The whole galaxy watched over hyperspace as the fuzzy, dark ball veered and grew substantially brighter, a worrisome sign that it had already entered the particle-rich space around the sun. The captain’s hand rested on the red hyperspace button, ready to leap away from the solar system the moment before impact.
In the end, the bomb shot by the very edge of the sun, only a few dozen miles from its surface, sucking in huge amounts of material from the sun’s atmosphere as it brushed past. It glowed intensely with a blue-white light, and for a moment, the sun appeared to have a brighter twin star locked in close, binary orbit, a phenomenon that was to become an enduring mystery to the inhabitants of Earth. The sun’s fiery surface darkened beneath the bomb, like the wake of a speedboat in calm water, and as the black hole swept past the solar surface, its gravity consumed the sun’s light, scratching a dark, crescent scar into the sun’s surface which grew to eclipse the whole solar hemisphere. As the bomb left the sun, it dragged an enormous solar prominence behind it, a beautiful string of flame one million miles long. The tip of the prominence flared violently outward, blossoming into a mass of whirling plasma vortices.
After the singularity bomb brushed past the sun, it grew dark again. Soon, it disappeared into the infinite night of space.
“We almost destroyed a carbon-based civilization,” said the senator, heaving a sigh of relief.
“A 3C-level civilization here, in this desert—unbelievable!” exclaimed the fleet commander.
“Yes. Neither the Carbon Federation nor the Silicon Empire has included this region in its plans for expansion and cultivation. If this civilization were to have evolved entirely on its own, that would be a rare thing indeed,” said the High Archon.
“Vessel Blue 84210, you are to hold your position in that star system and commence a full-surface civilization test on Planet Three. Another ship will take over your prior mission,” ordered the fleet commander.
The children in the village didn’t notice anything amiss, unlike their digital replicas outside of Jupiter’s orbit. They were still crying over their teacher’s body in their candlelit dormitory. After a long time, they quieted down.
“We should go tell a grown-up,” said Guo Cuihua, stifling a sob.
“What for?” asked Liu Baozhu, his eyes on the floor. “No one in this village cared about him when he was alive. I bet they won’t even pay for a coffin!”
In the end, the children decided to bury their teacher themselves. With pickaxes and shovels, they dug a grave in a hill next to the school, and the brilliant stars above silently watched them work.
The senator watched Vessel Blue 84210’s test results as they streamed instantly across a thousand light-years of space. “The civilization on this planet isn’t 3C—it’s 5B!” he exclaimed, astonished.
The skyscrapers of human cities appeared as holograms aboard the flagship.
“They have already begun using nuclear energy, and they can fly into space using chemical propellants. They’ve even landed on their moon.”
“What are their basic features?” asked the fleet commander.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” said the duty officer of Vessel Blue 84210.
“Well, how advanced is their heritable memory?”
“They don’t inherit memories. They acquire all their memories during their lives.”
“What method do they use to communicate information to each other?”
“It’s very primitive, and very rare. There is a thin organ in their bodies that vibrates, producing waves in their planet’s atmosphere, which is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen. By modulating the vibrations, they encode information into the waves. They have separate organs—thin membranes—that receive the waves.”
“What’s the transmission rate of that method?”
“Approximately one to ten bits per second.”
“What?!” Everyone on the flagship laughed out loud.
“It’s true. We were incredulous at first, but it’s been verified repeatedly.”
“Captain, this is lunacy!” yelled the fleet commander. “You are telling us that an organism without any hereditary memory that transmits information using sound waves at one to ten bits per second can form a 5B-level civilization?! And that they developed this civilization entirely on their own, without any external assistance from an advanced civilization?!”
“Sir, that is the case.”
“If that’s so, they have no way to pass knowledge between generations. Accumulated knowledge across generations is necessary for civilization to evolve!”
“There is a class of individuals, a certain proportion of the population spread evenly among their civilization. They act as mediums for the transmission of knowledge between generations.”
“That sounds like a myth.”
“It’s not,” said the senator. “Such a concept existed in the galaxy in prehistoric times, but even then, it was extremely rare. No one would know about it except historians of the evolution of civilization in the star systems where the idea had currency.”
“By ‘concept,’ you mean individuals that transmit knowledge between generations of a species?”
“Yes. They’re called ‘teachers.’”
“Tea—cher?”
“An ancient word that was once in currency among a few long-lost civilizations. It’s rare enough that it does not appear in most ancient vocabulary databases.”
The holographic feed from the solar system zoomed out to display the blue orb of Earth rotating slowly in space.
The High Archon said, “A civilization evolving independently is rare enough, but I know of no other civilization in the Milky Way that has attained 5B level on its own, at least in the era of the Carbon Federation. We should let this civilization continue its evolution without interference, observing it as it does, not only to further our understanding of ancient civilizations, but also, perhaps, to gain insight into our broader galactic civilization.”
“I’ll have Vessel Blue 84210 leave the star system immediately and designate a hundred-light-year no-fly zone around it,” said the fleet commander.
Insomniacs in the northern hemisphere might have seen a small group of stars begin to flutter slightly, then the stars around those, and so on across the whole sky, as if a finger had been dipped into the still water of the night sky.
The space-time shock wave caused by Vessel Blue 84210’s hyperspace leap was considerably attenuated by the time it hit Earth. Every clock jumped three seconds ahead. Humans, confined as we are to three-dimensional space, were unaware of the disturbance.
“It’s a pity,” said the High Archon. “They’ll be confined to sub-light speeds and three-dimensional space for another two thousand years without the intervention of a more advanced civilization. It will be at least a thousand years before they can harness the energy of matter-antimatter annihilation. Two thousand more years before they can transmit and receive multidimensional communications… and as for hyperspace galactic travel, that will take them at least five thousand years. It will be at least ten thousand years before they attain the minimum conditions for entry into the galactic family of carbon-based life-forms.”
The senator said, “Independent evolution of this sort happened only in the prehistoric era of the galaxy. If our records of those times are correct, my distant ancestors lived in the deep ocean of a marine planet. They lived and died there in darkness, their governments rose and fell, and then, at some point, they felt adventurous. They launched a craft toward space—a buoyant, transparent ball that rose slowly to the surface of the ocean. It was the dead of night when they reached the surface. The people inside the craft were the first of my ancestors to see the stars. Can you imagine how they felt? Can you imagine how glorious and mysterious that sight was to them?”