Invisible Planets

Invisible Planets

By Hannu Rajaniemi

Travelling through Cygnus 61, as it prepares to cross the gulf between the galaxies, the darkship commands its sub-minds to describe the worlds it has visited.

In the lives of darkships, like in the journey of any ambassador, there always comes a time that is filled with doubt. As the dark matter neutralions packed tight like wet sand in the galactic core annihilate each other in its hungry Chown drive heart and push it ever closer to the speed of light, the darksphi wonders if it truly carries a cargo worthy of the Network and the Controller. What if the date it has gathered from the electomagnetic echoes of young civilisations and the warm infrared dreams of Dyson spheres, written onto tons upon tons of endlessly coiled DNA strands that hold petabytes in a single gram, is nothing more than a scrawled message in a botlle, to be picked up by fishrman in an unknown shore and the discarded, alien and meaningless?

That is why – before the relentless hand of Lorentz squeezes the ship.s clocks so thin that aeons pass with every tick and the starry gaze of the Universe gatheers into a single blazing, blue-shifted, judging eye – the ship studies its memory and tries to discern a pattern subtle enough to escape entropy’s gnawing.

Invisible Planets. Photo by Elena

During the millennia of its journey, the darkship’s mind has expanded, until it has become something that has to be exploded and mapped. The treasures it contains can only be described in metaphors, fragile and misleading and elegant, like Japanese street numbers. And so, more and more, amongst all the agents in its sprawling society of mind, the darkship finds itself listening to the voice of a tiny sub-mind, so insignificant that she is barely more than a wanderer lost in a desert, coming from reaches of the ship’s mid so distant that she might as well be a traveller from another country that has stumbled upon an ancient and exotic kingdom on the other side of the world, and now finds herself serving a quizzical, omnipotent emperor.

The sub-mind gives the ship not simulations or mind-states or data but worlds. She communicates with symbols, hints and whispers that light up old connections in the darkship’ mind, bright like cities and highways seen from orbit, maps of ancient planets, drawn wit guttural monkey sounds.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.