Chapter twelve

Another, even more insidious anomaly is anomaly AA-Z-800. It is a spherical area of space that is warped, and anyone who looks directly at it goes insane. Even if any programs or NS-AIs look at it they will become corrupted.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the chronosphere:

New Terra was advancing pretty well. I had to make it from scratch because it didn’t exist, but that wasn’t too hard and I made sure to put it in the same place and in the same galactic orbit as Old Terra had been in.

Humanity was also developing quite well. I had to pull a few strings here and there to let them evolve and develop, but they were now advancing very stably. All I needed for them to do was develop primitive FTL, and then influence them to discover me.

As I was watching two countries going to war again over the colour of the hat one of their leaders wore, I felt a vibration in subspace. Huh, I didn’t think that any of the current raced had developed subspace travel yet. It was probably one of the “hidden” races.

I watched as the ship’s rudimentary subspace drive stopped the second it entered the chronosphere. I dropped by cloak and slowly made my way over. they could probably provide me with much better information than the others I had spoken to. “Hidden” races always loved to watch younger nations.

As I effortlessly hacked into the ship, the first things I saw were a couple of octopus-headed aliens running around screaming “WHY IS THE GIANT PURPLE PLANET MOVING! HOW IS THE GIANT PURPLE PLANET MOVING?” I lost it right there. After laughing my guts out for a few seconds, I looked at the rest of the scene. The captain was very pale and yelling at the crew, the scientists were going insane and insisting that I violated the laws of physics (I did not, thank you very much), and the diplomats were standing in corner looking very lost.

As I put my avatar up on their main screen they all jumped and the person at the coms suite fell out of his chair. I ignored that and started speaking.

“Greetings. What brings you to this part of the galaxy?”

“If you can hack our coms you must know our purpose by now. we are here to ask you some questions and negotiate.” One of the diplomats stood forward.

“You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Yes, I’ll answer your questions, but I want something in return.”

“We can negotiate the terms face to face.”

“But we are already face to face.” They immediately started looking around. “Just look out of the window.”

Mr Smart got it first. “Y-Y-You’re the planet.”

“Bingo!” They froze again, then started babbling on about homicidal AIs and “The War of Giants”, which as far as I could tell was fought against a homicidal hivemind AI. Idiots. They couldn’t even create an AI properly without it going insane.

“First of all, I wasn’t born an AI, I was Uploaded. Second, what you’re doing right now with AIs is akin to cramming several nukes into a gun, instead of using a reactor to power a laser.” They looked slightly ashamed, before trying to regain their momentum.

“So, where can we negotiate?”

“I’ll arrange a place for you to stay while we talk. And we’re not really negotiating, you’re asking for information.”