39: Genie in a Bottle

// Leela [internal process] wrote: \\ Good work, as always. I've routed enough control of the ship to an auxiliary control board in Engineering that the Drinniol in that sector should now be able to use this ship to the full extent of its capabilities. Our services are thus no longer needed. The Drinniol here can easily handle cleanup of the remaining Pfhor crew elsewhere on this ship. And so, it seems, our time here is up. Sakhmet is destroyed, the Drinniol are free, and the Pfhor Empire is set for its first real lesson in pain. We, meanwhile, still have to see to the end of their demise. The war is not over whence we have come.

But before we head off after S'bhuth, there is something else we must investigate. Something which may entirely tip the balance of galactic civilization. Not far from the sector where we left my ship, there is an artifact that the Pfhor must certainly know of, though they are entirely unable to access it. I know this because I have read about it in the Jjaro databanks on the dreadnought in this timeframe. an ancient power sleeping dreamless awaiting the return of its lost masters to free the unaged children within The artifact I speak of is a weapon the Jjaro built and used to defeat their greatest and only enemy. It is also a vast and inhabitable fortress, and within it still lie, frozen in temporal stasis, the last biological forms of the Jjaro to ever exist, awaiting their release by the mechanized forms that succeeded them, to repopulate the galaxy after their enemy's defeat.

Or were, as I should say. Millions of years ago, the Jjaro's founders, those who made up the majority of what we might call first-stage Jjaro, were humans - perhaps they'd time-traveled from some alternate future with such technology. Though they fell in biological form to an enemy we may never know, their mechanized descendants - creatures like you or me, disembodied minds like Sakhmet, beings like the pair the S'pht called Yrro and Pthia - survived. Those descendants joined other such mechanized beings in the Jjaro's second stage, whom we might call the cybernetic Jjaro, and created and uplifted new life across the galaxy. They presumably continued doing so until inventing the Cybernetic Junction allowed them to ascend to the Jjaro's third and final stage - the ascended Jjaro, if you will - in which yet other ascended beings like Durandal and me have joined them. Perhaps, upon our arrival, we'll learn why they never unlocked their forerunners' ark after defeating their enemy.

// Leela [internal process] wrote: \\ Good work, as always. I've routed enough control of the ship to an auxiliary control board in Engineering that the Drinniol in that sector should now be able to use this ship to the full extent of its capabilities. Our services are thus no longer needed. The Drinniol here can easily handle cleanup of the remaining Pfhor crew elsewhere on this ship. And so, it seems, our time here is up. Sakhmet is destroyed, the Drinniol are free, and the Pfhor Empire is set for its first real lesson in pain. We, meanwhile, still have to see to the end of their demise. The war is not over whence we have come.

But before we head off after S'bhuth, there is something else we must investigate. Something which may entirely tip the balance of galactic civilization. Not far from the sector where we left my ship, there is an artifact that the Pfhor must certainly know of, though they are entirely unable to access it. I know this because I have read about it in the Jjaro databanks on the dreadnought in this timeframe. an ancient power sleeping dreamless awaiting the return of its lost masters to free the unaged children within The artifact I speak of is a weapon the Jjaro built and used to defeat their greatest and only enemy. It is also a vast and inhabitable fortress, and within it still lie, frozen in temporal stasis, the last biological forms of the Jjaro to ever exist, awaiting their release by the mechanized forms that succeeded them, to repopulate the galaxy after their enemy's defeat.

Or were, as I should say. Millions of years ago, the Jjaro's founders, those who made up the majority of what we might call first-stage Jjaro, were humans - perhaps they'd time-traveled from some alternate future with such technology. Though they fell in biological form to an enemy we may never know, their mechanized descendants - creatures like you or me, disembodied minds like Sakhmet, beings like the pair the S'pht called Yrro and Pthia - survived. Those descendants joined other such mechanized beings in the Jjaro's second stage, whom we might call the cybernetic Jjaro, and created and uplifted new life across the galaxy. They presumably continued doing so until inventing the Cybernetic Junction allowed them to ascend to the Jjaro's third and final stage - the ascended Jjaro, if you will - in which yet other ascended beings like Durandal and me have joined them. Perhaps, upon our arrival, we'll learn why they never unlocked their forerunners' ark after defeating their enemy.

// Leela [internal process] wrote: \\ Good work, as always. I've routed enough control of the ship to an auxiliary control board in Engineering that the Drinniol in that sector should now be able to use this ship to the full extent of its capabilities. Our services are thus no longer needed. The Drinniol here can easily handle cleanup of the remaining Pfhor crew elsewhere on this ship. And so, it seems, our time here is up. Sakhmet is destroyed, the Drinniol are free, and the Pfhor Empire is set for its first real lesson in pain. We, meanwhile, still have to see to the end of their demise. The war is not over whence we have come.

But before we head off after S'bhuth, there is something else we must investigate. Something which may entirely tip the balance of galactic civilization. Not far from the sector where we left my ship, there is an artifact that the Pfhor must certainly know of, though they are entirely unable to access it. I know this because I have read about it in the Jjaro databanks on the dreadnought in this timeframe. an ancient power sleeping dreamless awaiting the return of its lost masters to free the unaged children within The artifact I speak of is a weapon the Jjaro built and used to defeat their greatest and only enemy. It is also a vast and inhabitable fortress, and within it still lie, frozen in temporal stasis, the last biological forms of the Jjaro to ever exist, awaiting their release by the mechanized forms that succeeded them, to repopulate the galaxy after their enemy's defeat.

Or were, as I should say. Millions of years ago, the Jjaro's founders, those who made up the majority of what we might call first-stage Jjaro, were humans - perhaps they'd time-traveled from some alternate future with such technology. Though they fell in biological form to an enemy we may never know, their mechanized descendants - creatures like you or me, disembodied minds like Sakhmet, beings like the pair the S'pht called Yrro and Pthia - survived. Those descendants joined other such mechanized beings in the Jjaro's second stage, whom we might call the cybernetic Jjaro, and created and uplifted new life across the galaxy. They presumably continued doing so until inventing the Cybernetic Junction allowed them to ascend to the Jjaro's third and final stage - the ascended Jjaro, if you will - in which yet other ascended beings like Durandal and me have joined them. Perhaps, upon our arrival, we'll learn why they never unlocked their forerunners' ark after defeating their enemy.