A visitor from beyond the galaxy (or maybe from beyond the universe) Buddha's Wheel passed Earth's solar system in the year 2408 at barely half a lightyear.
Traveling at a relative snail's pace of three thousand kilometers per second, it was first detected by the ultra-long-wave radar network in the Kuiper Belt.
It took another two decades for Earth's fastest antimatter vessel, the Arctica, to catch up with it in the cold of deep space.
Before the encounter, the improvised human/hybrid crew (38 homorphs and 96 anibots) prepared for every conceivable contingency.
It's impossible to prepare for the absolute unknown. One has to make an effort though.
We found a centripetal-wheel spaceship 110.7 kilometers wide, spinning to generate 1.7 g of interior gravity. There were no hubs or spokes, just a slowly spinning metallic circle.
Only fifteen degrees above absolute zero, the exterior of the great wheel (or ring or hoop - though the middle wasn't as hollow as it first seemed) was completely featureless, except for the row of identical scoops lining the outer rim.
Each scoop was large enough to hold all the ships that have ever sailed Earth's seas.
Rolling toward its unknown destination, the Wheel had to be vastly more advanced than it appeared. The first clue was its unblemished outer surface.
In fact, it was so advanced the small crew of humanoid visitors which spent less than two months inside was utterly irrelevant to its existence. We were beneath beneath contempt.
Everything we think we know about its builders must be wrong:
Created by an "Undergod" Class-4 super-civilization, the Wheel may be part of a billion-year plan. If their history ended eons ago, their only remaining goal must be perfection. Sufficiently advanced civilizations may decide to cut themselves off from the rest of the universe forever.
After discovering the deep secrets of physics, the Undergods' future had become as clear to them as the past. Their Wheel might use quantum feedback amplification to plot its path through reality. Its very passage preempted any threats before they could occur.
That was why we could enter and explore 6% of its interior without consequence. As a side effect, it may even have stabilized human civilization before its passage.
Arctica managed to touch down on the inner rim in an elegant deceleration maneuver.
It took another three weeks to figure out how to enter through one of the mysterious scoops. This led to a claustrophobic, gel-filled airlock, which led to the Sponge Maze.
The outer rim of Buddha's Wheel was over one kilometer thick, and almost as strong as solid diamond.
It was riddled with several millions of kilometers of narrow access shafts and corridors leading every which way. Between them were smaller tubes and tunnels of all imaginable shapes and sizes, down to nanometer scales and below. Some glowed like fiberoptic stars, providing the dim illumination.
The atmosphere was a complex mixture - 8% oxygen at 2.6 atmospheres, most other gasses being synthetic molecules. We never found two molecules that were exactly alike.
Not even Earth's toughest bacteria could have survived in that mixture for long, but our exosuits never sprung a leak.
The first wave of exploration bots spread out for hours, climbing and descending the strangely curved tubes connecting the different levels, before finding their way back to the Entry Room.
Since radio didn't work beyond line-of-sight, the bots had to defragment into hundreds of pieces each, running back and forth to keep us updated.
There were many doors and gates that could slam shut at any time. It felt like an epic journey, but they never got further away than 175 meters.
Because of the smooth walls and absence of corners, we suspected the tunnel network was meant to transport fluids. We didn't stay too long.
The next day, the bots found a path to a spiral tunnel rising to the interior surface, more than a kilometer above our heads.
It led to the Oculus, an airlock made of sliding panels.
When we walked out onto the main floor and looked up, it was like a caveman visiting a human space station. Human aesthetics, the rules of symmetry, complexity, and redundancy didn't apply. Nothing was truly random. Everything had evolved to its ideal state.
We stood inside a curving tunnel ten kilometers wide and high. Almost flat on the bottom, at least for the first few hundred meters. Then the ground seemed to rise up in both directions, steeper and steeper, to finally vanish behind the sky. Both ends of the tube, spinward and antispinward, looped back together 108 kilometers overhead.
Harsh, violet light glared from the artificial sky.
A standard Von Braun space station - only one billion times bigger. Big enough to have weather. The clouds were disturbingly regular, like kites or dirigibles.
The ground was covered with something like blue felt. Directly ahead lay our first challenge, one of the most intimidating sights ever seen by human eyes.
The Black Jungle was a teeming, steaming wilderness; chaotic terrain with steep, jagged hills and deep, misty valleys.
Up close, the densely packed plant life turned out to be made of delicate machinery of every imaginable variety, without discernible purpose. Even the sponge-like moss was made of millions of perfectly interlocking levers and pistons in a web of wires, with not a nanoscopic cog out of place.
Fortunately, the large entities we sometimes heard moving in the distance never came closer. It took rather long to figure out why.
It turned out the chaotic wilderness was actually a single integrated device, perfectly organized to perform one unimaginable task. Instead of a wild junkyard, it was the summit of intelligent design.
Things only got stranger.
Beyond the Jungle, the curving tubeway was filled with great hanging ribbons of all sizes. Behind them, we could just see what looked like a series of oddly asymmetrical temples, leading to a tunnel of light.
Long-range scans revealed several physical anomalies within this well-lit but apparently empty area. The absence of background neutrinos from that direction indicated it wasn't nearly as empty as it looked.
Buddha's Wheel had a complex artificial climate, with many types of synthetic rain and snow.
Once, we were caught inside a bright sparkling storm, like being submerged in analog static. Afterwards, the environment had changed, with new colors and layers all around us.
We saw a large structure collapse like a stage prop, the debris slowly melting into the ground.
Buddha's Wheel was a meta-organism, constantly rearranging itself. It controlled its own matter to a degree that seemed almost magical.
The first artifact that seemed to break the laws of physics was a Constructor, which appeared without warning outside our mobile camp.
Described as hairy stick figures, they were not made of matter or any known form of energy. We soon learned they could be any size, but they all looked alike, from specks of dust to almost half a kilometer long. While they seemed to blur and shift as they moved, they were quite solid.
Working together, they could manufacture and assemble vast arrays of more complicated machinery in a matter of hours.
Our best guess is they were projections of the Wheel itself, remotely generated and controlled from somewhere within the endless tunnel network.
The total control of all matter inside Buddha's Wheel extended to the subatomic level. All its particles were like entangled gyroscopes that could coordinate their atomic spin. In theory, Buddha's Wheel could stop rotating, or even reverse its rotation instantaneously.
The interior activity increased hour by hour, but we never found evidence of any controlling intelligence, let alone intelligent aliens. Or an information kiosk, for that matter.
Buddha's Wheel was cycling through different configurations for no discernible reason. Was it a universal factory, an experimental laboratory, or a living museum?
Perhaps it was on a million-year mission to establish a new outpost in another galaxy. The Undergods may only settle remote areas, to avoid contact with radically different Others.
If so, its mission appeared doomed to fail.
There was never any doubt about Buddha's Wheel's immediate destination: it was on a direct collision course with Nemesis, also known as the Death Star.
It turns out that Earth's solar system has circled this 10-solar-mass black hole in a statistically unlikely, pseudo-stable orbit for half a billion years . . . still more evidence of destiny at work.
Arctica had to depart one week before impact. A trillion-ton alien starship mostly converted into energy would make quite a bright flash, even behind our layered mirror shields.
We watched the show from almost a billion kilometers away, having fallen far behind by then. We had no choice but to slow down, but at least it gave us time to map the environment around Nemesis. There was a thin accretion disk, with charged particle belts.
A few minutes before closest approach, our accompanying probes saw Buddha's Wheel make a ninety-degree angular-plane rotation.
The last thing the nearest probe saw was the Wheel seemingly becoming transparent. That was to be expected, as its matter stopped interacting with the rest of the universe.
Less than a second later, the black hole smoothly passed THROUGH the center of the great ring.
Traveling at near lightspeed, the inner rim spent only milliseconds in the danger zone, passing within fifteen kilometers of the event horizon. According to our current understanding of the laws of physics, the tidal forces should have instantly pulverized Buddha's Wheel to glowing plasma.
Maybe if it had been ten times wider, the ring might have survived.
At the moment of closest approach, the Wheel initiated an instantaneous acceleration maneuver, ejecting an enormous amount of unseen propellant matter.
Even this wasn't a complete surprise. We already knew from gravimetric analysis that an amount of dark matter equal in mass to the starship had somehow been stored in a compact ring (like a smaller wheel) around its center of mass, held there by what might as well be magic.
When the alien starship looped around the black hole, this invisible reaction mass was converted into a narrow beam of dark energy, blasted in the other direction.
We passed through the outer shell of the dispersal cone, and saw dim flashes of pair annihilations.
Buddha's Wheel also made a course correction during its close encounter.
Seconds later, it had climbed back out of the gravity well and was hurtling away at 15% of the speed of light, on a course that would take it just outside the plane of the galaxy. Its next plausible target was over a hundred thousand years in the future.
The acceleration should have been well nigh infinite, but apparently the force had somehow acted equally upon each particle of the starship. At least it didn't break the light barrier.
A few days later, we swung around Nemesis ourselves at a considerably safer distance, and performed our own acceleration maneuver on a rapid Earth-return trajectory.
For an instant, we glimpsed a majestic ring around Nemesis, perfectly aligned with the Wheel's new course.
Something that fragile shouldn't have survived that long.
Long ago, Nemesis "inadvertently" deflected a handful of ice mountains toward our dinosaur-infested planet.
If that hadn't happened, we would never have existed. Now we don't need to exist anymore.
At that time, Buddha's Wheel was moving through the intergalactic deep vacuum of the Local Group. It sure seems in a hurry all of a sudden.
Some say it's the end stage of a degenerate intelligence, without awareness, purpose, or meaning anymore. The optimists say it is fleeing from us, or what humanity is about to become.
More likely, it wants to spend as little time as possible in this particular quadrant of the galaxy.
Our solar system was just a passing speck in the night, unworthy of serious attention.
I don't think we should worry. We're not ready to worry.
We saw many inexplicable and seemingly impossible things, but all we learned during our time in Buddha's Wheel were our own biases, like ants investigating an airplane. It wasn't even a plausible psychology experiment, art project, or practical joke.
Which brings us to the very first mystery that was discovered about the object: until its rendezvous with Nemesis, it might not have been moving at all (in a way).
While it appeared to be passing Earth's solar system at a percent of the speed of light, it was completely motionless relative to the cosmic background radiation.
The unknowns are so vast they just might cancel out.
Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
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