Quoted By:
“Hollow. The two archive-seeds were mostly hollow.
“A miniaturized scanner slowly tapped across the fist-sized cubes, mapping out their internal structure using a range of emission modalities. Layer by layer, a ghostly projection of the object developed on my display tablet.
The construction was much simpler than I expected – nothing like the fractalized complexity of the hypometric weapon. The dense, radiation-opaque surface protected a thin lining of insulative support machinery, maintaining an inert, EM-shielded chamber which contained an oddly amorphous payload.
The sight was puzzling to me. After hearing the hunter’s account, I had expected something more dramatic – perhaps an offshoot of the strange-matter weapon it had deployed during its final stand against the Mizarian fleet.
But the scanner showed little of that. Besides for the faintest whisper of particle entanglement, the substance seemed free of exotic physics. Structurally, it straddled the boundary between a liquid and a fine solid, using ambient heat to slowly self-organize into a range of complex patterns. The motion resembled iron filings aligning towards the poles of an old compass – or a drop of ferrofluid caught in the grip of an oscillating electromagnet.
The humming of the scanner pitched up, narrowing its emission wavelength to obtain higher resolution imagery. The projection swam before updating to show a magnified perspective.
And I began to understand.
I saw the base components of a plague, aligned in an endless matrix. Tiny, nanoscale heat-engines which exploit a fleeting blind-spot in thermodynamic-heat flow to convert diffuse energy into usable work. Here, they consumed each other: peeling their siblings apart atom-by-recorded-atom to assemble an endless lineage of identical children.
I no longer hold any doubts that the archive-seed can be used as a weapon. However, it would be a paradoxical one. Everything consumed will be committed to the hunter's archive – preserved in a permanent storage medium that we cannot selectively alter. Unleashing it against the Mizarians would grant them a degree of…immortality…that disgusts me on a personal level. I know that MERRYGATE would feel the same.
So there will be a choice here, I am sure. I cannot be certain that if hunter forced it upon us intentionally, but my intuition only points to a single answer. Both of our species have an unfilled entry in the archive. And there are precisely two archive-seeds aboard the RAIN.
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, SEPTEMBER 21th, PERSONAL JOURNAL
