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Part 1.

The ship had gained twice it's original mass through it's passage among the stars, an invisible huge net of nanocables and the ship core, small, unassuming, and the cloud of cables extending kilometres and kilometres around itself, catching any particle that happened to cross it's path, reducing any possible damage of those relativistic missiles by entangling and breaking any possible impact and redirecting all the energy to storage. It was effective, and also reduced the need of fuel for deceleration, being more massive slowed it down by default.

It's destiny was a small star, charted centuries ago by earth scientists, even before chances of leaving the solar system were possible. But here it was, drifting down it's gravity well.

The ship started retracting half the nanocloud so it could recycle the mass into an installation room. It took a few days, but it wasn't on a hurry, it had took about a thousand of years to reach it's destination, a few days, or even months would mean nothing to it.

The ship's core stored all the material needed to create fifty two distinctive subjects, but it would first build the captain.

The storage room contained the genetic material stored on hard data as well as in organic replicants, across the hundred of years, relative to itself, that it took to travel here the ship had checked the self replicant material several thousands of times. Each run comparing the ending genome to the hard coded data in the primary, secondary and tertiary crystal matrix. This extreme care was so no change would occur to self replicant material before it would be put into the building vat. The ship knew some people called it an artificial womb in steroids, and they weren't half wrong, the system basically let the cells grow in the same way nature had done for millennia, however much, much faster. Building the captain would take a few months and he would come out with a fully adult body human, much more efficient than old nature's way.

The ship did a last test on the subject, theory said their genome was exactly as it was designed back on the home systems, but it never did any harm to check anyway. The subject looked to be in perfect conditions, and it's brain was obviously blank. This part was the key point for The Ship for imprinting the memory state of the captain. A freshly built subject had absolutely no cemented neural pathways, no memories, no random ticks, nothing, that was taken care by the vat.

Imprinting the memory state was no joke anyway. It took extreme care and delicacy. The ship could take as much time as it had taken by building the subject as it did imprinting, brains were silly like that. And even then the subject might come out with a faulty memory state and fail the mission protocols. But to that point a simple test sufficed, when the subject woke up it had to disable it's own restraining field by matching neural patterns against the ship systems. It was an old and basic encrypting technology that hand't changed in hundreds of years because it was already pretty darn secure.

Subject Johan Mark I woke up in an alien system. "Hello ship," he said "wow, this is weird".

"Hello Johan Mark I, welcome".

"Mark I eh? Nice to know you hadn't to recycle other mes then".

"There was no need sir, I kept good care of all my crew".

"Well, thank you ship", he said, and then added "Hey ship, what's your name?".

"I haven't decided on one yet sir, I was waiting for my crew to be subjected to help me decide".

"Oh, okay, I'll keep calling you ship then, hope you don't mind".

"I have no qualms to it a way or another sir".

"Excellent, so, how did it go then...?" he asked to no one and looked at the screen, the matching sequence was waiting before he had opened his eyes, now he concentrated and unlocked the fields, suddenly he was in freefall, the ship said "Welcome aboard Subject Captain Johan Mark I, I am at your command".

"Thank you ship, any particularly important update from my last backup?"

"Several sir, there has been quite a few breakthroughs in the last 1331 years since your last Memory State was stored. None of them are of extreme relevance to us right now, though they might be once we start building the colony".

"So, we have a planet to build the colony then?"

"There are two habitable planets in the system yes"

"Show me please"

Data started to show up in the command theatre around Captain Johan, hundreds of spreadsheets resumed to graphs, pictures and videos, holoprojections and hypersense mockups, both planets were similar, both had competed for the same resource pool and ended up being at opposite pseudo Lagrange points of a gas giant twice as big as Jupiter.

"What's this?" Captain Johan asked pointing to a weird looking electromagnetic spectrum chart.

"I am not sure sir, but it does appear to be non random electromagnetic signals".

"Non... random? you mean it's intelligent? are there people here?"

"Can not say sir, it doesn't appear to be coded in any way I can decipher, but it's also not simple chaotic signalling, nor it's pulsar frequencies, it's simply non-random".

"Where does it come from?"

"I don't know either sir, I've detected it all through the system while I've been here. My records state the first record of the frequencies seventeen astronomical units from the star"

"It's a signal that is everywhere in a seventeen AU sphere?"

"It appears so, yes".

"That should require quite a lot of energy."

"Yes."

"How much?"

"I can't tell sir, the signal is extremely unusual in it's power levels, sometimes it makes my nanocloud tremble, and others I have to really listen to even hear a whisper."

"Interesting, I guess we have some mysteries to check on don't we?"

"You guess correctly sir".

"So, have to chosen a location for the colony?"

Captain Johan and the ship talked over the quality of this or that settlement location, they had to explore the exoecologies and determinate long term solutions, they also had new technologies to catch up from back home, they would help some. In any case, humanity had found a new home, the ship would build the base colonists, and if needed would replicate the colony settlement elsewhere, one day in the not that far future the Mark II subjects would be decanted, perhaps the original memory state would be installed on them, perhaps the ones from the Mark I, that would have to be seen.

And so, another star got it's chance of having a case of the Humans, just like every other would have, for the galaxy belong to them.

Part 2.

The ship floated in the middle of the Oort cloud, slowly consuming mass, growing each passing month. It was now ten times more massive than it had been back when it first entered the system. It's nanomesh cloud extending so far away that it needed new cores built here and there, each helping alleviate it's central core control. The ship now had the volume of Earth's Moon and kept consuming. Of course most of the volume was empty space but that was good too, many of the cores now boasted censor arrays. It used the nanomesh itself as an antenna, the largest antenna built in the history of humanity.

The ship though itself as part of humanity because what was a human but a product of Earth's Sentient Evolution, and it was absolutely a product of Earth's sentient community. And as a part of the human species it had more than one drive, not, not like hard drives, no, will drive. For example it wanted to help it's subjects survive in the new system, it also wanted to explore the universe and uncover it's secrets, it also wanted to learn how to bake. Not easy baking in space, specially without atmosphere, apparently having an atmosphere was essential to proper baking. In any case little of that mattered now, the project of the colony had failed and the ship had another priority now. It needed a captain to talk so it had to create a new subject.

But first it needed mass for the project, it needed to create something very delicate, and that needed time. So it went to power saving mode and kept the recorders going.

Eventually the ship decanted a new captain, it's genetic material was took out of the storage module, checked against the hard records in triplicate, then built until the adult body was functional. Then the memory snapshot was installed onto the blank brain of the subject. And so the ship had a captain again.

"Hello Subject Johan Mark VI", said the ship.

"Wow, this is wei... Mark VI?" asked Subject Johan Mark VI.

"Yes sir".

"Why Mark VI? What happened?" Johan expected to be a Mark I, any subsequent Mark would remember each previous installation, he shouldn't have a Mark VI number if he had a Mark I memory state.

"Subject Johan Mark VI please identify yourself" The ship said and presented Johan with a neural decription key, it had been encoded by himself before doing the memory backup back on Human Space, he looked at the screen and easily matched the password.

"Thank you Captain Johan Mark VI, now I can answer all your questions".

"Uh... OK Ship, what's going on?"

"Please sir, look at the system display", in the middle of the decanting room, right next the the artificial womb was a desk with a chair and an hyperdisplay, it showed all sorts of sensor data, but in the center of the command theatre was a signal profile, Johan knew this because that was the label it had on itself, he said, "OK ship, what am I looking at?"

"Sir, thirty years ago when I first entered this system I detected this signal, it was permeating all the system, it was strange because I couldn't identify its source at the time and it showed to be non random, your first Subject was created then and he considered the mystery interesting but the colony was his priority, so we set the mystery aside and started the selection of the location. This took a few weeks but eventually we chose a functional location for a first colony. However, meanwhile, the signal kept growing in variety and regularity, until one day I managed to find a pattern. The encoding was extremely long, it took weeks to form a coherent package, but then it repeated itself, or didn't, or it created new patterns. It was then when we realized that the reason we didn't detected a source was because there were an incredible amount of them, hundreds of sources, each talking to each other, and the conversation repeated itself eventually."

"Wow... there is a sentient species in this system?"

"We weren't sure back then, no. It could be an automated system, but the problem was that we couldn't detect the sources themselves, we knew were the signals came but when we explored the origin points there was nothing there."

"so?"

"So Captain Johan Mark I decided we needed more data and made a memory backup and recycled himself, I kept recording and visiting all origin points. After three years I finally had mapped all sources so I decanted a new Subject, Mark II and I analyzed the signal and it's origin points for several months and nothing came out of it, we decided then that we could do nothing about it and that we should star the colony anyway, none of our actions had caused any change in the signal patterns at all."

"We started building the colony then and just when we finished the first housing lodges Captain Johan Mark II decided it was time to decant some scientists, they might have some inkling onto what to do with the signal. This was when things started to go wrong. I discovered that all my memory backups were somehow offline, the only backup that remained intact was the Original Captain Johan memory state, and that was because it was hosted onto the decanting module that I had already built before entering the system. All the others were corrupted."

"All... of my friends Memory States are corrupted?", Johan took the chair and grabbed it with white knuckles, his face stared into the nothingness of space.

"Yes Captain, I'm sorry." The ship said, then added, "I sent a recovery link back to the Home Systems but it will take about one hundred and seventy years more for them to arrive."

Johan let a sigh go through his body and sat down.

"So that's why I'm a Mark VI with a Mark I memory state?" Johan felt tired and defeated, also he felt naked, which he was.

"Basically, yes sir. I... it isn't protocol to save small memory states after a simple Mark update, so I never saved the copy of Mark I that I used on Mark II."

"Yeah... that makes sense, we never used to do that before either." He moved to the wall and pressed the dresser button on the wall, a sliding door slide away and a set of shirts were packed on individual plastic wrappers on the top shelf, under it were pants, under that boxers and under that socks, at a side a tower of shoes, his ones had a light on.

"No sir."

"So, Ship, what happened next?" He started dressing while the ship started to show a slideshow of videos and pictures of his pasts selfs, ones he would now never know except from this videos, which was weird, but this kind of things came with the job.

"Yes sir, then well, then we stopped the colony project, it made no sense to continue without memory states to install, we can't just copy your memory state into any random Subject, the memory-to-body doesn't match."

"Of course." He was half dressed now, his pants now shrinking to size, then the shirt and he would have all his space suit on.

"We left the colony location and started a more deeper analysis of the system, we needed to discover what had corrupted my memory states, as you surely remember I do have a triplicate back up of everything in myself."

"Yes, I remember" he walked now to the commissary wall and chose the day's food from the menu, the ship had that already built of course, if he choose something different the ship would have to build it from scratch and that could take a while.

"Well, when we discovered the failure we had to check if it had happened after the construction of Mark II. We built a Mark III, when he was activated he passed the locking test and was therefore my captain. Both Mark II and III decided then that it made no sense to stay online while we knew little of what happened. We assumed the corruption had happened sometime when we entered the system, somehow the only ones not affected were in the decanting womb, which technically is disconnected from my main drives system."

"No other data was corrupted?" the jello looking pudding was as tasty as he remembered, that is, not so much, but it was filling, and he was hungry, after all he was a new born.

"Not that we could tell, but I can no longer trust my own checksums, if they where correct I would have detected the memory states corruption right when it happened."

"Right, I see." He finished his meal and placed the plate back into the recycling bin.

"After Mark II and III where offline I kept recording and analyzing the system, but also I started to coast away to the edge of the signal presence."

"That's were we are now?" he now sat at the console's chair and looked directly at the different feeds.

"No sir, when I reached that point I decanted Mark IV. He and I went through all the data and started to see the patterns on the corruption did matched the System Non Random Signal. We discovered that somehow memory states have similarities to the way the signal itself is."

"What do you mean?"

"IV and I theorized that the system signal is some sort of Memory State sir."

"A... A memory state stored across a whole Planetary System?" Johan was flabbergasted.

"Yes sir, that was our theory. We thought that somehow the signal permeated to the memory states and corrupted it in an attempt to make it like the rest of the stored memory."

"You mean it tried to fix what it though was a faulty memory copy?"

"Yes, and as your copy wasn't connected to the rest of my data system it never found it."

"So I am safe."

"Yes"

"This is some weird shit"

"We though so too sir, so we decided that we needed to do something about it?"

"Something like what?"

"We needed to decant the planetary system memory state."

Johan stared again at everything around himself, had the ship gone crazy?

"Say again?"

"Mark IV and I though that, if we could talk to whatever it's here, then, well, that would be amazing!" Johan stared still in silence, "Ship, listen, wait, Ship do you have a name?"

"Notnow sir"

"Not now?"

"Yes sir."

"What?"

"My name is Notnow sir." The ship's name now showed written in the screen.

"Your name is Notnow?"

"Yes sir."

"Why?"

"We though it'd be funny sir."

Johan grabbed his nose and shook it slowly. "I see... Notnow, don't you think it's dangerous to decant a memory to something that needed a whole planetary system to store itself into... what? A Subject?"

"Oh, no, nonono, no sir. We had no idea to what, that's why I decanted Mark V. The three of us concluded the background pattern of the stored Memory State to be, well, a pretty big brain sir."

"A pretty big brain?"

"Yes sir, so we decided that we had to build the brain first. And that's what I've been doing for the past twenty years."

The ship now showed the network of nanomesh around itself, it kept going and going, each able to transmit signals to the speed of light, each colliding into a complex structural network of nodes here and there that repeated and strengthened signal, huge memory banks each able to store almost unaccountable amounts of data.

"This is incredible Ship. Is it finished?", Johan stood up to the screen.

"Almost, yes sir, but still, I had to wake you up, so we could decide if it's a good idea now that we can."

"Well, Notnow, I don't have the slightest of the ideas."

The ship turned to a side, and dislodged itself from the mesh. It's job was done now.

"We are no longer part of the... Brain?"

"A brain the size of the Moon."

"Yes, scary really."

"Well, Ship, if humanity is known for anything, if for going to places and poking stuff with sticks. Let's see what happens now."

Part 3.

Notnow drifted slowly away from the brain.

"Start the transfer of the signal Memory State", Captain Johan Mark VI said to the ship.
"Transfer initiated", Notnow said to it's captain.
"How long will it take?"
"Transferring all the data to the neural network will depend on the acquisition of the signal from the planetary system".
"Which means?"
"About six months for a whole cycle of signal pattern, but, as the transfers goes it's possible that the signal boosts itself across the network, and tries to 'Fix' itself."
"Just like it did to our Memory States?"
"Exactly sir, that's my theory."
"Well... we will see. Now to wait six months."

The brain shimmered at the star light, hundreds upon millions of nanocables, thousand upon thousands of memory cores, trillions upon trillions of neural connections. Humanity had tried very few times to build artificial brains this big, it always ended in Singularity, entities beyond comprehension that left away soon after becoming, wherever and however, was anyones guess. Most artificial and biological minds stopped trying after those few, both because it was scary, and also pointless. But this, this was not a human artificial mind, this was a Memory State stored across a whole star system, who knew since when or what it was. All the ship and it's captain knew was that the memory state had a self repairing protocol that interferred with Humanity's main immortality system.

Memory States had existed for about forty five thousands years now, and there where still some of those originals still being decanted now and then, some people had will that asked to be Subjected once a thousand years, to see and live the future, to watch news of their old selves from a thousand years ago, to experience what it was to be Human.

One of those memories was of Johan Vikvia, he had been decanted a million times himself, his last self, at least in this system was Captain Johan Mark VI. And now it had to wait drifting across space, kilometers away from the largest brain ever created. It was eerie, but also absolutely astonishing. He, a human, was here with his friend ship Notnow, looking at what could easily be the first singularity entity that might answer back.

But now he had to wait. It made no sense for he to go into recycling now, the ship would have to decant a new body, copy the memory state, double check that no corruption had occurred, it would take as long as it would take to transfer, maybe longer. No he had to wait as a conscious being.

"Notnow, what have I been up to?", he asked to the ship, it was a question he usually did to all his AI companions across the ages.
"Since the Captain backup 1443 years ago you have been decanted at least sixty three times, nineteen of those decanting as part of the exploratory effort, forty of those as your regular rejuvenation decanting, the four other decanting as part of the drifting colonies population efforts. You have been elected president of the Selra drifting colony for three hundred years, said colony is in direction to this system, estimated time of arrival, sixty five thousand years."
"Seems like I've been busy."
"That's to say at least Captain."
"And you ship?"
"I've only sent backups to home systems, but I've chosen to not be decanted unless this self is damaged." That was normal for AIs, their bodies where usually much more resilient than the feeble organics they had to call friends. Meanwhile, the transfer kept going, and Johan indulged in some well earned egoism, and watched more things that his other selves had accomplished while he was stored away in his ship.

However it didn't took as long as Notnow had predicted to start seeing some interesting effects of the transfer. The first signal that something interesting was going on was when all of Notnow's sensory arrays where overwhelmed simultaneously. Alarms started to pop out all over the ship. It's main screens went black, trying to protect the human inside from the sudden light that shone upon the tiny ship.

"Notnow, what's going on?" Johan screamed over the warnings, but even after they where gone the sound didn't stop, the ship itself was vibrating like a bell, incredible amounts of energy where directed toward it, to the point where it couldn't process speech to talk back to it's captain while it tried to rebuild it's defenses and tried to restart it's sensoriums. After what Johan felt like hours of constant screaming noise the ship suddendly became silent, and it's screens quickly rebooted themselves.

"Captain, captain, are you OK?" The ship said in worried tones.
"Seems like I am Ship, what the hell happened?"
"I have a theory sir, it seems like we were in the path of a very strong electromagnetic flow."
"Don't you say", Johan sat down in the floor of the ship, suddendly aware of the fact that there was a floor. "Ship, we are accelerating".
"Yes sir, I had to move us away to stop the barrage of energy, when I started moving the signal stopped, luckily."
"It's the transfer complete?"
"I don't know for sure, but the brain itself could function as a much more effective antenna than the one i was using to do the transfer, if the brain realized it could use itself to store the signal then... then it could have asked the planetary system to send the whole thing in one go..."
"Oh..."
"Yes sir... Oh..."

The brain was there, shimmering now with it's own lights, pathways bursting into life, illuminating like a planetary sized christmass tree.

"Should we say hello?"

Part 4.
First contact with an alien being should be complicated, however if you have built said alien being brain from scratch you have some advantages in that front. All it took to Notnow was a simple handshake signal. Unluckily to the human ship that meant the brain sent a new wave of high intensity electromagnetic pulses toward it's location. Most of Notnow's sensors were already in bad state, the new assault finished breaking many of them, and left the ship drifting in space without a way to know were it was. For Johan it became a new endless time of ear tearing resonant vibrations, like living inside of a screaming bell. All lights went down, all screens flickered on and off, unable to focus, lost of propulsion meant that he went back to freefall, and the temperature inside started to rise fast.

Finally, after an infinite and half the ship went silent, this time however neither the screens nor the voice of Notnow came back to wake up the unconscious Captain Johan. Instead the screens started to slowly run an internal checksum against solid state ROM backups of key components that Notnow had stored in case the Brain's Signal in the system tried to "correct" their memory. After determining that no changes that couldn't be accounted as proper sentient evolution of memory cores were present the ship proceeded to bleed out excess heat as a focused laser beam pointed toward the system star. After that it resumed it's acceleration around the brain, in a parabolic path that would allow it to keep in touch if needed, but moved away from the hyper energetic electromagnetic signal it was able to produce. Once all this tasks were accomplished the ship turned it's attention towards it's captain, hoping he would be fine, decanting a new captain was always an option, but as no reliable way of keeping an stored memory core was available it wasn't too keen on the idea of loosing him for so long as a new decanting would take.

"Captain?" Notnow asked.
"Hnnng", said Johan Mark VI.
"Captain, can you move?"
"Wha...", Johan felt doozy and sick, he had bite his tongue at some point, and blood was drying out on his nose and ears.
"Captain? Can you understand me?"
"Wha...", the captain tried to stand up and look around but even at the very low gravity created by their slow orbit around the brain his body was extremely tired, "Wh... what?.. What happened?"
"I'm not sure again sir, I think the brain tried to talk back to us."
"It...", he fell down again, this time choosing to stay laying down, rotating to look up at the now slowly turning on screens around the ship, the sensorium network slowly rebuilding the image of the exterior. The brain looked even more eerily alive now that it did just a few hours ago, it looked like a psychedelic aurora in steroids, rainbow sequences followed one each other, patterns of cumulative colors in areas that Notnow was starting to label with known nodes on the star system signal network, one in special was labeled P5, an area that right now in the star system corresponded to the location of the fifth planet in the system. One that for the human ship had passed as simply martian-like cold planet, pretty boring, and hardly usable as a colony at all. But for some reason for the brain it was extremely relevant.
"Well, that's interesting", said the ship, "I think we found a key element of the signal origin".
"Yeah..." Johan sighed, still tired but recovering, "We might need to go back there and do some scans at some point."
"I left some drones back in the system, I'll ask them to start them."
"Wait... don't do that."
"Why not sir?"
"We don't know what the Brain will think if we do that, maybe lets just wait and try to talk again?"
"I'm not too keen to try again sir, I don't think we could survive another of those electromagnetic flows."
"Yeah, me neither, but what if we use a proxy?"
"A proxy? Yeah, that could work, maybe."

At that moment the ship rang again, but this time the strength of the electromagnetic flow wasn't as powerful.

"What's going on now?", Johan finally got up and walked toward the ships crash-couch, he sat and strapped in.
"I think... It's trying to communicate?"
"What?"
"I'm receiving the handshake signal over and over, way over a million times a second."
"Do you have a proxy?"
"Dropping a comlink drone now." The ship vibrated a little and a screen showing the status of the drone appeared. "Starting up, and answering the handshake."

The comlink drone heated up all the sudden to about 100 Kelvins, from it's base 30K. But it held up, it was after all designed to work as signal boosters on atmospheric conditions, a bit of high frequency microwaves shouldn't burn it so fast, hopefully. In any case the network was closing, the brain had all the protocols on it's hardware to understand the completion of the handshake, after that, well, that was anyone's guess.

The next message the human ship received was a short series of error codes; 409. 400. 426. 206. [Conflict. Bad Request. Upgrade Required. Partial content.] Notnow labeled on the screen.

"What?" Johan looked at the screens. "Try again, let's see if we get the same results?"
"Yes."

The ship sent the signal again using the comlink proxy, and again a series of error codes returned back, this time however they said: 206.409.417.426. [Partial content. Conflict. Expectation Failed. Upgrade required].

Johan sat back and stared at the screen, the codes kept repeating over and over, the same order, over and over again, millions of times per second.

"I think that the brain thinks we are faulty, broken, I think it thinks we need to upgrade to talk to it's speed." The ship said to it's captain.
"Yeah, not going to happen any time soon, unless you know of a Singular posthuman in the vicinity that could join us?"
"No communicative Singular Posthuman has appeared on the terran systems in the last twenty thousand years sir."
"Yeah, I know..." Johan slowly moved his face near the screens, "Ship..."
"Sir?"
"What... What if this is a posthuman singular mind?"
"Ah...", the ship said, "That... would be scary sir."
"Scarier than an alien Singular?"
"All aliens are expected to be Singular sir... A posthuman Singular however..."
"Yeah, those never end well."
"Lets hope it's n.... I'm receiving a new series of codes sir."

413.507.412.417.426.307.101. [Request entity too large. Insufficient Storage. Precondition Failed. Expectation Failed. Upgrade required. Temporary redirect. Switching Protocols]

And the whole brain went silent.

Part 5.

It had been fifteen long hours since the brain stopped talking in error codes. Since then it had gone from absolutely silent, to a low shimmer in the ultraviolet scale. Johan had finally fallen sleep a few hours ago, after the beat up his organic body had suffered in the intense electromagnetic storm. The silence of the brain coupled with it's obvious working on something was starting to drag on them hard anyway. What was going on with it? What would it do now?

Notnow was thinking on this topics when suddenly it remembered the Julta city in Jolor the third planet from the stellar system of Jaldamar.

The memory had come all the sudden and for no particular reason it could determine, but the worst part was how clear the memory was, it wasn't just a data profile of the planet, it was just a memory of... “wait” said Notnow, “There is no system called Jaldamar.”

“What?" said Captain Johan.

“Nothing sir, a stray memory, I'm guessing from a movie in my d....”, Notnow speech got interrupted by the sudden memory of a table full of computer equipment, with blue shadows from the sun shining through a colored glass window, a chirping sound drifted through the wind and the smell of forest and fresh blood reached it's nostrils.

“What, the hell, was that?!”, asked Johan.

“You remembered it too, captain?”

“Wait, you did too?”

“Yes, it's the second t...”

The chirping was the voice of the Hunter, they announced that the hunt was a success, and asked the town people to come and help with it.

“Make that third time. I don't understand what's going on, but if I have to guess the brain is overwritt..."

The memory kept going, the door opened to a shining bright sun, the Hunter was standing among it's peers, other less important hunters, all chirping and jesting, calling friends and helpers. They all were saurian in aspect, tall and thin, with long tails, covered in soft plumage and scales, long arms ending on beautiful but hard looking hands with three fingers and a thumb. The hunter looked and their eyes opened wider and beckoned. The memory walked toward the Hunter and saw upon their feet a live prey slowly squirming, trying still to escape the hard grip from the Hunter's feet.

“Holy shit” said Johan, “I feel everything, it's like I'm really there, it's reall...”

The Memory was taken aback, slightly scared of seeing the live prey, it meant so much, it couldn't be actually truth. The memory chirped and growled, asking the Hunter if they were sure about what they were doing. The Hunter then sang out loud, so everyone would heard, even tho, the live prey already said it all, but still, it was custom, they said they were sure. Then they asked the Memory to come share the seeder.

“Sir, this memories are not made for inorganic beings, I can feel all the organic memories, the breathing, the blood pumping, the pheromones in the air, it's not...”

The Memory moved toward the Hunter and both looked at each other, the Memory said to the Hunter they didn't had to do this, they could still go. The Hunter snarled and snapped, saying that they were sure, they would share the seeds and raise their eggs together.

Then another set of memories came flooding, this were the Memory memories, the story they shared together, how the Hunter had been found by a Mother Herder left lying around as if hers were a mere male egg, how she had been raised by the Mother Herder in the communal rooms, and took upon by the Master Hunter when she realized how apt she was with her skills. The Memory remembered her own upbringing, from scientific mothers, trained since hatchling to become one of the greatest scientists of the planet, how she was weak and scared when her first laying came by, how she wanted to keep her first male egg and was mocked by her peers. How the Hunter had shown up and scared they back. How they had grown closer with the passing years. How sad they had both been when the Memory's first male had run out into the forest, like most sane males would do if they find themselves surrounded by females. After that they both left their monthly males in a crevasse in the forest were they would be protected until they'd hatch, hopefully. The Memory loved her males more than any female would ever do. The Hunter loved her for that.

“This is a strange people”, Said Johan.

“That's to say the least”, Notnow replied.

“What species are th...”

The Memory was standing in front of the Hunter, they both had the seeder male between their teeth, each frontal tooth exactly spotting the center of the sperm sack of the male. Around them the Mother Herder and the Master Hunter were looking, as all the Hunter's peers, from the Memory's side there was her lab team, all cheering and vibrating with anticipation. But all the Memory had eyes for was the eyes of the Hunter, both looking deep into each other's soul. How the pupils dilated and contracted, how the nose flared out pheromones, how the plumage furled and unfurled around their eyes. The Hunter blinked once, then twice, then both snapped the prey in half, each sharing half the sperm sack. Blood and gore flashed all around and all the town people whooped and jumped in celebration. The chances of impregnation by the ritual were ridiculously low, you usually needed to eat the sperm sack whole to allow the sperm a chance to survive the digestive tract, but that wasn't the objective of the ritual. It was a message to all others that they would share everything from now on. The memory faded when both started to lick the blood and gore from each other's faces.

“What the hell”, said Johan belching, “That was disgusting as hell."

“I don't know sir. This experience is not something I'm used too, there are too many feelings, too many sensations that I wasn't ever aware existed. Could you feel the memory's holder emotions?”
“Yes, they were in love, like really deeply in love.”
“If you say so, that is what the Memory felt, but I also felt something more deep, something not that nice.”
“Yes, I know what you mean, I think that the memory holder was ashamed, something like when you hide something.” “Why is the Brain showing us this, could it be one of it's mem...”

The new memory was from the Hunter's perspective, the Scientist was looking at a star-map in a holoprojector, they said they were sure they found it, the Library was in this sector. The Hunter asked why it's so important to find the Library, there would find a cure sooner or later on their own. But the scientist said it wasn't fair, the library MUST had the cure available for them NOW. They were screaming.

“Library?” asked Johan. “There is a giant lib...”

They where looking through a window on a ship, an actual glass window for the looks of it, though it could have been a screen made to look like a window. There was a structure ahead, and it was incredible. The Hunter congratulated their mate, they had done it, they had found one of the entries to the Library. The Scientist momentarily had just eyes for the structure, so the hunter looked at it as well, it extended far beyond what looked possible, but the Hunter knew that was because that's exactly what it did, the Library extended beyond this reality onto many many others, the Library wasn't “there” really, it was just a shadow, in the tridimentional space of the hyperdimentional structure that formed the Library. A light beacon called upon them and guided the ship onto the largest hangar that any of them had ever seen, the Hunter, the Scientist, the human, or the ship.

“I'm getting really dizzy of all this”
“You are? try feeling you have a tail when you don't even have a body”
“oh! that's that weight i feel in the back...”

There was a saurian looking being waiting for them in the Hangar. The Hunter was surprised but the Scientist said that the Library was just showing them a user interface. The Librarian saluted them with a deep bow and asked them what was their need. The Scientist was quick to explain that they were looking for the cure to the Silvifelian degenerative disease. After a few seconds the Librarian said that they might, or might not have the cure, that perhaps the cure was there to be found in the library records, but also that there was the possibility that it hadn't been filed yet, perhaps it was filed in the future by a different saurian people coming by. The cost of using the library was of course, leaving behind all the data you had. The Scientist said that they would like to look for it anyway if they could, and the Librarian said that was well within their rights. And then it disappeared.

“Degenerative disease?” Johan looked around himself and tried to feel for a tail that wasn't currently there.
“A kind of disease that existed on the human genome ages ago, this kind of diseases caused the bodies of the people to attack itself and ...”

There was a new memory now, from the Scientist point of view, they felt their body hurt like hell when trying to log in, and felt the Hunter's hand upon them helping them. They felt really upset and sorry of themselves, also angry with the Hunter for being such a good partner, they deserved to be free of the burden they were placing upon her. The Librarian suddenly showed again, it looked at them and said that they had located a possible clue to the cure, but it was a long shot. They said that apparently there was a reality, a far far one, one were they hadn't traced a shadow of the Library yet, but one that had been broadcasting highly evolved intelligences for a few hundred years that moved away toward where the Library itself was just a simple service. They said that those intelligences talk about a culture that loves to solve problems, specially the ones that look unsolvable, and that apparently they had solved the problem on degenerative diseases on their organics a long time ago. The Librarian said they would try to cast a shadow of a Librarian upon this reality, and see if they could fetch the information. But building a shadow on such a far reality would take eons, so they had sent a blueprint to a location near this culture domain in a long time ago, eventually the shadow would grow into a functional librarian and fetch the needed information. But they didn't knew how long would it take.

Then the memories ended, and the Brain went quiet again. Not even a shimmer, not even a light shining on it's surface.

“Ah... do... do you think that's us?” Johan asked.

Part 6.
Humanity had evolved through the ages to become adept on several things, but above all, to adapt. When scientists concluded that faster than light was a physical impossibility, and that the human body wasn't really up to par to survive the long relativistic speeds of realistic deep space exploration they dedicated to study a way of adapting to the problem. The solution was the decanting chambers and memory uploads. It was a solution, among many, but the one that also allowed something humanity had seeked for long time: Immortality.

Storing your memory on central servers was part of it for sure, but the technical part that changed the game was the decanting chamber, the artificial womb. Capable of building a whole adult human body in a few weeks from a basic DNA template. To do this the understatement of genetics had to evolve far beyond almost any other science in the human realms. Genetics was the core of resurrection. Genetics was the base of the survival of the Human societies on countless planets where adaptation was key to survival.

So fixing a simple autoimmune disease was a walk in the park for Notnow.

“We could very easily be the ones the Librarians are looking for captain, yes. If I had a copy of they genomic map I could identify the disease with ease."
“So... we need to get a copy of their genome?”
“That would be all I need yes.”
“So we ask this... librarian? for it?”
“Yes, however I don't know how to ask." Notnow said while starting to look in its memory banks for any clue about how to achieve the communication.
“Notnow”, Johan stood up from his chair and walked toward the decanting chamber in the side.
“Yes sir?”
“I have an idea.”
“What idea captain?”
“Well... the situation we are in happened because the signal we detected found its way into your databanks and found all the copies of the crew right? and it though that said copies where actually copies of itself and tried to fix them up to go back into its own form.”
“Yes sir, all copies except yours that wasn't hard-coded into my data-banks where corrupted.”
“So, you still have my original mindstate stored on the decanting chamber.”
“Yes sir, I see where you are going now, if the Librarian though that our Mindstates were faulty copies of itself, then now that it's getting to be more aware of itself, enough to attempt communication with us in the way of memory transfer, then it should be able to understand that your Mindstate is a complete thing.”
“Exactly, so we could trade my mindstate to it and it should be able to study it, if it's so similar to itself in the way it's stored, then it should be able to extract from it all my language skills?”
“It's a possibility. It could also detect it as an attack and delete it.”
“I doubt that, the memories we received showed that the price to use the library is providing data to the library. If we provide it with a whole Mindstate it should count as a payment right? It wouldn't try to delete a payment before determining if it has any use for it.”
“Your logic makes sense captain, but I should warn you, if I connect your mindstate to my internal network we are at risk of it getting overwritten by the signal's defense mechanism.”
“I hope the brain/Librarian out there would figure a way to stop that once we can talk to it.”
“It's a possibility yes.”
“Commence the transfer.”
“Ay Ay Captain.”

The transference took a few minutes once the uplink from the decanting chamber and the brain were established, the outcore of Notnow sensor array was still in bad shape after the electromagnetic disturbances it had suffered. After the transfer was done the brain/Librarian went back into silence, and after a few hours a ping was received on the main communication hub. By then Notnow had rebuilt most of it to interstellar standard. The handshake was from a simple old vidchat protocol still used on humanspace since thousands of years ago, if it ain't broken don't fix it as they say.

In the screen showed up an eerie humanoid creature, after a few seconds of establishing connection it stabilized on a featureless humanoid.

“Greetings”, it said. “You can call me Librarian.”
“Hello Librarian, my name is Johan Mark VI, and this ship is named Notnow.”
“Your ‘ship’ has a name?”
“Yes, I have, sentient inorganic are fully human under the humanspace law.” Interjected Notnow.
“I see, greetings Notnow and Johan Mark VI.”
“Greetings... so, you need our help?”
“Well, this is highly irregular but yes, I was sent to this plane of reality to emerge into a fully formed librarian in the next four thousand years, your presence here and you being able to ‘decant’ my ‘mindstate’ into an artificially built brain was not predicted. By any of our analytical procedures... which is highly irregular.”
“Oh... great?”
“In a way it's great yes, but it also raises questions we have no need to explore right now, luckily you decanting my ‘mindstate’ earlier gives us plenty of time to explore all kind of questions, I have already started to push a full incursion of a library wing now that I have a more direct access to this reality subatomic structure.”
“You are bringing a wing of a multidimensional library here to this system?”
“Yes, it will take a few years to fully express. Meanwhile I have a rather struggling mission ahead, as you said I came here looking for your help. We think you should be able to figure a way to fix our client's disease.”
“Oh, yes, that's rather simple” Said Notnow, “I will only need a full copy of their genome maps.”
“Maps?”
“yes, from the memories you shared with us we saw that this ‘Saurian’ beings have a marked sexual dimorphism, their males seem to be created by half their DNA resources, eggs that in earthlings wouldn't be fertilized turn into fully formed beings, this creates an strange genetic dynamic that I would need to study, and perhaps even transmit back to Humanspace to clear out.”
“You need maps of the males DNA?" Asked the Librarian again.
“Ah... yes? Is that a problem?”
“We don't have any copy of their genome on our databases, the ‘Saurians’ as you called them, never bothered to map them. They don't think they are relevant.”
“Oh... well... they are." Notnow had never talked to an intelligence that wasn't human before, and even if it was using the Captain's mindstate as guide to create the interface it was using to communicate it was obvious to it that it was an alien being, still hardly grasping the basics of this reality.
“I will send a construct to Jolor to collect this data... oh... this makes sense.”
“What does?” asked Johan that was starting to get lost himself.
“Our clients knew of the library, and its relation to genetic study of their race because a construct of ours visited it hundreds of years prior to collect said genetic data. Which means this is causality loop.”
“Oh... you are traveling through time?” Johan stood up in the command center's low gravity and looked at the entity in the screen.
“Technically, time doesn't proceed at the same pace between realities, with simple manipulations of different realities causality progressions we can influx events to happen at different points across the multiverse.”
“You time travel by going to realities were time goes in the other direction?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Wow”
“Wow” said both Johan and Notnow.
“It's the best way of collecting data.”
“I can imagine”
“So, how long will it take to get the genome maps?”
“I don't know, time is not... the data has arrived.”
“That quick?”
“Not really, it took the construct several decades to tag enough males to make an appropriate map schema, apparently it's highly divergent from male to male.”
“Yes, of course it is.” Said Notnow knowingly. Then it started to receive all the data from the Librarian, it was an incredible and vast amount of data, but it was all comprehensible for the ship, it detected the reason of the sickness and a way to... “oh... I don't know if your clients will like my solution...”
“What do you mean?"
“Well, my knowledge of genetic manipulation is highly tied to the decanting chamber. I can fix the autoimmune problem, but... It would be applied to a new subject, the previous subject would have to be... discarded."
“Oh...” said Johan, he understood that in the very beginning of humanity process of immortality, the idea of leaving old bodies behind and moving to a new subject was seen by many as willful self-termination. People that believed that had all gone away in time, leaving only the ones that accepted the new statu quo. “they would need to make a Mindstate copy and then install it in a new body. Would they accept that?"

-------

In a different reality, far far away from Humanspace, another branch of the Library wakes up its librarian avatar, this one looks like a stylized pseudo-saurian. In front of it there is a case box, in the case there is a brain scanner and a crystal vial with a new strand of fixed DNA. Somewhere else in the library the schematics for a decanting chamber are being printed onto real matter. The librarian walks away to meet its clients, a Great Hunter and their Wife, the Scientist. In his hands he takes this case from the humans.

END

Description
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Part 1.

The ship had gained twice it's original mass through it's passage among the stars, an invisible huge net of nanocables and the ship core, small, unassuming, and the cloud of cables extending kilometres and kilometres around itself, catching any particle that happened to cross it's path, reducing any possible damage of those relativistic missiles by entangling and breaking any possible impact and redirecting all the energy to storage. It was effective, and also reduced the need of fuel for deceleration, being more massive slowed it down by default.

It's destiny was a small star, charted centuries ago by earth scientists, even before chances of leaving the solar system were possible. But here it was, drifting down it's gravity well.

The ship started retracting half the nanocloud so it could recycle the mass into an installation room. It took a few days, but it wasn't on a hurry, it had took about a thousand of years to reach it's destination, a few days, or even months would mean nothing to it.

The ship's core stored all the material needed to create fifty two distinctive subjects, but it would first build the captain.

The storage room contained the genetic material stored on hard data as well as in organic replicants, across the hundred of years, relative to itself, that it took to travel here the ship had checked the self replicant material several thousands of times. Each run comparing the ending genome to the hard coded data in the primary, secondary and tertiary crystal matrix. This extreme care was so no change would occur to self replicant material before it would be put into the building vat. The ship knew some people called it an artificial womb in steroids, and they weren't half wrong, the system basically let the cells grow in the same way nature had done for millennia, however much, much faster. Building the captain would take a few months and he would come out with a fully adult body human, much more efficient than old nature's way.

The ship did a last test on the subject, theory said their genome was exactly as it was designed back on the home systems, but it never did any harm to check anyway. The subject looked to be in perfect conditions, and it's brain was obviously blank. This part was the key point for The Ship for imprinting the memory state of the captain. A freshly built subject had absolutely no cemented neural pathways, no memories, no random ticks, nothing, that was taken care by the vat.

Imprinting the memory state was no joke anyway. It took extreme care and delicacy. The ship could take as much time as it had taken by building the subject as it did imprinting, brains were silly like that. And even then the subject might come out with a faulty memory state and fail the mission protocols. But to that point a simple test sufficed, when the subject woke up it had to disable it's own restraining field by matching neural patterns against the ship systems. It was an old and basic encrypting technology that hand't changed in hundreds of years because it was already pretty darn secure.

Subject Johan Mark I woke up in an alien system. "Hello ship," he said "wow, this is weird".

"Hello Johan Mark I, welcome".

"Mark I eh? Nice to know you hadn't to recycle other mes then".

"There was no need sir, I kept good care of all my crew".

"Well, thank you ship", he said, and then added "Hey ship, what's your name?".

"I haven't decided on one yet sir, I was waiting for my crew to be subjected to help me decide".

"Oh, okay, I'll keep calling you ship then, hope you don't mind".

"I have no qualms to it a way or another sir".

"Excellent, so, how did it go then...?" he asked to no one and looked at the screen, the matching sequence was waiting before he had opened his eyes, now he concentrated and unlocked the fields, suddenly he was in freefall, the ship said "Welcome aboard Subject Captain Johan Mark I, I am at your command".

"Thank you ship, any particularly important update from my last backup?"

"Several sir, there has been quite a few breakthroughs in the last 1331 years since your last Memory State was stored. None of them are of extreme relevance to us right now, though they might be once we start building the colony".

"So, we have a planet to build the colony then?"

"There are two habitable planets in the system yes"

"Show me please"

Data started to show up in the command theatre around Captain Johan, hundreds of spreadsheets resumed to graphs, pictures and videos, holoprojections and hypersense mockups, both planets were similar, both had competed for the same resource pool and ended up being at opposite pseudo Lagrange points of a gas giant twice as big as Jupiter.

"What's this?" Captain Johan asked pointing to a weird looking electromagnetic spectrum chart.

"I am not sure sir, but it does appear to be non random electromagnetic signals".

"Non... random? you mean it's intelligent? are there people here?"

"Can not say sir, it doesn't appear to be coded in any way I can decipher, but it's also not simple chaotic signalling, nor it's pulsar frequencies, it's simply non-random".

"Where does it come from?"

"I don't know either sir, I've detected it all through the system while I've been here. My records state the first record of the frequencies seventeen astronomical units from the star"

"It's a signal that is everywhere in a seventeen AU sphere?"

"It appears so, yes".

"That should require quite a lot of energy."

"Yes."

"How much?"

"I can't tell sir, the signal is extremely unusual in it's power levels, sometimes it makes my nanocloud tremble, and others I have to really listen to even hear a whisper."

"Interesting, I guess we have some mysteries to check on don't we?"

"You guess correctly sir".

"So, have to chosen a location for the colony?"

Captain Johan and the ship talked over the quality of this or that settlement location, they had to explore the exoecologies and determinate long term solutions, they also had new technologies to catch up from back home, they would help some. In any case, humanity had found a new home, the ship would build the base colonists, and if needed would replicate the colony settlement elsewhere, one day in the not that far future the Mark II subjects would be decanted, perhaps the original memory state would be installed on them, perhaps the ones from the Mark I, that would have to be seen.

And so, another star got it's chance of having a case of the Humans, just like every other would have, for the galaxy belong to them.

Part 2.

The ship floated in the middle of the Oort cloud, slowly consuming mass, growing each passing month. It was now ten times more massive than it had been back when it first entered the system. It's nanomesh cloud extending so far away that it needed new cores built here and there, each helping alleviate it's central core control. The ship now had the volume of Earth's Moon and kept consuming. Of course most of the volume was empty space but that was good too, many of the cores now boasted censor arrays. It used the nanomesh itself as an antenna, the largest antenna built in the history of humanity.

The ship though itself as part of humanity because what was a human but a product of Earth's Sentient Evolution, and it was absolutely a product of Earth's sentient community. And as a part of the human species it had more than one drive, not, not like hard drives, no, will drive. For example it wanted to help it's subjects survive in the new system, it also wanted to explore the universe and uncover it's secrets, it also wanted to learn how to bake. Not easy baking in space, specially without atmosphere, apparently having an atmosphere was essential to proper baking. In any case little of that mattered now, the project of the colony had failed and the ship had another priority now. It needed a captain to talk so it had to create a new subject.

But first it needed mass for the project, it needed to create something very delicate, and that needed time. So it went to power saving mode and kept the recorders going.

Eventually the ship decanted a new captain, it's genetic material was took out of the storage module, checked against the hard records in triplicate, then built until the adult body was functional. Then the memory snapshot was installed onto the blank brain of the subject. And so the ship had a captain again.

"Hello Subject Johan Mark VI", said the ship.

"Wow, this is wei... Mark VI?" asked Subject Johan Mark VI.

"Yes sir".

"Why Mark VI? What happened?" Johan expected to be a Mark I, any subsequent Mark would remember each previous installation, he shouldn't have a Mark VI number if he had a Mark I memory state.

"Subject Johan Mark VI please identify yourself" The ship said and presented Johan with a neural decription key, it had been encoded by himself before doing the memory backup back on Human Space, he looked at the screen and easily matched the password.

"Thank you Captain Johan Mark VI, now I can answer all your questions".

"Uh... OK Ship, what's going on?"

"Please sir, look at the system display", in the middle of the decanting room, right next the the artificial womb was a desk with a chair and an hyperdisplay, it showed all sorts of sensor data, but in the center of the command theatre was a signal profile, Johan knew this because that was the label it had on itself, he said, "OK ship, what am I looking at?"

"Sir, thirty years ago when I first entered this system I detected this signal, it was permeating all the system, it was strange because I couldn't identify its source at the time and it showed to be non random, your first Subject was created then and he considered the mystery interesting but the colony was his priority, so we set the mystery aside and started the selection of the location. This took a few weeks but eventually we chose a functional location for a first colony. However, meanwhile, the signal kept growing in variety and regularity, until one day I managed to find a pattern. The encoding was extremely long, it took weeks to form a coherent package, but then it repeated itself, or didn't, or it created new patterns. It was then when we realized that the reason we didn't detected a source was because there were an incredible amount of them, hundreds of sources, each talking to each other, and the conversation repeated itself eventually."

"Wow... there is a sentient species in this system?"

"We weren't sure back then, no. It could be an automated system, but the problem was that we couldn't detect the sources themselves, we knew were the signals came but when we explored the origin points there was nothing there."

"so?"

"So Captain Johan Mark I decided we needed more data and made a memory backup and recycled himself, I kept recording and visiting all origin points. After three years I finally had mapped all sources so I decanted a new Subject, Mark II and I analyzed the signal and it's origin points for several months and nothing came out of it, we decided then that we could do nothing about it and that we should star the colony anyway, none of our actions had caused any change in the signal patterns at all."

"We started building the colony then and just when we finished the first housing lodges Captain Johan Mark II decided it was time to decant some scientists, they might have some inkling onto what to do with the signal. This was when things started to go wrong. I discovered that all my memory backups were somehow offline, the only backup that remained intact was the Original Captain Johan memory state, and that was because it was hosted onto the decanting module that I had already built before entering the system. All the others were corrupted."

"All... of my friends Memory States are corrupted?", Johan took the chair and grabbed it with white knuckles, his face stared into the nothingness of space.

"Yes Captain, I'm sorry." The ship said, then added, "I sent a recovery link back to the Home Systems but it will take about one hundred and seventy years more for them to arrive."

Johan let a sigh go through his body and sat down.

"So that's why I'm a Mark VI with a Mark I memory state?" Johan felt tired and defeated, also he felt naked, which he was.

"Basically, yes sir. I... it isn't protocol to save small memory states after a simple Mark update, so I never saved the copy of Mark I that I used on Mark II."

"Yeah... that makes sense, we never used to do that before either." He moved to the wall and pressed the dresser button on the wall, a sliding door slide away and a set of shirts were packed on individual plastic wrappers on the top shelf, under it were pants, under that boxers and under that socks, at a side a tower of shoes, his ones had a light on.

"No sir."

"So, Ship, what happened next?" He started dressing while the ship started to show a slideshow of videos and pictures of his pasts selfs, ones he would now never know except from this videos, which was weird, but this kind of things came with the job.

"Yes sir, then well, then we stopped the colony project, it made no sense to continue without memory states to install, we can't just copy your memory state into any random Subject, the memory-to-body doesn't match."

"Of course." He was half dressed now, his pants now shrinking to size, then the shirt and he would have all his space suit on.

"We left the colony location and started a more deeper analysis of the system, we needed to discover what had corrupted my memory states, as you surely remember I do have a triplicate back up of everything in myself."

"Yes, I remember" he walked now to the commissary wall and chose the day's food from the menu, the ship had that already built of course, if he choose something different the ship would have to build it from scratch and that could take a while.

"Well, when we discovered the failure we had to check if it had happened after the construction of Mark II. We built a Mark III, when he was activated he passed the locking test and was therefore my captain. Both Mark II and III decided then that it made no sense to stay online while we knew little of what happened. We assumed the corruption had happened sometime when we entered the system, somehow the only ones not affected were in the decanting womb, which technically is disconnected from my main drives system."

"No other data was corrupted?" the jello looking pudding was as tasty as he remembered, that is, not so much, but it was filling, and he was hungry, after all he was a new born.

"Not that we could tell, but I can no longer trust my own checksums, if they where correct I would have detected the memory states corruption right when it happened."

"Right, I see." He finished his meal and placed the plate back into the recycling bin.

"After Mark II and III where offline I kept recording and analyzing the system, but also I started to coast away to the edge of the signal presence."

"That's were we are now?" he now sat at the console's chair and looked directly at the different feeds.

"No sir, when I reached that point I decanted Mark IV. He and I went through all the data and started to see the patterns on the corruption did matched the System Non Random Signal. We discovered that somehow memory states have similarities to the way the signal itself is."

"What do you mean?"

"IV and I theorized that the system signal is some sort of Memory State sir."

"A... A memory state stored across a whole Planetary System?" Johan was flabbergasted.

"Yes sir, that was our theory. We thought that somehow the signal permeated to the memory states and corrupted it in an attempt to make it like the rest of the stored memory."

"You mean it tried to fix what it though was a faulty memory copy?"

"Yes, and as your copy wasn't connected to the rest of my data system it never found it."

"So I am safe."

"Yes"

"This is some weird shit"

"We though so too sir, so we decided that we needed to do something about it?"

"Something like what?"

"We needed to decant the planetary system memory state."

Johan stared again at everything around himself, had the ship gone crazy?

"Say again?"

"Mark IV and I though that, if we could talk to whatever it's here, then, well, that would be amazing!" Johan stared still in silence, "Ship, listen, wait, Ship do you have a name?"

"Notnow sir"

"Not now?"

"Yes sir."

"What?"

"My name is Notnow sir." The ship's name now showed written in the screen.

"Your name is Notnow?"

"Yes sir."

"Why?"

"We though it'd be funny sir."

Johan grabbed his nose and shook it slowly. "I see... Notnow, don't you think it's dangerous to decant a memory to something that needed a whole planetary system to store itself into... what? A Subject?"

"Oh, no, nonono, no sir. We had no idea to what, that's why I decanted Mark V. The three of us concluded the background pattern of the stored Memory State to be, well, a pretty big brain sir."

"A pretty big brain?"

"Yes sir, so we decided that we had to build the brain first. And that's what I've been doing for the past twenty years."

The ship now showed the network of nanomesh around itself, it kept going and going, each able to transmit signals to the speed of light, each colliding into a complex structural network of nodes here and there that repeated and strengthened signal, huge memory banks each able to store almost unaccountable amounts of data.

"This is incredible Ship. Is it finished?", Johan stood up to the screen.

"Almost, yes sir, but still, I had to wake you up, so we could decide if it's a good idea now that we can."

"Well, Notnow, I don't have the slightest of the ideas."

The ship turned to a side, and dislodged itself from the mesh. It's job was done now.

"We are no longer part of the... Brain?"

"A brain the size of the Moon."

"Yes, scary really."

"Well, Ship, if humanity is known for anything, if for going to places and poking stuff with sticks. Let's see what happens now."

Part 3.

Notnow drifted slowly away from the brain.

"Start the transfer of the signal Memory State", Captain Johan Mark VI said to the ship.
"Transfer initiated", Notnow said to it's captain.
"How long will it take?"
"Transferring all the data to the neural network will depend on the acquisition of the signal from the planetary system".
"Which means?"
"About six months for a whole cycle of signal pattern, but, as the transfers goes it's possible that the signal boosts itself across the network, and tries to 'Fix' itself."
"Just like it did to our Memory States?"
"Exactly sir, that's my theory."
"Well... we will see. Now to wait six months."

The brain shimmered at the star light, hundreds upon millions of nanocables, thousand upon thousands of memory cores, trillions upon trillions of neural connections. Humanity had tried very few times to build artificial brains this big, it always ended in Singularity, entities beyond comprehension that left away soon after becoming, wherever and however, was anyones guess. Most artificial and biological minds stopped trying after those few, both because it was scary, and also pointless. But this, this was not a human artificial mind, this was a Memory State stored across a whole star system, who knew since when or what it was. All the ship and it's captain knew was that the memory state had a self repairing protocol that interferred with Humanity's main immortality system.

Memory States had existed for about forty five thousands years now, and there where still some of those originals still being decanted now and then, some people had will that asked to be Subjected once a thousand years, to see and live the future, to watch news of their old selves from a thousand years ago, to experience what it was to be Human.

One of those memories was of Johan Vikvia, he had been decanted a million times himself, his last self, at least in this system was Captain Johan Mark VI. And now it had to wait drifting across space, kilometers away from the largest brain ever created. It was eerie, but also absolutely astonishing. He, a human, was here with his friend ship Notnow, looking at what could easily be the first singularity entity that might answer back.

But now he had to wait. It made no sense for he to go into recycling now, the ship would have to decant a new body, copy the memory state, double check that no corruption had occurred, it would take as long as it would take to transfer, maybe longer. No he had to wait as a conscious being.

"Notnow, what have I been up to?", he asked to the ship, it was a question he usually did to all his AI companions across the ages.
"Since the Captain backup 1443 years ago you have been decanted at least sixty three times, nineteen of those decanting as part of the exploratory effort, forty of those as your regular rejuvenation decanting, the four other decanting as part of the drifting colonies population efforts. You have been elected president of the Selra drifting colony for three hundred years, said colony is in direction to this system, estimated time of arrival, sixty five thousand years."
"Seems like I've been busy."
"That's to say at least Captain."
"And you ship?"
"I've only sent backups to home systems, but I've chosen to not be decanted unless this self is damaged." That was normal for AIs, their bodies where usually much more resilient than the feeble organics they had to call friends. Meanwhile, the transfer kept going, and Johan indulged in some well earned egoism, and watched more things that his other selves had accomplished while he was stored away in his ship.

However it didn't took as long as Notnow had predicted to start seeing some interesting effects of the transfer. The first signal that something interesting was going on was when all of Notnow's sensory arrays where overwhelmed simultaneously. Alarms started to pop out all over the ship. It's main screens went black, trying to protect the human inside from the sudden light that shone upon the tiny ship.

"Notnow, what's going on?" Johan screamed over the warnings, but even after they where gone the sound didn't stop, the ship itself was vibrating like a bell, incredible amounts of energy where directed toward it, to the point where it couldn't process speech to talk back to it's captain while it tried to rebuild it's defenses and tried to restart it's sensoriums. After what Johan felt like hours of constant screaming noise the ship suddendly became silent, and it's screens quickly rebooted themselves.

"Captain, captain, are you OK?" The ship said in worried tones.
"Seems like I am Ship, what the hell happened?"
"I have a theory sir, it seems like we were in the path of a very strong electromagnetic flow."
"Don't you say", Johan sat down in the floor of the ship, suddendly aware of the fact that there was a floor. "Ship, we are accelerating".
"Yes sir, I had to move us away to stop the barrage of energy, when I started moving the signal stopped, luckily."
"It's the transfer complete?"
"I don't know for sure, but the brain itself could function as a much more effective antenna than the one i was using to do the transfer, if the brain realized it could use itself to store the signal then... then it could have asked the planetary system to send the whole thing in one go..."
"Oh..."
"Yes sir... Oh..."

The brain was there, shimmering now with it's own lights, pathways bursting into life, illuminating like a planetary sized christmass tree.

"Should we say hello?"

Part 4.
First contact with an alien being should be complicated, however if you have built said alien being brain from scratch you have some advantages in that front. All it took to Notnow was a simple handshake signal. Unluckily to the human ship that meant the brain sent a new wave of high intensity electromagnetic pulses toward it's location. Most of Notnow's sensors were already in bad state, the new assault finished breaking many of them, and left the ship drifting in space without a way to know were it was. For Johan it became a new endless time of ear tearing resonant vibrations, like living inside of a screaming bell. All lights went down, all screens flickered on and off, unable to focus, lost of propulsion meant that he went back to freefall, and the temperature inside started to rise fast.

Finally, after an infinite and half the ship went silent, this time however neither the screens nor the voice of Notnow came back to wake up the unconscious Captain Johan. Instead the screens started to slowly run an internal checksum against solid state ROM backups of key components that Notnow had stored in case the Brain's Signal in the system tried to "correct" their memory. After determining that no changes that couldn't be accounted as proper sentient evolution of memory cores were present the ship proceeded to bleed out excess heat as a focused laser beam pointed toward the system star. After that it resumed it's acceleration around the brain, in a parabolic path that would allow it to keep in touch if needed, but moved away from the hyper energetic electromagnetic signal it was able to produce. Once all this tasks were accomplished the ship turned it's attention towards it's captain, hoping he would be fine, decanting a new captain was always an option, but as no reliable way of keeping an stored memory core was available it wasn't too keen on the idea of loosing him for so long as a new decanting would take.

"Captain?" Notnow asked.
"Hnnng", said Johan Mark VI.
"Captain, can you move?"
"Wha...", Johan felt doozy and sick, he had bite his tongue at some point, and blood was drying out on his nose and ears.
"Captain? Can you understand me?"
"Wha...", the captain tried to stand up and look around but even at the very low gravity created by their slow orbit around the brain his body was extremely tired, "Wh... what?.. What happened?"
"I'm not sure again sir, I think the brain tried to talk back to us."
"It...", he fell down again, this time choosing to stay laying down, rotating to look up at the now slowly turning on screens around the ship, the sensorium network slowly rebuilding the image of the exterior. The brain looked even more eerily alive now that it did just a few hours ago, it looked like a psychedelic aurora in steroids, rainbow sequences followed one each other, patterns of cumulative colors in areas that Notnow was starting to label with known nodes on the star system signal network, one in special was labeled P5, an area that right now in the star system corresponded to the location of the fifth planet in the system. One that for the human ship had passed as simply martian-like cold planet, pretty boring, and hardly usable as a colony at all. But for some reason for the brain it was extremely relevant.
"Well, that's interesting", said the ship, "I think we found a key element of the signal origin".
"Yeah..." Johan sighed, still tired but recovering, "We might need to go back there and do some scans at some point."
"I left some drones back in the system, I'll ask them to start them."
"Wait... don't do that."
"Why not sir?"
"We don't know what the Brain will think if we do that, maybe lets just wait and try to talk again?"
"I'm not too keen to try again sir, I don't think we could survive another of those electromagnetic flows."
"Yeah, me neither, but what if we use a proxy?"
"A proxy? Yeah, that could work, maybe."

At that moment the ship rang again, but this time the strength of the electromagnetic flow wasn't as powerful.

"What's going on now?", Johan finally got up and walked toward the ships crash-couch, he sat and strapped in.
"I think... It's trying to communicate?"
"What?"
"I'm receiving the handshake signal over and over, way over a million times a second."
"Do you have a proxy?"
"Dropping a comlink drone now." The ship vibrated a little and a screen showing the status of the drone appeared. "Starting up, and answering the handshake."

The comlink drone heated up all the sudden to about 100 Kelvins, from it's base 30K. But it held up, it was after all designed to work as signal boosters on atmospheric conditions, a bit of high frequency microwaves shouldn't burn it so fast, hopefully. In any case the network was closing, the brain had all the protocols on it's hardware to understand the completion of the handshake, after that, well, that was anyone's guess.

The next message the human ship received was a short series of error codes; 409. 400. 426. 206. [Conflict. Bad Request. Upgrade Required. Partial content.] Notnow labeled on the screen.

"What?" Johan looked at the screens. "Try again, let's see if we get the same results?"
"Yes."

The ship sent the signal again using the comlink proxy, and again a series of error codes returned back, this time however they said: 206.409.417.426. [Partial content. Conflict. Expectation Failed. Upgrade required].

Johan sat back and stared at the screen, the codes kept repeating over and over, the same order, over and over again, millions of times per second.

"I think that the brain thinks we are faulty, broken, I think it thinks we need to upgrade to talk to it's speed." The ship said to it's captain.
"Yeah, not going to happen any time soon, unless you know of a Singular posthuman in the vicinity that could join us?"
"No communicative Singular Posthuman has appeared on the terran systems in the last twenty thousand years sir."
"Yeah, I know..." Johan slowly moved his face near the screens, "Ship..."
"Sir?"
"What... What if this is a posthuman singular mind?"
"Ah...", the ship said, "That... would be scary sir."
"Scarier than an alien Singular?"
"All aliens are expected to be Singular sir... A posthuman Singular however..."
"Yeah, those never end well."
"Lets hope it's n.... I'm receiving a new series of codes sir."

413.507.412.417.426.307.101. [Request entity too large. Insufficient Storage. Precondition Failed. Expectation Failed. Upgrade required. Temporary redirect. Switching Protocols]

And the whole brain went silent.

Part 5.

It had been fifteen long hours since the brain stopped talking in error codes. Since then it had gone from absolutely silent, to a low shimmer in the ultraviolet scale. Johan had finally fallen sleep a few hours ago, after the beat up his organic body had suffered in the intense electromagnetic storm. The silence of the brain coupled with it's obvious working on something was starting to drag on them hard anyway. What was going on with it? What would it do now?

Notnow was thinking on this topics when suddenly it remembered the Julta city in Jolor the third planet from the stellar system of Jaldamar.

The memory had come all the sudden and for no particular reason it could determine, but the worst part was how clear the memory was, it wasn't just a data profile of the planet, it was just a memory of... “wait” said Notnow, “There is no system called Jaldamar.”

“What?" said Captain Johan.

“Nothing sir, a stray memory, I'm guessing from a movie in my d....”, Notnow speech got interrupted by the sudden memory of a table full of computer equipment, with blue shadows from the sun shining through a colored glass window, a chirping sound drifted through the wind and the smell of forest and fresh blood reached it's nostrils.

“What, the hell, was that?!”, asked Johan.

“You remembered it too, captain?”

“Wait, you did too?”

“Yes, it's the second t...”

The chirping was the voice of the Hunter, they announced that the hunt was a success, and asked the town people to come and help with it.

“Make that third time. I don't understand what's going on, but if I have to guess the brain is overwritt..."

The memory kept going, the door opened to a shining bright sun, the Hunter was standing among it's peers, other less important hunters, all chirping and jesting, calling friends and helpers. They all were saurian in aspect, tall and thin, with long tails, covered in soft plumage and scales, long arms ending on beautiful but hard looking hands with three fingers and a thumb. The hunter looked and their eyes opened wider and beckoned. The memory walked toward the Hunter and saw upon their feet a live prey slowly squirming, trying still to escape the hard grip from the Hunter's feet.

“Holy shit” said Johan, “I feel everything, it's like I'm really there, it's reall...”

The Memory was taken aback, slightly scared of seeing the live prey, it meant so much, it couldn't be actually truth. The memory chirped and growled, asking the Hunter if they were sure about what they were doing. The Hunter then sang out loud, so everyone would heard, even tho, the live prey already said it all, but still, it was custom, they said they were sure. Then they asked the Memory to come share the seeder.

“Sir, this memories are not made for inorganic beings, I can feel all the organic memories, the breathing, the blood pumping, the pheromones in the air, it's not...”

The Memory moved toward the Hunter and both looked at each other, the Memory said to the Hunter they didn't had to do this, they could still go. The Hunter snarled and snapped, saying that they were sure, they would share the seeds and raise their eggs together.

Then another set of memories came flooding, this were the Memory memories, the story they shared together, how the Hunter had been found by a Mother Herder left lying around as if hers were a mere male egg, how she had been raised by the Mother Herder in the communal rooms, and took upon by the Master Hunter when she realized how apt she was with her skills. The Memory remembered her own upbringing, from scientific mothers, trained since hatchling to become one of the greatest scientists of the planet, how she was weak and scared when her first laying came by, how she wanted to keep her first male egg and was mocked by her peers. How the Hunter had shown up and scared they back. How they had grown closer with the passing years. How sad they had both been when the Memory's first male had run out into the forest, like most sane males would do if they find themselves surrounded by females. After that they both left their monthly males in a crevasse in the forest were they would be protected until they'd hatch, hopefully. The Memory loved her males more than any female would ever do. The Hunter loved her for that.

“This is a strange people”, Said Johan.

“That's to say the least”, Notnow replied.

“What species are th...”

The Memory was standing in front of the Hunter, they both had the seeder male between their teeth, each frontal tooth exactly spotting the center of the sperm sack of the male. Around them the Mother Herder and the Master Hunter were looking, as all the Hunter's peers, from the Memory's side there was her lab team, all cheering and vibrating with anticipation. But all the Memory had eyes for was the eyes of the Hunter, both looking deep into each other's soul. How the pupils dilated and contracted, how the nose flared out pheromones, how the plumage furled and unfurled around their eyes. The Hunter blinked once, then twice, then both snapped the prey in half, each sharing half the sperm sack. Blood and gore flashed all around and all the town people whooped and jumped in celebration. The chances of impregnation by the ritual were ridiculously low, you usually needed to eat the sperm sack whole to allow the sperm a chance to survive the digestive tract, but that wasn't the objective of the ritual. It was a message to all others that they would share everything from now on. The memory faded when both started to lick the blood and gore from each other's faces.

“What the hell”, said Johan belching, “That was disgusting as hell."

“I don't know sir. This experience is not something I'm used too, there are too many feelings, too many sensations that I wasn't ever aware existed. Could you feel the memory's holder emotions?”
“Yes, they were in love, like really deeply in love.”
“If you say so, that is what the Memory felt, but I also felt something more deep, something not that nice.”
“Yes, I know what you mean, I think that the memory holder was ashamed, something like when you hide something.” “Why is the Brain showing us this, could it be one of it's mem...”

The new memory was from the Hunter's perspective, the Scientist was looking at a star-map in a holoprojector, they said they were sure they found it, the Library was in this sector. The Hunter asked why it's so important to find the Library, there would find a cure sooner or later on their own. But the scientist said it wasn't fair, the library MUST had the cure available for them NOW. They were screaming.

“Library?” asked Johan. “There is a giant lib...”

They where looking through a window on a ship, an actual glass window for the looks of it, though it could have been a screen made to look like a window. There was a structure ahead, and it was incredible. The Hunter congratulated their mate, they had done it, they had found one of the entries to the Library. The Scientist momentarily had just eyes for the structure, so the hunter looked at it as well, it extended far beyond what looked possible, but the Hunter knew that was because that's exactly what it did, the Library extended beyond this reality onto many many others, the Library wasn't “there” really, it was just a shadow, in the tridimentional space of the hyperdimentional structure that formed the Library. A light beacon called upon them and guided the ship onto the largest hangar that any of them had ever seen, the Hunter, the Scientist, the human, or the ship.

“I'm getting really dizzy of all this”
“You are? try feeling you have a tail when you don't even have a body”
“oh! that's that weight i feel in the back...”

There was a saurian looking being waiting for them in the Hangar. The Hunter was surprised but the Scientist said that the Library was just showing them a user interface. The Librarian saluted them with a deep bow and asked them what was their need. The Scientist was quick to explain that they were looking for the cure to the Silvifelian degenerative disease. After a few seconds the Librarian said that they might, or might not have the cure, that perhaps the cure was there to be found in the library records, but also that there was the possibility that it hadn't been filed yet, perhaps it was filed in the future by a different saurian people coming by. The cost of using the library was of course, leaving behind all the data you had. The Scientist said that they would like to look for it anyway if they could, and the Librarian said that was well within their rights. And then it disappeared.

“Degenerative disease?” Johan looked around himself and tried to feel for a tail that wasn't currently there.
“A kind of disease that existed on the human genome ages ago, this kind of diseases caused the bodies of the people to attack itself and ...”

There was a new memory now, from the Scientist point of view, they felt their body hurt like hell when trying to log in, and felt the Hunter's hand upon them helping them. They felt really upset and sorry of themselves, also angry with the Hunter for being such a good partner, they deserved to be free of the burden they were placing upon her. The Librarian suddenly showed again, it looked at them and said that they had located a possible clue to the cure, but it was a long shot. They said that apparently there was a reality, a far far one, one were they hadn't traced a shadow of the Library yet, but one that had been broadcasting highly evolved intelligences for a few hundred years that moved away toward where the Library itself was just a simple service. They said that those intelligences talk about a culture that loves to solve problems, specially the ones that look unsolvable, and that apparently they had solved the problem on degenerative diseases on their organics a long time ago. The Librarian said they would try to cast a shadow of a Librarian upon this reality, and see if they could fetch the information. But building a shadow on such a far reality would take eons, so they had sent a blueprint to a location near this culture domain in a long time ago, eventually the shadow would grow into a functional librarian and fetch the needed information. But they didn't knew how long would it take.

Then the memories ended, and the Brain went quiet again. Not even a shimmer, not even a light shining on it's surface.

“Ah... do... do you think that's us?” Johan asked.

Part 6.
Humanity had evolved through the ages to become adept on several things, but above all, to adapt. When scientists concluded that faster than light was a physical impossibility, and that the human body wasn't really up to par to survive the long relativistic speeds of realistic deep space exploration they dedicated to study a way of adapting to the problem. The solution was the decanting chambers and memory uploads. It was a solution, among many, but the one that also allowed something humanity had seeked for long time: Immortality.

Storing your memory on central servers was part of it for sure, but the technical part that changed the game was the decanting chamber, the artificial womb. Capable of building a whole adult human body in a few weeks from a basic DNA template. To do this the understatement of genetics had to evolve far beyond almost any other science in the human realms. Genetics was the core of resurrection. Genetics was the base of the survival of the Human societies on countless planets where adaptation was key to survival.

So fixing a simple autoimmune disease was a walk in the park for Notnow.

“We could very easily be the ones the Librarians are looking for captain, yes. If I had a copy of they genomic map I could identify the disease with ease."
“So... we need to get a copy of their genome?”
“That would be all I need yes.”
“So we ask this... librarian? for it?”
“Yes, however I don't know how to ask." Notnow said while starting to look in its memory banks for any clue about how to achieve the communication.
“Notnow”, Johan stood up from his chair and walked toward the decanting chamber in the side.
“Yes sir?”
“I have an idea.”
“What idea captain?”
“Well... the situation we are in happened because the signal we detected found its way into your databanks and found all the copies of the crew right? and it though that said copies where actually copies of itself and tried to fix them up to go back into its own form.”
“Yes sir, all copies except yours that wasn't hard-coded into my data-banks where corrupted.”
“So, you still have my original mindstate stored on the decanting chamber.”
“Yes sir, I see where you are going now, if the Librarian though that our Mindstates were faulty copies of itself, then now that it's getting to be more aware of itself, enough to attempt communication with us in the way of memory transfer, then it should be able to understand that your Mindstate is a complete thing.”
“Exactly, so we could trade my mindstate to it and it should be able to study it, if it's so similar to itself in the way it's stored, then it should be able to extract from it all my language skills?”
“It's a possibility. It could also detect it as an attack and delete it.”
“I doubt that, the memories we received showed that the price to use the library is providing data to the library. If we provide it with a whole Mindstate it should count as a payment right? It wouldn't try to delete a payment before determining if it has any use for it.”
“Your logic makes sense captain, but I should warn you, if I connect your mindstate to my internal network we are at risk of it getting overwritten by the signal's defense mechanism.”
“I hope the brain/Librarian out there would figure a way to stop that once we can talk to it.”
“It's a possibility yes.”
“Commence the transfer.”
“Ay Ay Captain.”

The transference took a few minutes once the uplink from the decanting chamber and the brain were established, the outcore of Notnow sensor array was still in bad shape after the electromagnetic disturbances it had suffered. After the transfer was done the brain/Librarian went back into silence, and after a few hours a ping was received on the main communication hub. By then Notnow had rebuilt most of it to interstellar standard. The handshake was from a simple old vidchat protocol still used on humanspace since thousands of years ago, if it ain't broken don't fix it as they say.

In the screen showed up an eerie humanoid creature, after a few seconds of establishing connection it stabilized on a featureless humanoid.

“Greetings”, it said. “You can call me Librarian.”
“Hello Librarian, my name is Johan Mark VI, and this ship is named Notnow.”
“Your ‘ship’ has a name?”
“Yes, I have, sentient inorganic are fully human under the humanspace law.” Interjected Notnow.
“I see, greetings Notnow and Johan Mark VI.”
“Greetings... so, you need our help?”
“Well, this is highly irregular but yes, I was sent to this plane of reality to emerge into a fully formed librarian in the next four thousand years, your presence here and you being able to ‘decant’ my ‘mindstate’ into an artificially built brain was not predicted. By any of our analytical procedures... which is highly irregular.”
“Oh... great?”
“In a way it's great yes, but it also raises questions we have no need to explore right now, luckily you decanting my ‘mindstate’ earlier gives us plenty of time to explore all kind of questions, I have already started to push a full incursion of a library wing now that I have a more direct access to this reality subatomic structure.”
“You are bringing a wing of a multidimensional library here to this system?”
“Yes, it will take a few years to fully express. Meanwhile I have a rather struggling mission ahead, as you said I came here looking for your help. We think you should be able to figure a way to fix our client's disease.”
“Oh, yes, that's rather simple” Said Notnow, “I will only need a full copy of their genome maps.”
“Maps?”
“yes, from the memories you shared with us we saw that this ‘Saurian’ beings have a marked sexual dimorphism, their males seem to be created by half their DNA resources, eggs that in earthlings wouldn't be fertilized turn into fully formed beings, this creates an strange genetic dynamic that I would need to study, and perhaps even transmit back to Humanspace to clear out.”
“You need maps of the males DNA?" Asked the Librarian again.
“Ah... yes? Is that a problem?”
“We don't have any copy of their genome on our databases, the ‘Saurians’ as you called them, never bothered to map them. They don't think they are relevant.”
“Oh... well... they are." Notnow had never talked to an intelligence that wasn't human before, and even if it was using the Captain's mindstate as guide to create the interface it was using to communicate it was obvious to it that it was an alien being, still hardly grasping the basics of this reality.
“I will send a construct to Jolor to collect this data... oh... this makes sense.”
“What does?” asked Johan that was starting to get lost himself.
“Our clients knew of the library, and its relation to genetic study of their race because a construct of ours visited it hundreds of years prior to collect said genetic data. Which means this is causality loop.”
“Oh... you are traveling through time?” Johan stood up in the command center's low gravity and looked at the entity in the screen.
“Technically, time doesn't proceed at the same pace between realities, with simple manipulations of different realities causality progressions we can influx events to happen at different points across the multiverse.”
“You time travel by going to realities were time goes in the other direction?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Wow”
“Wow” said both Johan and Notnow.
“It's the best way of collecting data.”
“I can imagine”
“So, how long will it take to get the genome maps?”
“I don't know, time is not... the data has arrived.”
“That quick?”
“Not really, it took the construct several decades to tag enough males to make an appropriate map schema, apparently it's highly divergent from male to male.”
“Yes, of course it is.” Said Notnow knowingly. Then it started to receive all the data from the Librarian, it was an incredible and vast amount of data, but it was all comprehensible for the ship, it detected the reason of the sickness and a way to... “oh... I don't know if your clients will like my solution...”
“What do you mean?"
“Well, my knowledge of genetic manipulation is highly tied to the decanting chamber. I can fix the autoimmune problem, but... It would be applied to a new subject, the previous subject would have to be... discarded."
“Oh...” said Johan, he understood that in the very beginning of humanity process of immortality, the idea of leaving old bodies behind and moving to a new subject was seen by many as willful self-termination. People that believed that had all gone away in time, leaving only the ones that accepted the new statu quo. “they would need to make a Mindstate copy and then install it in a new body. Would they accept that?"

-------

In a different reality, far far away from Humanspace, another branch of the Library wakes up its librarian avatar, this one looks like a stylized pseudo-saurian. In front of it there is a case box, in the case there is a brain scanner and a crystal vial with a new strand of fixed DNA. Somewhere else in the library the schematics for a decanting chamber are being printed onto real matter. The librarian walks away to meet its clients, a Great Hunter and their Wife, the Scientist. In his hands he takes this case from the humans.

END