“This is beautiful,” Raeilya said, gazing at the Revelation’s interior as if she was staring at a work of art. It was beautiful—it belonged to the Imperatrix, after all, and everything Imperial had to be pretty—but certainly nothing Carina would have remarked upon.

“Thank you,” Acidalia replied cordially. “It’s nowhere near faster than light, but it has a certain charm to it nonetheless.”

Carina bit her lip. If these people from outer space truly had faster-than-light technology, she had no idea what she could possibly say to them. How could she be expected to enlighten the ambassador when the civilization she came from had clearly accomplished so much more than Eleutheria? Carina was no expert; she’d grown up in astrophysics, but so had every other Scientia girl in her sector. She was still young and inexperienced, and she felt like Acidalia was drastically overestimating her abilities. And Athena… well, Athena had failed introductory physics three times. It would be a miracle if she could bullshit her way through this conversation, let alone say anything that made any sort of scientific sense.

“Doctors,” Raeilya said, stretching out a hand. Carina chose not to correct her, partially because that would have made it awkward, but mostly because being referred to as a “doctor” like some sort of old-timey intellectual felt rather nice.

“Ambassador,” Carina answered, shaking her hand. Her fingers were wet and cold, with thin, fleshy membranes stretched between them, but otherwise, they looked rather human. She wore black nail polish decorated with sparkles and tiny pearls, just like any human woman would, and Carina thought about how strange it was that nail polish was a thing on whatever planet Raeilya was from.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you both.” Raeilya smiled, revealing very white, very human teeth. Except they weren’t human, not exactly—she didn’t have canines. Maybe the Mira were herbivores.

“Likewise,” Carina said, only because it seemed like something Acidalia would say. It was better than yeah, me too, she thought. Athena nodded, but she kept her mouth shut, which was probably a good thing considering the circumstances.

Acidalia nodded. “Would you like something to drink? Tea, perhaps?”

“Tea would be nice.” The minute Raeilya said it, a tiny silver teacup appeared from a slot on the table and began to fill itself with brown liquid. Surprised, Raeilya held it up to the light, like she couldn’t believe it was real. Then she took a small sip and settled back in her chair, apparently satisfied. “Thank you.”

Acidalia smiled her charismatic-politician smile. “It’s nothing. If anything, thank the ship.”

“Well, thank you, Revelation,” Raeilya laughed. “Now, regarding astrophysics…”

“Yeah, let’s talk about that!” Athena said with an enthusiasm that did not match her hatred of math whatsoever. “I’m an astrophysicist, caste Scientia. Nice to meet you. The name’s Athena Stellara, but you can just call me Athena.”

Inwardly, Carina groaned, but if Raeilya was shocked or offended by her casual tone, she didn’t show it. “In that case, greetings, Athena, and—“

“Carina.”

“—and Carina,” Raeilya finished, “I come to speak with you about the entropy problem.” The way she said it made Carina feel like it was a proper noun that ought to be capitalized—Entropy Problem. “You are aware of the concept of entropy?”

“Um, duh? Of course. Rooms don’t clean themselves, spilled milk doesn’t rise back into a glass, and you can’t uncook an egg. What’s your point?” Athena leant backwards, hands folded behind her head lazily.

“Actually, we can unboil eggs,” Acidalia said, “though that has to do with refolding proteins that were denatured. It’s all simple biology, not a reversal of the nature of the universe, and it does give off entropy in the form of heat—“

“You get the point,” Athena interrupted. “But thanks for making my physics instructor and her stupid egg metaphors look dumb.”

Raeilya giggled in a very unprofessional manner. “Well, regardless of whether it disobeys the laws of physics, that is quite a scientific feat. I don’t even know what a protein is myself.”

Carina looked at Acidalia, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. They have FTL travel but no idea what a protein is? Something about that sounded impossible. Being an Astrophysica by caste, Carina had never received any biology education beyond the most introductory, basic level, but even she knew what a protein was.

“You… don’t know what a protein is?” Athena asked, voicing what they were all thinking.

“Should I?”

“No, no, it’s a very Eleutherian science, I wouldn’t expect you to!” Acidalia interjected herself hurriedly into the conversation, probably because she didn’t want Athena to offend the Ambassador. Still, Carina knew Acidalia was lying. There was nothing special about the science of biology that made it exclusive to the inhabitants of the planet Terra.

Raeilya shook her head like she was dizzied, and, to be fair, to a woman who’d never even heard of proteins before, this whole conversation must sound insane. Un-cooking eggs would seem impossible to any normal person, especially when that person didn’t understand the very basics of biology.

“In any case,” she said, still looking mildly confused, “at least we’re on a similar page regarding entropy. I hoped we would be, but you never know; we’ve been at war with each other for so long that it’s difficult to tell. There are precious few Eleutherians I’ve met who have’t tried to shoot me on sight, not that I fault them for that; war is war.”

“Well, let’s hope we can go from a similar page to the same one.” Acidalia didn’t remark on the comment about people trying to shoot Raeilya, but Carina had to wonder how an ambassador, a politician with no ties to the military, found themselves in enough combat situations to consider being shot at a regular occurrence. Raeilya was slight and scrawny enough that she could probably be considered unfit for service even if the Ciryan army allowed women to fight, which Carina doubted. “We’ve established that things get more random as time passes; now we need to delve into what that means,” Acidalia continued.

Raeilya smiled sadly. “Well, it means the universe is falling apart, doesn’t it?”

“That’s grim.” Athena yawned, bored. “But the death of the universe won’t happen until we’re all long dead, so I don’t know why it matters.”

“The death of the universe, of course, will take eons, and that’s of no concern to me,” Raeilya said. “But that isn’t what I’m talking about. Entropy means that things break, and some of the things that break are important, necessary for our survival as a civilization. Maybe the universe won’t die for a while yet, but our society is on the verge of collapsing in on itself because things break spontaneously, but they don’t put themselves back together again.”

“I still don’t see what you mean,” Carina said. “What keeps breaking that you can’t fix?”

“The better question is what can we fix?” Raeilya asked. “We really can’t fix anything at all, and that’s the problem. Our whole civilization is relying upon technology that was built before our time, and everyone who knows how it works vanished years ago.”

“Why?” Carina didn’t specify whether she was asking why they were running on ancient technology or why all of the creators of said technology had disappeared. She wanted to know the answer to both.

“We don’t have any choice, do we? If we stopped using everything we don’t understand we’d be back in the Stone Age.”

“That bad, huh,” Athena said. “Well, what’s breaking that you’re so dependent on?”

“Rifts are the biggest thing.” Raeilya said. “They’re difficult to explain, but I’ll try my best. You know how dimensions work, right? If you took a piece of paper and folded it and—“

“And stabbed it with a pen,” Athena finished. “Oldest trope in the book. You’re talking about wormholes, right?”

Raeilya nodded. “Wormholes. That’s what my brother calls them, anyway. Passageways that let you go from one part of the galaxy to another without having to actually fly there at lightspeed. We have them, lots of them, but nobody knows how they work, and they keep breaking down.”

Athena and Carina looked at each other. Wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, had never been created or used by any Terran, but the math for their existence checked out. As far as Carina knew, nobody had ever seen them before, but they still had a rough idea of how they could operate.

“Were these wormholes created by someone or naturally occurring?” Athena asked, now looking considerably more interested in the conversation.

“Created.”

“And they’re large enough to allow people and starships to travel through them?”

“Correct.”

“In that case,” Athena said, “the physics surrounding them is pretty easy to understand. You have two holes connected by a passageway, except gravity doesn’t like holes in spacetime, so you have to use exotic matter to prop the holes open before gravity clamps them shut. Matter with a negative mass. I have no idea where you’d find that kind of thing, but theoretically, wormholes should be possible if you know where to find it.”

“Well,” Carina added hastily, “it gets significantly more complicated than that. They’re mathematically possible, but you’re combining exotic matter with classical physics, and then things get unstable. You can’t really have a wormhole that’s stable and predictable, if I’m remembering right.” She probably wasn’t; she hadn’t had to know any of this since primary school.

“Well, that’s less cool, so I choose to ignore it,” Athena said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, what do you mean they keep ‘breaking?’”

“Well, that’s the problem; we don’t know. We didn’t build them,” Raeilya replied. “They break in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes they just get unpredictable and you wind up three thousand light years away from where you were supposed to be for no clear reason, but those are the good cases. In the bad cases, they just break, and anyone who goes into them is just going into a black hole, so they get, um—“

“Spaghettified?” Athena asked.

“Wait, that’s a word?” Raeilya laughed incredulously. “My gods, I thought Rune made that up. Oh, I shouldn’t be finding this funny. But yes. Spaghettified. They don’t realize that they’re walking into a death trap, and neither does anyone else, not until it’s too late and they’re nothing but strings of atoms floating past the event horizon.”

“That’s horrifying,” Carina said before she could stop herself. How many people had walked through an ordinary transport wormhole and then died in a terrible, painful manner before they were even aware they’d made a mistake?

“Yes. It is. But what’s more horrifying is the fact that we can’t fix them,” Raeilya continued. “The people who built them are gone, and they took the records with them. So entropy means they break, because things do that. But they can’t ever be repaired, and they’ll never spontaneously begin to work again. That’s part of this war, this war-that’s-not-really-a-war. Technology is becoming scarcer and scarcer, and everyone wants to keep it for themselves. We can’t build more Rifts. But we can battle one another in a desperate attempt to control the ones that remain.”

“Well, setting aside the war for a moment,” Acidalia said, “if you didn’t build the Rifts, who did?”

“The Precursors did, of course,” Raeilya said, looking surprised that Acidalia didn’t already know that. “Your ancestors.”

“My ancestors?”

“Katerina.”

Acidalia, Athena and Carina shared a worried look.

“You’re saying that Katerina Aurelia, or Katherine Davis, founder of Eleutheria, built wormholes,” Athena said slowly. “And all the other technology you don’t understand.”

“Not necessarily Katerina in particular, but people like her. Precursors. Higher beings.” Raeilya’s voice took on a mystical, mythical tone. “Some even think of them as divine. They’re the ones who built the Rifts, the gravity field planets, the Dyson spheres. And now they’re gone.”

“And Acidalia is descended from them?” Athena asked, still looking utterly confused.

“We’re all descended from them to an extent. Why else would I look so similar to a human despite being a completely different species adapted to a different environment?” Raeilya held up her hand, showing Athena that, other than the hue and the thin webbing between Raeilya’s fingers, they were completely identical. “But Acidalia and her family are the people with the most Precursor blood running through their veins. We can track their lineage back to Katerina, and Katerina’s father was a Precursor. You can tell because of their eyes.”

“So the infamous Cipher blue eyes are actually because the Imperial family is descended from a living alien goddess?”

“Sort of.”

Athena exhaled. “Ohhhhhhkay.”

“That’s still over sixty generations ago, assuming all of this is true,” Acidalia said. “Even if Katerina was half-Precursor, I’m…” Her voice trailed off as she did the math. “Less than a quintillionth Precursor. The actual amount is most likely even smaller. I’m definitely not a divine being from outer space, and I’m sorry to say that I have no idea how to repair breaking wormholes. I don’t even work in astrophysics.”

“I do work in astrophysics, and even I have no clue,” Athena added. “I don’t think we can help you. Besides, if you think people are Precursors because of their eyes, I’ve got bad news for you, cause Acidalia’s are brown, anyway.”

“And Aleskynn has blue eyes, but she’s one of the most immature people I’ve ever met,” Carina said. “I don’t really think Precursor ancestry is a reliable way to measure scientific achievement. Most discoveries in Terran science were made by people with no relation to Katerina or her parents.”

Raeilya shook her head. “Then how else do you explain why Terra has technology that we haven’t been able to figure out for the past hundred eons? Acidalia just gifted me penicillium mold that can be used to treat diseases, said that you have even better means of killing bacteria, and yet nobody in the rest of the galaxy has ever been able to see that.”

“Well, was anyone looking for it?” Acidalia asked.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s your issue. To achieve scientifically, you have to actually make an attempt to do so,” Acidalia said. “You have to fund research, develop methods, share knowledge. One person can’t go from sticks and rocks to genetic engineering, but a society can, given sufficient time. But you have to actually try, not keep waiting for technology to fall into your laps.”

“I get that,” Raeilya said. “Forget the Precursors and Katerina for a minute. Even if nobody here has a one nucleotide of Precursor DNA in their whole body, Earth is still special because technology has never fallen into your lap and yet you succeed anyway! Do you want to know why we tried to keep you in the dark for so long? Because you kept developing at an astonishing pace. You went from horses and buggies to electricity and cars in just a few centuries, and we were hoping that eventually you’d go from highways to intragalactic Rifts, and then maybe show us where the Precursors went when they vanished.”

Disconcerted, Acidalia bit her lip. “If you were thinking that we’d suddenly pause all of our research because someone gave us some new technology, I can safely assure you that that isn’t going to happen. And, if there were Precursors here two thousand years ago, their DNA is so diluted that nobody here would be related to them in any significant way. I’m only slightly more connected to Katerina than I am to the mitochondrial Eve.”

“Mitochondrial?” Raeilya asked, knitting her violet eyebrows.

Acidalia sighed in obvious exasperation. “It doesn’t matter. Essentially, I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that none of us can do much to fix your issue with entropy at the moment. I can help you with some technologies—for example, I can teach you genetic engineering and how it works, and there are plenty of other professionals out there who would be extremely willing to share their research with you—but we are nowhere near advanced enough to understand where to obtain exotic matter or how to use it. You should also keep in mind that we still don’t fully know you or your civilization, let alone whichever other societies are out there, and almost none of us have ever heard of the war you’re trying to fight. I will absolutely help you if your cause is just and you’re willing to learn, but to ask us to come in and fix the slow, burning apocalypse that’s been rotting the galaxy for the entirety of time itself is a lot. Small things, like plagues and penicillin, I can help with. Gigantic things, like the laws of physics, are a different matter entirely. And before I do anything, most importantly, I need more context.”

“Well put,” Carina said, because she didn’t know what else she could possibly add on to that.

“That’s fair.” Raeilya stood, setting the tea back down on the table. “I would be reluctant to help, too, without any knowledge of what I was supporting. But I would suggest coming to Cirya and Awakening, and becoming accustomed to the rest of the galaxy’s peoples. Perhaps then you’ll know more context, because you’ll be able to see it yourself.”

“Yes, I would,” Acidalia said, though something in her voice suggested that she was hesitant. “What exactly does Awakening entail?”

“A ceremony, a formal acknowledgement that you are now a part of the Galaxy as a whole,” Raeilya shrugged. “It’s entirely a formality. But I do suggest that you take the opportunity and Awaken Eleutheria now—then you can reap the rewards before someone else does. I take it whatever faction you’re opposing in this war—Alestra and her men—have no knowledge that you and I have spoken?”

“Hopefully not.” Acidalia looked like she’d only just realized that Alestra had no idea what she’d been up to and the advantage she had. “I have an idea, actually. I believe I should discuss this further with my comrades before we proceed—after all, when the day is done and the sun has set on this war, I am only a person myself, and they have just as much of a right to know what is happening as I do. Then we can talk about this matter further at a later date, preferably with an entire panel of professionals, and I will consider it.”

“Understandable.” Raeilya shook Acidalia’s hand in an extremely strange, stilted way that suggested she wasn’t accustomed to handshakes. She nodded her head in an odd half-bow, and Acidalia returned the gesture, even though by all accounts she shouldn’t have to, being the Imperatrix. And then Raeilya just… left. Left like it was simply the end of a boring department meeting and they hadn’t just had a ridiculous and completely insane conversation about entropy and science and blue-eyed alien goddesses from outer space.

Carina sat, stunned, for a few seconds, then she looked to Acidalia for guidance. It didn’t help her much; Acidalia looked just as confused and dazed as she did.

“Well, that was something,” Athena said, wide-eyed.

“Something indeed.” Acidalia shook her head. “I must admit, I don’t have any idea how to respond to whatever just happened, but something tells me that the Ambassador doesn’t have an excellent grasp on the concept of genetics. That thing about the Imperials being some type of divine, mythical family is pure propaganda, though I suppose you already know that.”

Carina nodded. As much as she admired Acidalia, there was absolutely no way she was anything but human. It was rather ironic that Raeilya, who literally was an extraterrestrial being of a different species, thought of a Terran empress as an alien. And just looking at Aleskynn and hearing her speak solidified the fact that the nobles were no smarter than anyone else on the planet. There was no way Aleskynn had more scientific aptitude than an average Labora.

“I imagine if they were observing us from afar, though, that it would be easy for them to pick up some misconceptions rather than pure fact,” Acidalia continued thoughtfully. “Many a royal family has tried to convince their subjects that the noblemen were something more than human, and to an extent, the nobles believed it themselves. That’s how all of those cases of people marrying their siblings happened—people wanted to keep divinity in the family, rather than reproduce in a normal and healthy way.”

Athena made a face. “Yay, incest. As if this conversation couldn’t get any weirder.”

“You’d be surprised how many people proclaimed themselves genetically superior even though their parents were first cousins,” Acidalia said. “Some of my ancestors among them, no doubt. My point is that the presumed divinity of the upper class has historically been an extremely effective propaganda tool. And in a society where nobody understands the very essentials of science or logic or rationalism, propaganda is even easier to believe. Gods and magic don’t sound any stranger than quantum physics and cell biology to someone who doesn’t know anything about any of those topics.”

“So you’re saying that she just picked up on random propaganda and is assuming that all of it’s true?” Carina asked. “And hoping you’d just show up and fix her failing society? That’s… kind of a bold assumption.”

“Well, that’s the problem when your propaganda makes promises you can’t keep. My dominion is in politics, and all rumors of alien ancestry aside, I’m just a human. Even an Imperatrix must bow to the laws of spacetime. But still…” A thoughtful expression crossed Acidalia’s features. “Propaganda may still prove useful yet.”

“Are we seriously going to act like all of this bullshit is true?” Athena demanded. “Oh my god, we’re actually going to do that. Wow.”

“No. That would be unbelievable,” Acidalia replied. “You can’t just make claims like that. What you can do is allude to myths and stories, imply things you can’t outright say, and act like you’re telling the truth when you’re not confirming anything.”

“So you’re going to act like it’s true but not say that it’s true,” Athena said. “Hmmm. I like it.”

Carina wrinkled her nose. “Seems a little dishonest.”

“It is dishonest, but I don’t need them believing my mother is some type of goddess if they don’t believe the same thing is true about me,” Acidalia said, shrugging like it couldn’t be helped. “This is war. Any advantage I can have, I will take. To do anything else would be foolish.”

“I guess,” Carina agreed. I guess. What more could she say? It made her uncomfortable, but politics were politics. Andromeda’s words came back to her: all is fair in love and war.