As the morning suns rise once more over the lakes; the messy form of the galaxy vanishing like a phantom. Something new raises its stalks. Slowly, a sizable amount of fluid gets pumped into tubes made of elastic nanite components.
At their tips, are plates of monocrystalline silicon, glinting in the morning sun.
One day…
These leaves will become legs, and those legs hands, and when that day comes….
…the Precursors will awaken again.
What once were gods, were now stones.
Existence running up the hill of aware things before tumbling down to square one.
Back to the dark, of eternal sleep.
But fate had other plans…
The only constant in the universe is change.
Change is the world’s oldest steward, and change will affect the Sopholiths.
Already, the small crystalline stones have started to compete.
Adapting,
Evolving,
Roots have started to overtake roots,
Piercing them…
Leeching off their fluid.
Some have started developing spines and motes of roots.
Most notable of all, the simple neural structures gifted to all Sopholith kind are starting to specialize…
For different actions and functions!
The manipulation of nanites and the release of hormones!
The Percusors made them to be deathbeds, but they have become seeds to something spectacular.
A reawakening 4 billion years in the making, now coming full circle.
They were the first – a flicker of sapience born in the abyss of the vast cosmos.
Yet, as is the nature of all things, over time, their reign faded. They fractured, splintering off into smaller and smaller subgroups across interstellar space.
They became increasingly more complex…
And simultaneously simpler.
They eventually grew bored of the universe, and bored of the infinite experiences of the network. So, quietly, they went to sleep. In an act of zen, they finally slept, simplifying their minds into self-replicating crystals on the surfaces of random worlds.
They redid themselves.
They remade themselves.
So they would never have to wake up again.
They wanted death, a calm death, a slow slumber, an eternal slumber.
Never to be bored and unsatisfied again.
And for the first few million years it stayed that way, stones that carried the simplified minds of dead gods.
Once upon a time, the distant cousin ancestors of the Sopholiths ascended. The exact details of this ascension have long been lost to time, but from the beginning one thing was clear – that simply copying a being’s consciousness in AI form would not spare their ‘souls’ from death. It would simply create an eternal false impression of a soul, that would stalk the digital realm as its own person.
The only way they could save themselves, save the true themselves, was by gifting their brains immortality in nanite shells long after their bodies had disintegrated. This line of thought extended over all the Primordial Sopholiths, till they could effectively reproduce without their prior forms. This began the age of the Astro-sapiens, the dawn of the Precursors.
Over the course of millions of years, the Precursors spread across the galaxy, seeding worlds, dismantling others, enveloping entire colonies of themselves around stars like moths swarming at the light. Free of the constraints of natural selection, their brains expanded and folded in ways more complex than we could fathom. They became neural cyborgs, adding synthetic nanite neurons to their interface, creating sensorium utopias beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors. They became gods, immortal gods, a trillion immortal minds intertwined in a hivemind network.
It created a strange visage to behold. Vast “savannas” and “plains” crowded with opaque black crystals, that choked the ground and were layered in fine glass. There wasn’t a patch of ground left that wasn’t occupied by the myriad of 4-meter-wide polyhedron-disks, that out of chance would have been compared to sundials as their taller javelin and pillar-shaped brothers cast velvet shadows over their faces.
Their secrets are not skin deep, for they resided within. What appeared as a gleaming crystal was, in fact, a shell. Within the shell housed the last relic of their ancestry, a syrupy nutritious oxygen-rich core that fed a culture of interconnected organoids. They were like a strange, silicon-covered perversion of eukaryotic cells, multitudes of small organlets pumping the fluid to a great web of nerves that connected with an outer layer of nanites.
It was strange, technological and biological electrodes sown together like cress and thread, united more efficiently than separate. For some odd reason, they were stuck in an eternal slumber, a delta frequency punctuated by specific jolts of activity in certain neural web clusters.
The Sopholiths are the last of a long lineage of cosmic civilizations. They took the resemblance of strange, geometric shapes, all of them having at least one flat top surface. Their world is a vast, arid super-earth, pockmarked with a thousand tiny seas at its poles. Two suns cast double shadows on tall columnar formations that resemble monumental obelisks, their polished surfaces glinting like mirrors under the dual sunlight.
It is late evening, and the setting of the sister suns has turned the sky a deep passionate pink. The monocrystalline silicon of the Sopholiths start to shimmer as opals. They use the silicon to gather energy by accumulating electric potential through the photovoltaic effect. This in practice acts as an effective solar panel, and, with two suns in the sky, this made the gathering of energy more efficient than plant photosynthesis.
The Sopholiths come in many shapes and sizes, their forms coming in a great diversity of morphotypes. Crystals and pillars straight from antiquity tower over the landscape, as smaller dodecahedrons, pyramids, and giant hexahedrons surround the lakes. Some are even stalked, strange Euclidian kebabs of pentahedrons, spheres, bowls, and forms that would recall the lipid shells of viruses. Their hardened roots flow like the water that they sucked from the ponds and streams. Some even bore into the rock itself, absorbing the metal-rich grounds of their super-mercurial world.
As night falls, the Sopholiths glimmer faintly as they have for eons. As the galaxy around them descends into chaos, all remains quiet on their timeless world.
This entry was made by our community member, Tardigrade.