Star Empire

"Help... help... monsters - madmen! Madmen! It's those madmen!!! They are all the same... they are all the same -!! They... they go back..."

…

"Crazy... us?"

"Why……"

Deep inside, a strange feeling quickly spread, more desperate than the decay of a vacuum, colder and darker than the influx of the void.

The empire's battleships were attacked by other civilizations, and other civilizations that could cross into the void faced the various actions of the imperial fleet and called the empire... madman.

The meaning of everything the empire does has changed, and it has already changed. Unknowingly, what is the difference between the empire's current approach to other civilizations and the past when the corpses crazily destroyed itself? What role has the empire become now? !

In the red reality, over a long period of time, the remaining imperial beings and the massive war machines under their command may have mutated into something that they have never thought of, but they have never noticed it.

It wasn't until he was regarded as a lunatic by intelligent individuals from other civilizations, and his fleet and actions were frantically counterattacked because they damaged or even deprived other civilizations of their right to survive... that he truly realized the empire's stance towards other civilizations. It is no longer as "just" and "friendly" as I imagined.

Not to mention justice and friendship, the empire has set the goal of "fighting for living space" many times. While fighting for itself, the empire has certainly thought about using its spare efforts to fight for more civilizations. However, what the civilization is doing now has long deviated from the goal. Everything the current empire has done is just like the attitude and actions taken by the relics and remains of the former Σ civilization towards the empire itself.

Why is this happening? ? When did the problem start? What went wrong?

Faced with the sudden reversal of the status quo, reason is collapsing layer by layer. The remaining threads of thinking seem to have exploded with endless concentration and desire for survival. Every strand of calculation and processing power begins to spasm. They are calculating, thinking, and struggling crazily. with...

In the swirling storm of increasingly crazier thoughts, a few sparks quietly burst out from the friction of countless information, igniting a small fire—

The only reason that can be thought of now is that the hidden dangers that led to the current situation of the empire were quietly buried several centuries ago when the former beings of the empire were planning the framework and strategy. Whether this reason is correct or not, there is no chance to make any further arguments and deductions. But the reason for the sudden appearance of the sanity-annihilating storm that came without warning but with extremely ferocious force...could it seem a little too ridiculous?

The reason itself is very simple: in this regard, the empire has made too many assumptions and placed too many hopes and possibilities in its own imaginary environment.

The empire has never really tried to seriously establish stable and long-term diplomatic relations with other civilizations, nor has it really thought about how the ideas and principles it has established will be implemented in real life. . And the empire has never considered, if the reality does not match its imagination and expectations, how should it face it?

Did the Empire really join an environment with multiple lives and multiple intelligences?

No, in fact, such an environment has never been open to the Empire.

In an even longer time ago, when the history of the empire was just a part of the macro-historical line, when my ancestors were still pioneering on the planet... In the end, only the intelligent race of human beings was left on that planet. ! !

And for a long, long time, there was no other intelligent life among the vast stars! Even if many planets considered habitable have entered the vision of our ancestors one after another...the life existing on those planets...is not intelligent at all!

The universe has been discovered. In addition to the basic macroscopic laws, in high dimensions, or at the beginning of the birth of the world, a part of the fluctuations that may not be the same have been integrated with the world itself.

In addition to the basic physical rules, uneven and different existences can exist. This once made the ancestors come up with some of their own plans and actual preparations, but what greeted the ancestors was the use of the Murdori Zerg that was enough to A sea of ​​insects that can resist the annihilation of large amounts of positive and antimatter, and can span the stars, as well as Theodal's endless memes, antimeme suppression and pollution...

By the time the ancestors had gone through many battles and struggles, and finally ensured that their civilization was no longer a threat in the universe... there were no traces of races that were not of the same origin as their own.

And whether the federation is loose or tight...they all know each other's ins and outs. The history is too clear, and the changes in divisions, mergers and unions...have been established.

The star civilization that was expelled from the world of order, the brand-new star empire, never thought that it was ready to contact and communicate with other intelligent civilizations - there were too many possible conflicts and wars, inability to protect, lack of preparation, etc. factors prompted the Empire to take the lead in launching the Observer Project, using a series of observation equipment hidden in deep space to carefully spy on the survival of life in the original order...

During this period, the empire's actions were closest to its own ideals. This plan may succeed. Even if this plan does not achieve the expected goal, it can provide a lot of valuable experience - however, Σ's invasions again and again and destruction halted the Empire's progress in this direction.

Judging from the current situation, when the death wave disaster triggered by Σ swept through the void, the destruction caused by this terrible storm of destruction did not reach the "complete" level. After the highest peak of the disaster gradually subsides... there are tangible wastelands and dangerous enemies in the void, as well as hidden and difficult-to-detect pollution from the death tide.

Their influence is certainly not just rooted within the world's walls.

Under such a poisoned environment and atmosphere, order life is not suitable to survive in a polluted world of order. The content that the death wave can destroy must not be limited to the various contents inside the world barrier. Perhaps how high the order is, death How high can the tide's corruption rise...

If you can't even protect yourself, how can you protect civilization? If all creations can't usher in the death they should have, then what's the point of creation... Such thoughts are sweeping across the entire empire. In the cold empire network, information The format of communication is almost completely unified by the evolutionary matrix and field life... Dead obsession has created red reality and destroyed countless opportunities.

And the last, the weakest possible buffer, was annihilated because of the ignored idealism cycle.

However... why, opportunities come again and again, no, countless opportunities pass through the countless time of the empire's rise and fall, but the empire has all kinds of reasons, or excuses for itself " "Excuse" gave up the opportunity and attempt to communicate with conventional civilizations. All plans and predictions were only superficial. A little deepening seemed to cause endless deep pain, making the empire no longer dare to take a step forward...

Now, perhaps we can know what is hindering the empire's exploration and what is invisibly constraining the empire...

For a long time, Star Ming Civilization has never had any reference. The empire has forcibly emerged from the planet behind closed doors. Driven by countless external factors that either hindered or promoted, Star Ming Civilization has reached this stage.

What is unimaginable and unpredictable is that after encountering countless difficulties and even near-annihilation wars and disasters... the empire now, no, I don't know when, all the wisdom in the heart seems to have been suppressed. Tone:

No matter how tragic, no matter how horrific, no matter how cruel the reality is for the empire, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, everything doesn't matter...

No matter how difficult the conditions are, how bad the environment is, there is no way, indeed there is no way. The same is true for those civilizations that have been dusted in history. Everything around them, everything from ancient times to the present, may not allow the empire to "get on the right track." , but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, as long as you put in more effort, as long as you study more seriously, make adequate preparations, and do it well enough, sooner or later, one day, there will be friends who can talk to you as an equal and give you reference materials. There will always be various civilizations appearing, and maybe there will be a big family of very big civilizations, and I can become one of them. No matter what the structure is, it will work. At least this is possible.

This hope that was once a distant goal gradually transformed with the spread of red reality into something that needed to be pursued persistently, and even further transformed into a noble pursuit in the ideal environment imagined by the empire.

I don’t know when it started. This idea that was once mixed with ideals has become an invisible idol. It cannot be tarnished or questioned. It hangs high in the sky, serving the empire in a way that is inexplicable to normal people. The soul and reason forcefully hold up the last line of defense

However, the empire's actions turned everything in the empire into a "madman" in the eyes of other civilizations.

This is negation, the most obvious negation, the most direct negation. No matter how much the empire itself anticipated or imitated the details and possibilities, it had never thought of it, or rather... it had never been taken seriously. The creatures inside and outside the empire, everything in the empire never thought that they would be denied like this, and the empire never thought that it would be denied. The empire has never realized that it has been wrong, and may have been on the wrong path for a long time... Or is it even wrong in itself? ?

All the souls of the empire, and even if there really is some kind of "imperial will" that has a substantial influence... these existences, I am afraid they always think of one thing - that is, even if the empire is dead now, even if it is about to withdraw, leaving all this behind Evolutionary matrix and field life, everything I do is right, and I just need to wait for the right group of people, or other creatures to confirm, to tell myself "What you did is okay, you can rest."

I was wrong. I have gone astray at some point, and those so-called ideals, so-called idols and goals have long since deteriorated. Along with these harsh roars, they have become something indescribable, and these I'm afraid it looks like the "real" thing. There is no doubt about it - what you ideally hoped for is definitely gone! ! there is none left! ! And, I’m afraid it’s gone forever! ! !

This is a cruel and cold denial of reality that is almost never thought of. It completely shatters the skeleton built by the last rationality and persistence in an instant.

"Wait, history - history!! This, why, why are you recalling it now?" A new round of fear exploded from the hearts of the souls, and they completely erupted from the countless layers of subconsciousness and bottom thinking that had completely collapsed. ,

Pain and fear continue to gather and spread. The pyramid of reason and calm begins to collapse. Endless negative emotions condensed in the "sky" of the empire, and these invisible things formed a storm that covered the sky and the sun in the invisible realm. Every drop of the pouring rain is deadly corrosive and toxic.

Countless forgotten details emerge from nowhere, the past and future lose their meaning, and memories and information clues of countless moments gather at this moment. This is a precursor to the free information body moving from open loop to closed loop, and towards death! !

"This, this - no, how is this possible? Just because of denial? Just because those levels are worse than the empire."

No, no, wait, that’s not the most worthy of fear and anxiety! !

Now, only the civilizations that can be seen by the empire and can make these claims and take these actions have been seen by the empire - what about the invisible ones, what about the invisible ones?

Some of them are in discrete worlds in the distant void, and there are also existences that occupy an insignificant part of the branches of the Σ world...

At this level, they still need to rise again after the military operations of the entire empire have gradually calmed down. The scanning system of the Void Narrative Radar recorded them. Only then did the empire see them and know what they were going to do and what they were thinking...

What about the ones you didn’t see? Pushing it a step further – how many years ago should something like this have happened? ? How long ago should the fantasy that my barren and needy heart insisted on be torn apart? When was the time when the beauty and ideals I thought were completely torn apart by my own actions? When should I have collapsed? ?

How many world branches have the empire created, how many worlds have been exiled, and how many world branches have been destroyed. When the world branches finally entered the stage of mass production, they used the national ignition device and the world branch zenith... There are things in the void. How many existences were destroyed? !

Since when did the expectations and ideals of empire cease to exist? ! How long has the empire lived in its own imagination? If such denial would cause such a terrible and huge problem, how long ago should this problem have exploded? How long had the Empire been pretending that "nothing happened" against its will?

"Unable to count...unable to count...unable to..."

Everyone in the Empire established a goal, but the Empire stood on the opposite side of the goal in madness. The Empire was as dangerous as the wreckage of Σ. The Empire killed countless other lives. The Empire thought that it was orderly and just. The Empire was resisting for order and itself. The Empire When fulfilling goals and striving for living space, even if the means are violent, there is nothing we can do about it...

This was no longer the case long ago, when reality no longer supported the Empire's empty, outdated, and overestimating ideals.

…

"...Your Majesty?? No -" Faced with the sudden violent mutation and the scream that could tear apart the soul, IV realized in an instant that even if he annihilated his entire historical line, his own power would not be able to hit him. Get rid of this terrifying storm that comes from the entire ruling structure of the empire and from the tens of billions of years of imperial history.

Perhaps because of his ability, he did not suffer so much every moment during this period, and he persisted longer than other souls who had been soaked in the "red reality" for many years and tortured themselves for countless years. ——Maybe one second, maybe two seconds?

The soul's sanity collapsed.

Within the countless large and small evolutionary matrices spread across the endless world of the void, the corresponding thinking modules begin to transform accordingly - corrupt thoughts and collapsing intellectual collapse that have endless poisoning and destruction effects on intelligent souls, for these evolutionary matrices Among the countless ruthless and mechanical puppets, it may just be the order of the empire's high-level officials to replace the processing model.

"What is this? What?? Your Majesty, wait, don't-"

The puppets that make up the evolutionary matrix itself have no room for expansionary thinking other than being constrained by the network and obeying the orders of the empire. The structure of the evolutionary matrix can be formed by emergence, just like all collective existences. Likewise, they gathered together and connected countless mechanical and cold logical elements, which ultimately gave this huge combination the ability to "evolve"...

There are countless micro-elements inside these simple and solid logical matrices. For intelligent life, disasters that can completely destroy the soul are just new logical judgment modes for these micro-elements. For just one or two puppets, apart from being more ruthless and more lethal, the other changes are not obvious... they are doing those things normally.

But what about the evolutionary algorithms and evolvable parts in the evolutionary matrix, as well as the "group life" formed by the evolutionary matrix that may be ignored by the empire, and what about the field life?

There are many loopholes, many unexpected problems, many things that were thought of but wrongly thought about, many problems that were thought of correctly but not corrected in time... Now it seems that there may be no chance to correct them.

In front of his eyes, a red color like ancient blood flooded everything in his field of vision. It might be the embodiment of red reality, it might be blood, or it might be something else. Deep inside, all the negative emotions that have been brewing for billions of years in the underlying thinking threads and underlying subconsciousness pour out. They change the puppets in the evolutionary matrix and contaminate those possible collections of consciousness.

And this terrifying trend of thought that erupted from the center of the empire became more rapid as the number of infections became larger and larger. It swept across the entire empire and hundreds of millions of world branches. Countless group intelligences born due to self-emergence phenomena have fallen into a violent whirlpool due to changes in their constituent elements. Their thoughts were screaming loudly, and the murderous intent in their eyes polluted everything around them, polluted the field, and polluted all life in the field, dragging them into this vortex before they could react...

Civilizations have proven a long time ago that when one enters the realm of unified information, everything has power—ideas also have the power to directly affect reality, change reality, and even subvert reality.

…

All the bottom lines have been completely broken. The beautiful fantasy that once existed may also be seen as a kind of persistence, maintained with illusion and a will that almost deceives reality.

When this bottom line turns out to have been destroyed billions of years or more ago, and has been contrary to one's own expectations and actions from the very beginning...

Perseverance itself has lost all value.

Death did not come, but the circle of development was indeed closed.

The bottom line is broken, persistence loses value, and the "last" and "bottom" that the remaining wisdom clings to lose all meaning... If it falls again, where can it fall? When the ring is closed, the starting point and the end point coincide with each other, and what was once the extreme becomes the critical layer of transformation and fusion...

A chaotic group falling into darkness, where will it get stuck...

…

"We...we...were wrong-"

"Negative... negative - so..."

"No...——"

"Woo-buzz-"

…

"Ouch————!!"

The shrill and strange howl erupted, it lasted for an infinitely short time, and then it was fleeting, and then it seemed to last for an infinitely long time... It was as if nothing here could measure it, and it could only be allowed to bypass all references. Tie.

The howling stopped, and the silent scream was quickly swallowed up in the void.

No existence has ever screamed, and the scream filled with hatred has never existed.