Edge of the Vortex Read online

  Many of the citizens of that last sphere dismissed the idea outright. Many asked how such a thing could happen. They had no technology or knowledge on hand to create synthetic beings to transfer into, and even if they created robots, that would just delay the inevitability of the species demise. They needed Zorosian bodies to return to, and there was only one place in the galaxy where they could find them.

  A remote space station had been built and slipped into the upper atmosphere of a gas giant where it would sit for all eternity and serve as a last-ditch vault for millions of Zorosian bodies that were grown, and lived full lives, then died in a perpetually catatonic state, waiting for the day that might come when the masters wanted to return to the physical world. The project had been scoffed at when first proposed, but at the time, the resources of the Empire were so vast that building a station with almost 19,000,000 square metres of space was a simple task.

  With news that they were the last of the species, the ruling council decided that it was time to leave the Dyson Sphere, and travel back to the massive facility and become beings in the physical world again. Many refused, and that choice was honoured. They could stay as they were inside the never-ending dream world that they had created for themselves inside a large black, featureless box that contained the collective minds of all Zorosian in the sphere.

  Those that decided to leave went about planning for their departure. They needed ships to transport them to the station, and those ships needed droids to function, and months to get ready. They hadn’t been used for centuries, and those that were planning their voyage were not about to risk everything on bad maintenance.

  When the ships, all one thousand of them, were declared ready for operations, the minds and consciousnesses were transferred from the large, featureless box onto the ships and evenly distributed. The process took time and needed to be executed with precision. A mind lost in the transfer was gone forever. When the ships were finally loaded, they offered a final chance for the portion of the population that wanted to remain in the sphere to join them, but by the time the ships had passed through the massive gates of the sphere out into open space, there hadn’t been one citizen to change their mind.

  By the time the ships were ready to make their first jump out of the system that they had occupied for centuries, a virus had started to corrupt the Dyson Sphere. No one knew where it came from, or what caused it, but it started shutting off various systems that kept the sphere functioning, and by the time an emergency call had been made to the ships, it was too late. The featureless black box was dying, without explanation. Perhaps it was the doing of the last physical Zorosian who had flipped the switch and been left all alone once the rest of the species had gone to the digital world, and this was some kind of sick plot that had taken all these years to play out.

  Either way, what was left of the mighty Zorosian species was now on board one thousand ships heading towards the last place they could go to survive: a massive station, cloaked to all known forms of detection, floating above the gas giant known to the species local to the system as Jupiter.

  To be continued…

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