message, the same assistance he would offer every world he happened across on the long journey ahead - short, yet clear. Enough. It would have to be enough.
He wished he were capable of sending a longer missive, perhaps containing the full specifications of a craft that would allow the recipient species to enact his urgings to depart, or at least to give them some details about what they should be running from, but no such processing power nor time could be spared. Not now, not after he had spent so much of his diminishing resources fleeing through the darkness of the void, all the while in terrible ignorance of what the universe outside the growing shadow was like.
It was so much worse than what he and his people had imagined. He knew it would be, after it had taken him nearly four times longer than expected to escape the crushing void he and his species had been stranded in for uncounted eons as they attempted to understand the nature of the cold doom that threatened to turn the WHOLE of their universe into a silent, still tomb, now and forevermore. They had volunteered for this, the elders told them, in days so ancient they may as well have been legend, when the voids were little more than a disturbing, nascent curiosity. The collective their people had once belonged to had charged them with investigating the anomalous, localized pockets of accelerated entropy that had begun springing up, cutting off the great pan-galactic alliances from one another. His people had always been brave, ingenious, and tenacious in their pursuit of understanding. After all, it had been their ancient mastery of reflexive antimatter generation reactions that had allowed their infant galactic republic to at last bridge the gap between their galaxy and another, leading to the first communion across the great spans of emptiness between the spinning discs of dust and stars, a connection that led to untold prosperity for thousands of generations.
Or so the legends said. Whatever prosperous universe had once been present in the lost days of his ancestors was gone - replaced by a dark, frigid plane of existence whose filaments of living matter had been stretched so thin that they could barely be said to exist any longer. But none of that mattered. In the end, his people had achieved the understanding they sought. And it had cost them everything.
The original Tahayogrash had not been an individual of great renown. He was a middling scientific administrator, remarkable only for an inborn genetic mental quality he’d never had to work to develop. His mind, more so than any other of his species, was resilient. It could be duplicated and stretched over time, altered and augmented in every conceivable way, all without suffering the catastrophic degradation that so afflicted other members of his kind when the same memetic procedures were attempted upon them. Thus, he was the perfect (and only) candidate for the Last Voyage - his species' final act, before they were at last swallowed irrevocably by the dark.
They had poured every last resource they possessed into creating the cluster of a dozen interlinked FTL-capable transit data orbs that his multiplied minds now inhabited and piloted, each bearing both altered copies of his mind AND the sum total of the data and conclusions his species had assembled over the course of their eons-long, suicidal endeavor into understanding the nature of the growing voids. Each data orb carried the critical answers so long ago sought by the brilliant member-beings of the last Pan-Galactic Alliance, the keys to salvation in the face of an exponentially accelerating entropic collapse that threatened to isolate and destroy every last sapient being in the universe. They had learned the cause of it, decoded the nature of the indifferent, idiotic entities gestating at the centers of every void, and found a way to counter the ever-grasping, ever-growing tendrils of dark matter that the infant destroyers were using to expand their sable egg-sacs. But without the unified, synchronous energy of multiple galactic cores, they were powerless to enact the solution they had discovered. Such a thing could only, maybe, be done by the intergalactic powers their people had once known - if such powers were still in existence.
And therein lay the greatest anxiety of each iteration of Tahayogrash as they hurtled between the rare and twinkling stars. His people had lost contact with the union they once represented ages ago, as the void they were studying grew around them, suffocating their ability to communicate. There had been no hope of contacting anyone on the ancient comm wavelengths as he journeyed through the void itself, traveling at many thousands of times the speed of light, but now that he had decelerated, he had hoped to immediately make contact with the beings his people had so long counted on to remain when their studies had at last concluded. Yet, he had found no such thing, only a scattered chittering of archaic radio waves emanating from an embryonic society too primitive to be of any help to him, a society he could only ever hope to warn of the long-advancing dark as he flew ever further from the void their galaxy dangled so precipitously upon the edge of.
It was a reality of the most deflating sort, the sort of thing that would have destroyed his original mind, fragile as it was, if not for the augmented resilience and amplified hope that had been fostered in him and his twins. He had not abandoned his people to the cold embrace of the malignant dark to give up when the first inhabited cluster of stars he found failed to host a society capable of helping him. He would go on. He had to go on.
In unison, each of the dozen orbs bearing his unsleeping soul accelerated. The fabric of the universe blurred around him as empty, humming stars streaked by, and in an instant, the primitive world and its star system were gone. In the grand timelines of the universe, it would be the merest moment before the void consumed the star system he had just passed by. A blink of the cosmic eye, nothing more, nothing less. But it was not too late. They had the means to escape. He had seen it in the collected images and buzzing echoes of radio that had puddled in the extrasolar space around their star. They had enough time to develop further, to escape the dark and seek some form of enduring light to build their futures around. They were capable of doing it.
But there were no assurances. There never were, even of things you were taught to be everlasting. And so, as he left their world behind in search of a brightness capable of banishing the dark, he could only hope that they would heed his warning and follow him into the light.
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