I've been so flooded with work, school and commission-related alike, that I haven't been able to pay much attention to my stories. However, I am graduating at the end of August and hope to get back in gear in some fashion after that.
As some of you may know, Skyler has dominated my creative energies, but the little seedling of a story called Luminaire, although little touched upon, will always occupy a place in my heart.
Today I wrote a synopsis. It was basically a personal exercise to gather ideas and congeal the atmosphere of the story. Okay, it's not technically a synopsis as it's reasonably long, but oh well.
So umm...here's what I wrote, if anyone's interested. As I said, it's not a presentable story but rather an exposition on its background and concepts.
Luminaire
The underlying theme of the story is the process of entropy, embodied in two discrete ways, both equal in their purported inevitability: the net tendency towards disorder of all meaningful systems culminating in "heat death", and the net tendency of consciousness towards impassivity, creative sterility, and nihilism, culminating in oblivion.
At one point, unfathomably deep in the past, the universe in its totality was a single conscious self-sustaining entity, known as the Monad or the "First Light", but over a series of countless catastrophic universal oscillations -- deaths and rebirths -- it has essentially forgotten what it was. Consequently, the summation of its knowledge of the Beyond (the metaverse, particularly its dynamics and role in the creation of the local universe) was lost, and the universe had at last become fully sequestered and insular in every regard. The net entropy of the universe was left to continue rising unabated, even across its oscillations, each of which could offer only temporary respite in its forgetive fires. The First Light gradually cooled and matter was beginning to regularly dominate over radiation. As a result, division was becoming naturally favoured over holistic solidarity.
Much like the stars were the only relics of the conflagration of the universe in its nascent phases, the children borne of the stars served as the only relics of the transcendent consciousness of the First Light. These stellar children were known as light-beings, conceived and then incubated in the cores of the stars until they gather enough energy to "hatch". Throughout their lives -- which seemingly could only end in some fashion when the cosmos itself dies -- they would absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum and analyse the information each photon carried while solicitious of every detail (because they absorbed energy continuously, the older light-beings of the first-generation stars were perforce more powerful than the younger star-offspring because they had considerably more absorption time and the conditions in which had appeared were far more energetic). Through their collective efforts they were the all-seers, conscious observers whose existence was necessary to collapse the quantum wavefunction of the universe. They were also attuned with the Aether, the ubiquitous fabric frothing with quantum fluctuations, which they were able to use, to some extent, to warp spacetime and make slight alterations to the fundamental laws and forces, although such usage had a great toll on their energy content. For many oscillations they sought to rediscover the essence of the First Light, as if they were all driven by a mutual, binding entelechy. While these light-beings existed as individual entities during the majority of the universe's lifespan, they would once again unite as the universe condensed unto itself to share the wealth of knowledge they had gleaned. But each time they found that they were missing something crucial to the equation.
The story is set in one particular life of the universe, during which something very peculiar happened. It appeared that in this cycle, the initial conditions had been fortuitously fine-tuned, after several adjustments to the Aether, to support biogenesis: the development of organic life on small, once insignificant conglomerates of matter called planets and moons. Some of these biomorphs evolved a reasonable level of intelligence, and their civilisations rapidly expanded outward into interstellar space. The light-beings at first were blissfully unaware of their existence, in large part due to their aethereal chauvinism: they believed that matter was crude in its frigidity and incapable of ever attaining the complexity of consciousness by its own means. However, a momentous event occurred: these paltry organic civilisations had managed to construct fusion reactors, emulating the engines behind the stars themselves. This feat "awakened" the light-beings from their reclusion and they finally emerged from their abodes within the cores of stars. Some, however, remained in their parent-stars and communicated with their kin through subtleties in the sunspot cycle.
From the sidelines, the light-beings observed with curiosity as the various organic civilisations encountered one another in their expeditions across the galaxy, forging great alliances and super-alliances which in turn monitored and bolstered the lesser planet-bound civilisations. They enjoyed peace and technological prosperity; indeed, conflict of any kind sprouted with marked rarity, having been far more rampant a problem when it was restricted to internecine feuds within their respective home-planets in epochs past. Some light-beings, going against the counsel of others, presented themselves to these alliances, as they believed more knowledge could only be procured through contact and interactivity rather than strict observation. The introduction took thousands of years' worth of conditioning for both parties as a result of the enormous perceptual, intellectual, and cultural gaps between aethereal and organic life, but the invention of the prisms -- advanced exoskeletal structures able to encase the energy-signatures of the light-beings -- aided relations significantly as it allowed the light-beings to interact far more intuitively and delicately with matter. However, despite their efforts having been in earnest, the purely aethereal light-beings repudiated the prismatic light-beings, the former of whom posited that the containment and corporeality of the prisms would interfere with their sensitive hydrostatic equilibrium between their outward temperature gradient and their inward hyperdimensional compactification forces, and, more importantly, becloud their communion with the First Light. For the first time ever, the dynasty of the light-beings suffered a schism between the traditionalists borne of the second-generation stars and the reformists borne of the younger, metal-rich stars (the first-generations had no sentiment of attachment to remain in the galaxy since they were borne before proper galactic formation had taken place, and so had long since departed, presumably to "chase after the quasars").
The puristic light-beings made threats that they would prevent reunification with the prismatic ones upon universal recollapse by manipulating the Aether in order to perpetuate cosmic expansion. This led to a fierce hostility (albeit one devoid of casualties, as light-beings were, after all, presumably immortal) between the two groups, resulting in heavy mass ejections of several stars and a number of prismatic light-beings being imprisoned within the orbits of neutron stars. The younger light-beings were overpowered, and an armistice was reached when they ceded their prisms and agreed to no longer meddle in the affairs of organic biomorphs. However, a select group of particularly potent young light-beings refused to part with their material chrysalides. These few possessed a stronger bond with the Aether than others of their generation thanks to their upbringing: they were all borne from main-sequence stars in binary systems and were whisked into the accretion disks of their older white dwarf companions, with whom they had merged prematurely under the duress of gravity. These anomalous light-beings were exiled from the galaxy for their recalcitrance, left only to find shelter and nourishment in the peripheral open clusters boiling with incipient stars.
But the organic civilisations felt bereaved in the absence of the light-beings, the great purveyors of enlightenment. Their technological progression had at last reached its upper limit and was feeling the constraints of physical possibility. Even their method of faster-than-light travel, the infrastructure of the slipstream conduits, was severely limiting and occasionally unstable. As their civilisations distended, their galaxy shrunk in comparison with overpopulation. Though for epochs they enjoyed bounteous mass-energy resources (the Age of Foison), they could not help but feel anchored to a single locality while the other galaxies retreated from them at an accelerating rate. They were beginning to feel despair. The weight of entropy and its implications for their future bore down on them. And they believed the light-beings embodied their only hope. So they resolved to capture one.
A galaxy-wide initiative led a mission to one of the outlying open clusters, where they encased a star in an opaque sphere immediately after it was formed, blocking it from communication with other stars. The sphere over time divested the star of its mass, and rattled the newborn light-being out. As soon as it surfaced, it was immured within a prism and kept in a magnetic suspension chamber where the information it stored could be pried out of it piecemeal. They named this particular light-being "Aster". But Aster was more cunning than they thought, for it discovered that the star-shell sphere re-emitted its light in infrared and it could therefore communicate to the other stars through that wavelength. Its signal of distress was largely ignored as the other light-beings had vowed never again to interfere no matter what the circumstances. However, the small band of prismatic light-beings who had been ostracised to the open clusters came to Aster's rescue.
They ripped the star-shell apart and retrieved Aster, but they were indiscreet in their operation. An armada of spacecraft confronted them, but were almost entirely eliminated with relative ease until a parley was opened. The alliance of civilisations warned that with the energy they harvested from Aster, they could have a point in spacetime undergo a phase transition into a lower energy state, a process known as vacuum decay, which would spread out omnidirectionally at light-speed until the entire universe was devoured. "Death may be our shared enemy," they told them, "but we are far more acquainted with it than your kind is." The prismatic light-beings feared this could mean that the universe's cyclical nature would end abruptly before they were able to return to the First Light, and so they submitted and served as the alliance's primary energy source for their attempts at establishing the first-ever intergalactic slipstream conduit. However, as its last action before yielding, the leader of the band of light-beings flared brightly and allowed Aster to escape by riding on its light-waves. This crafty light-being came to be named "Stellaris".
As their mass-energy demands increased, the alliance continued capturing more light-beings. Each one captured bought them more time with which they could tackle the ever-lingering entropy problem. For many ages Stellaris waited patiently for Aster to return, perhaps with reinforcement and a widespread concerted effort, to free them from their magnetic prisons.
But unfortunately, Aster was young and naive, having been isolated within a star-shell sphere ever since its parent-star first kindled. It failed to take time dilation into account as it whipped around the galaxy at near light-speed, and in doing so had temporally disconnected itself from the others.
Eventually Stellaris conceived a plan, a last recourse which it was now willing to take. It used its prism to red-shift its energy-signature, and drastically cooled until its temperature gradient was nearly as low as that of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Stellaris' captors thought that its energy had been completely drained and released it from its containment. In this cooled, darkened state, Stellaris was extremely susceptible and risked losing its connection with the Aether forever; however, it maintained the state very circumspectly, absorbing and expending very frugally the large influx of cosmic rays from the surrounding open cluster. The alliance kept Stellaris' "corpse" under the tightest supervision possible at all times, and transported it via the slipstream conduits to the galactic hub for further examination.
During Stellaris' strange lightless state, observing its new experience meticulously, it came to a stunning realisation: radiation energy and the light-beings themselves posed as the main contributor to the dilution and decadence of the universe. When a tribunal decided to jettison Stellaris straight into the black hole at the galactic core, Stellaris was almost unwilling to rebel against its fate in any way, as it had been overwhelmed by grief. But as it approached the event horizon, it too became temporally disconnected and with its keen vision spotted the young Aster unwittingly streaming away into the distant future as it circumnavigated the outskirts of the galaxy. Witnessing this imbued it with hope, and it blazed brightly once more to infiltrate the alliance. Having accumulated an enormous amount of energy from the black hole's accretion disk, it charged the central station of the slipstream conduit network, and diffused a beam of light through the slipstream conduits that led towards the open clusters, destroying the star-shell spheres and releasing its light-being comrades. It then signalled for them to converge upon the galactic hub.
The alliance's armada once again made threats to initiate vacuum decay, but this time Stellaris was within close enough proximity to detect the energy they had derived from Aster long ago and thereby ascertain the device's location. It streamed there, destroyed the defensive forces, and examined the machine. The other prismatic light-beings assembled there in accordance with Stellaris' request: at this point they numbered in the billions. Stellaris told them that the alliance had successfully laid foundation to a hyperspatial route to other galaxies and had already launched probes there, so it would have to send a signal out to warn the other, extragalactic light-beings of their arrival and their parasitism. The light-beings' assembly agreed with the exigency of the situation, but mentioned that such an endeavour would cost more energy than was available to them, as it would require tremendous governance of the Aether. Stellaris said that it had discovered that one can essentially "borrow" immense amounts of energy from the Aether and blatantly violate the conservation of energy by never needing to pay it back. They were sceptical at first, but Stellaris assured them that such was the very means with which the First Light created the universe. This swayed them, and they borrowed the energy. Each of them blazed with a light tantamount to that of millions of stars, and Stellaris wallowed in it. But it had tricked them.
Stellaris used this surplus of energy to engage the vacuum decay device, and then to manipulate the Aether so that the true vacuum bubbles nucleated in specific localities, but that their emergence would be infinitesimally transient rather than permanent, as the domain walls of its bubbles would be forcibly dissolved before they could spread outward. These localities were the cores of all the stars in the galaxy, allowing just enough time for the metastability event of vacuum decay to disrupt their hydrostatic equilibrium long before their lifespans would normally allow. Billions of stars erupted in supernovae simultaneously, while others cindered. Using this cataclysmic chain-explosion as a launch-light, Stellaris streamed straight out of the galactic hub and debouched into intergalactic space.
-----------------------------------------------
And this is where the story of "Luminaire" begins. Everything above was merely the background. It has been ten trillion years since creation. The Stelliferous Era, in which the stars thrived, had abruptly come to an end many ages ago as an aftermath of the Disaster, ushering in an early Degenerate Era. Darkness has enshrouded all of space.
What was once a great alliance had long ago splintered into small, almost entirely isolated colonies composed of vagabonding spacecraft. They were all subservient to the Sciarchy and were charged with scouring the graveyard of the galaxy for any remnants of mass-energy.
The Sciarchy was a galaxy-spanning dominion whose practices were akin to a hydraulic empire. Calling it an "empire", however, would be somewhat of a misnomer as there was no central authority figure or polity, as the demise of the slipstream conduit infrastructure meant that hierarchical communication over vast distances was impractical. The staying power of the Sciarchy was predicated on the species that enforced the system: the dark-beings. They were all monolithically like-minded and mechanistic and therefore required no deliberative body. As such, the Sciarchy was essentially a titular conglomerate of autonomous sectors. Their rule was not fiercely draconian, but rather characterised by coldness and ambivalence.
One scourer-class craft suffered a devastating ambiplasmatic explosion due to a disturbance in its antimatter containment field, shining as a beacon that stood out from the pervasive blackness and lured Aster, who had finally learned to disengage from its runaway streaming. The crew of this particular scourer were unknowingly about to experience a creature who would change their lives and illuminate the bleakness of endless routine and drudgery. But there were two problems:
1. Aster, despite being prismatic, had no contact with organic or cybernetic biomorphs, and thus does not recognise matter as sentient. Instead, as it arrives in the spacecraft, it heads directly to a chamber that stores gigantic furnace-like devices called the "luminaire hearths", which through very complex machinery manufactured faint emissions of light. Electromagnetic radiation of low energies could no longer be easily produced due to Stellaris' aberrations in the Aether long ago. Aster believed that the luminaire hearths posed its only company in an otherwise lonely, starless existence.
2. The ambiplasmatic explosion was easily detectable by the Sciarchy, and violated one of their most rudimentary laws: Light, even the slightest scintilla of it, was forbidden.
As some of you may know, Skyler has dominated my creative energies, but the little seedling of a story called Luminaire, although little touched upon, will always occupy a place in my heart.
Today I wrote a synopsis. It was basically a personal exercise to gather ideas and congeal the atmosphere of the story. Okay, it's not technically a synopsis as it's reasonably long, but oh well.
So umm...here's what I wrote, if anyone's interested. As I said, it's not a presentable story but rather an exposition on its background and concepts.
Luminaire
The underlying theme of the story is the process of entropy, embodied in two discrete ways, both equal in their purported inevitability: the net tendency towards disorder of all meaningful systems culminating in "heat death", and the net tendency of consciousness towards impassivity, creative sterility, and nihilism, culminating in oblivion.
At one point, unfathomably deep in the past, the universe in its totality was a single conscious self-sustaining entity, known as the Monad or the "First Light", but over a series of countless catastrophic universal oscillations -- deaths and rebirths -- it has essentially forgotten what it was. Consequently, the summation of its knowledge of the Beyond (the metaverse, particularly its dynamics and role in the creation of the local universe) was lost, and the universe had at last become fully sequestered and insular in every regard. The net entropy of the universe was left to continue rising unabated, even across its oscillations, each of which could offer only temporary respite in its forgetive fires. The First Light gradually cooled and matter was beginning to regularly dominate over radiation. As a result, division was becoming naturally favoured over holistic solidarity.
Much like the stars were the only relics of the conflagration of the universe in its nascent phases, the children borne of the stars served as the only relics of the transcendent consciousness of the First Light. These stellar children were known as light-beings, conceived and then incubated in the cores of the stars until they gather enough energy to "hatch". Throughout their lives -- which seemingly could only end in some fashion when the cosmos itself dies -- they would absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum and analyse the information each photon carried while solicitious of every detail (because they absorbed energy continuously, the older light-beings of the first-generation stars were perforce more powerful than the younger star-offspring because they had considerably more absorption time and the conditions in which had appeared were far more energetic). Through their collective efforts they were the all-seers, conscious observers whose existence was necessary to collapse the quantum wavefunction of the universe. They were also attuned with the Aether, the ubiquitous fabric frothing with quantum fluctuations, which they were able to use, to some extent, to warp spacetime and make slight alterations to the fundamental laws and forces, although such usage had a great toll on their energy content. For many oscillations they sought to rediscover the essence of the First Light, as if they were all driven by a mutual, binding entelechy. While these light-beings existed as individual entities during the majority of the universe's lifespan, they would once again unite as the universe condensed unto itself to share the wealth of knowledge they had gleaned. But each time they found that they were missing something crucial to the equation.
The story is set in one particular life of the universe, during which something very peculiar happened. It appeared that in this cycle, the initial conditions had been fortuitously fine-tuned, after several adjustments to the Aether, to support biogenesis: the development of organic life on small, once insignificant conglomerates of matter called planets and moons. Some of these biomorphs evolved a reasonable level of intelligence, and their civilisations rapidly expanded outward into interstellar space. The light-beings at first were blissfully unaware of their existence, in large part due to their aethereal chauvinism: they believed that matter was crude in its frigidity and incapable of ever attaining the complexity of consciousness by its own means. However, a momentous event occurred: these paltry organic civilisations had managed to construct fusion reactors, emulating the engines behind the stars themselves. This feat "awakened" the light-beings from their reclusion and they finally emerged from their abodes within the cores of stars. Some, however, remained in their parent-stars and communicated with their kin through subtleties in the sunspot cycle.
From the sidelines, the light-beings observed with curiosity as the various organic civilisations encountered one another in their expeditions across the galaxy, forging great alliances and super-alliances which in turn monitored and bolstered the lesser planet-bound civilisations. They enjoyed peace and technological prosperity; indeed, conflict of any kind sprouted with marked rarity, having been far more rampant a problem when it was restricted to internecine feuds within their respective home-planets in epochs past. Some light-beings, going against the counsel of others, presented themselves to these alliances, as they believed more knowledge could only be procured through contact and interactivity rather than strict observation. The introduction took thousands of years' worth of conditioning for both parties as a result of the enormous perceptual, intellectual, and cultural gaps between aethereal and organic life, but the invention of the prisms -- advanced exoskeletal structures able to encase the energy-signatures of the light-beings -- aided relations significantly as it allowed the light-beings to interact far more intuitively and delicately with matter. However, despite their efforts having been in earnest, the purely aethereal light-beings repudiated the prismatic light-beings, the former of whom posited that the containment and corporeality of the prisms would interfere with their sensitive hydrostatic equilibrium between their outward temperature gradient and their inward hyperdimensional compactification forces, and, more importantly, becloud their communion with the First Light. For the first time ever, the dynasty of the light-beings suffered a schism between the traditionalists borne of the second-generation stars and the reformists borne of the younger, metal-rich stars (the first-generations had no sentiment of attachment to remain in the galaxy since they were borne before proper galactic formation had taken place, and so had long since departed, presumably to "chase after the quasars").
The puristic light-beings made threats that they would prevent reunification with the prismatic ones upon universal recollapse by manipulating the Aether in order to perpetuate cosmic expansion. This led to a fierce hostility (albeit one devoid of casualties, as light-beings were, after all, presumably immortal) between the two groups, resulting in heavy mass ejections of several stars and a number of prismatic light-beings being imprisoned within the orbits of neutron stars. The younger light-beings were overpowered, and an armistice was reached when they ceded their prisms and agreed to no longer meddle in the affairs of organic biomorphs. However, a select group of particularly potent young light-beings refused to part with their material chrysalides. These few possessed a stronger bond with the Aether than others of their generation thanks to their upbringing: they were all borne from main-sequence stars in binary systems and were whisked into the accretion disks of their older white dwarf companions, with whom they had merged prematurely under the duress of gravity. These anomalous light-beings were exiled from the galaxy for their recalcitrance, left only to find shelter and nourishment in the peripheral open clusters boiling with incipient stars.
But the organic civilisations felt bereaved in the absence of the light-beings, the great purveyors of enlightenment. Their technological progression had at last reached its upper limit and was feeling the constraints of physical possibility. Even their method of faster-than-light travel, the infrastructure of the slipstream conduits, was severely limiting and occasionally unstable. As their civilisations distended, their galaxy shrunk in comparison with overpopulation. Though for epochs they enjoyed bounteous mass-energy resources (the Age of Foison), they could not help but feel anchored to a single locality while the other galaxies retreated from them at an accelerating rate. They were beginning to feel despair. The weight of entropy and its implications for their future bore down on them. And they believed the light-beings embodied their only hope. So they resolved to capture one.
A galaxy-wide initiative led a mission to one of the outlying open clusters, where they encased a star in an opaque sphere immediately after it was formed, blocking it from communication with other stars. The sphere over time divested the star of its mass, and rattled the newborn light-being out. As soon as it surfaced, it was immured within a prism and kept in a magnetic suspension chamber where the information it stored could be pried out of it piecemeal. They named this particular light-being "Aster". But Aster was more cunning than they thought, for it discovered that the star-shell sphere re-emitted its light in infrared and it could therefore communicate to the other stars through that wavelength. Its signal of distress was largely ignored as the other light-beings had vowed never again to interfere no matter what the circumstances. However, the small band of prismatic light-beings who had been ostracised to the open clusters came to Aster's rescue.
They ripped the star-shell apart and retrieved Aster, but they were indiscreet in their operation. An armada of spacecraft confronted them, but were almost entirely eliminated with relative ease until a parley was opened. The alliance of civilisations warned that with the energy they harvested from Aster, they could have a point in spacetime undergo a phase transition into a lower energy state, a process known as vacuum decay, which would spread out omnidirectionally at light-speed until the entire universe was devoured. "Death may be our shared enemy," they told them, "but we are far more acquainted with it than your kind is." The prismatic light-beings feared this could mean that the universe's cyclical nature would end abruptly before they were able to return to the First Light, and so they submitted and served as the alliance's primary energy source for their attempts at establishing the first-ever intergalactic slipstream conduit. However, as its last action before yielding, the leader of the band of light-beings flared brightly and allowed Aster to escape by riding on its light-waves. This crafty light-being came to be named "Stellaris".
As their mass-energy demands increased, the alliance continued capturing more light-beings. Each one captured bought them more time with which they could tackle the ever-lingering entropy problem. For many ages Stellaris waited patiently for Aster to return, perhaps with reinforcement and a widespread concerted effort, to free them from their magnetic prisons.
But unfortunately, Aster was young and naive, having been isolated within a star-shell sphere ever since its parent-star first kindled. It failed to take time dilation into account as it whipped around the galaxy at near light-speed, and in doing so had temporally disconnected itself from the others.
Eventually Stellaris conceived a plan, a last recourse which it was now willing to take. It used its prism to red-shift its energy-signature, and drastically cooled until its temperature gradient was nearly as low as that of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Stellaris' captors thought that its energy had been completely drained and released it from its containment. In this cooled, darkened state, Stellaris was extremely susceptible and risked losing its connection with the Aether forever; however, it maintained the state very circumspectly, absorbing and expending very frugally the large influx of cosmic rays from the surrounding open cluster. The alliance kept Stellaris' "corpse" under the tightest supervision possible at all times, and transported it via the slipstream conduits to the galactic hub for further examination.
During Stellaris' strange lightless state, observing its new experience meticulously, it came to a stunning realisation: radiation energy and the light-beings themselves posed as the main contributor to the dilution and decadence of the universe. When a tribunal decided to jettison Stellaris straight into the black hole at the galactic core, Stellaris was almost unwilling to rebel against its fate in any way, as it had been overwhelmed by grief. But as it approached the event horizon, it too became temporally disconnected and with its keen vision spotted the young Aster unwittingly streaming away into the distant future as it circumnavigated the outskirts of the galaxy. Witnessing this imbued it with hope, and it blazed brightly once more to infiltrate the alliance. Having accumulated an enormous amount of energy from the black hole's accretion disk, it charged the central station of the slipstream conduit network, and diffused a beam of light through the slipstream conduits that led towards the open clusters, destroying the star-shell spheres and releasing its light-being comrades. It then signalled for them to converge upon the galactic hub.
The alliance's armada once again made threats to initiate vacuum decay, but this time Stellaris was within close enough proximity to detect the energy they had derived from Aster long ago and thereby ascertain the device's location. It streamed there, destroyed the defensive forces, and examined the machine. The other prismatic light-beings assembled there in accordance with Stellaris' request: at this point they numbered in the billions. Stellaris told them that the alliance had successfully laid foundation to a hyperspatial route to other galaxies and had already launched probes there, so it would have to send a signal out to warn the other, extragalactic light-beings of their arrival and their parasitism. The light-beings' assembly agreed with the exigency of the situation, but mentioned that such an endeavour would cost more energy than was available to them, as it would require tremendous governance of the Aether. Stellaris said that it had discovered that one can essentially "borrow" immense amounts of energy from the Aether and blatantly violate the conservation of energy by never needing to pay it back. They were sceptical at first, but Stellaris assured them that such was the very means with which the First Light created the universe. This swayed them, and they borrowed the energy. Each of them blazed with a light tantamount to that of millions of stars, and Stellaris wallowed in it. But it had tricked them.
Stellaris used this surplus of energy to engage the vacuum decay device, and then to manipulate the Aether so that the true vacuum bubbles nucleated in specific localities, but that their emergence would be infinitesimally transient rather than permanent, as the domain walls of its bubbles would be forcibly dissolved before they could spread outward. These localities were the cores of all the stars in the galaxy, allowing just enough time for the metastability event of vacuum decay to disrupt their hydrostatic equilibrium long before their lifespans would normally allow. Billions of stars erupted in supernovae simultaneously, while others cindered. Using this cataclysmic chain-explosion as a launch-light, Stellaris streamed straight out of the galactic hub and debouched into intergalactic space.
-----------------------------------------------
And this is where the story of "Luminaire" begins. Everything above was merely the background. It has been ten trillion years since creation. The Stelliferous Era, in which the stars thrived, had abruptly come to an end many ages ago as an aftermath of the Disaster, ushering in an early Degenerate Era. Darkness has enshrouded all of space.
What was once a great alliance had long ago splintered into small, almost entirely isolated colonies composed of vagabonding spacecraft. They were all subservient to the Sciarchy and were charged with scouring the graveyard of the galaxy for any remnants of mass-energy.
The Sciarchy was a galaxy-spanning dominion whose practices were akin to a hydraulic empire. Calling it an "empire", however, would be somewhat of a misnomer as there was no central authority figure or polity, as the demise of the slipstream conduit infrastructure meant that hierarchical communication over vast distances was impractical. The staying power of the Sciarchy was predicated on the species that enforced the system: the dark-beings. They were all monolithically like-minded and mechanistic and therefore required no deliberative body. As such, the Sciarchy was essentially a titular conglomerate of autonomous sectors. Their rule was not fiercely draconian, but rather characterised by coldness and ambivalence.
One scourer-class craft suffered a devastating ambiplasmatic explosion due to a disturbance in its antimatter containment field, shining as a beacon that stood out from the pervasive blackness and lured Aster, who had finally learned to disengage from its runaway streaming. The crew of this particular scourer were unknowingly about to experience a creature who would change their lives and illuminate the bleakness of endless routine and drudgery. But there were two problems:
1. Aster, despite being prismatic, had no contact with organic or cybernetic biomorphs, and thus does not recognise matter as sentient. Instead, as it arrives in the spacecraft, it heads directly to a chamber that stores gigantic furnace-like devices called the "luminaire hearths", which through very complex machinery manufactured faint emissions of light. Electromagnetic radiation of low energies could no longer be easily produced due to Stellaris' aberrations in the Aether long ago. Aster believed that the luminaire hearths posed its only company in an otherwise lonely, starless existence.
2. The ambiplasmatic explosion was easily detectable by the Sciarchy, and violated one of their most rudimentary laws: Light, even the slightest scintilla of it, was forbidden.
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