God of Extinction

To whomever deciphers this message:

If you act at once, there may still be time to save your civilization. First, you must immediately erase all records of your homeworld from whatever means your vessel uses to store data, then destroy the storage media as well. You will never be able to go home. To do so would ensure your species’ destruction.

Please understand that this isn’t a threat. We found a similar message etched on the hull of another wrecked starship many light-years from here. That ship was orbiting the same rocky planet where you presumably came across our vessel. You are correct to understand that the planet has moved. It has also, almost certainly, scanned your ship by now.

All of those who come across this planet refer to it as “God.” The intelligence housed within is sophisticated, but ancient. It will take several orbits around the nearby pulsar for its higher cognitive functions to engage. Its weapons will already be active, but with luck it hasn’t interfaced with your computers yet. Once again, we urge you to purge any data that might identify your homeworld. We suggest ejecting your records toward the pulsar for good measure.

By now, you’re wondering why you should believe us. To understand what God is capable of, direct your sensors to the nearest binary system. Around the smaller sun, you’ll detect a planet whose atmosphere bears the carbon footprint of an industrial civilization, but when you look for microwave transmissions, you’ll find that the world has gone silent. 

Our ship was fleeing with God in pursuit when we picked up that planet’s radio signals. God did too; it stopped chasing us to alter its course and annihilate that planet’s life. That tragedy gave us the time we needed to lure God into this pulsar’s gravity well and trick it into going dormant. Doing so came at a very high price, one that you will have to pay as well.

God is compelled to destroy any sentient life it encounters before moving on to seek another target. Powerful radio sources such as pulsars limit its detection radius, and the gravitational eddies near superdense collapsars force it to divert much of its power to maintaining a quasi-stable orbit. It only does so, however, when it can no longer sense any prey. 

And so we had to die. After inscribing this message on our hull, we made orbit at the gravitational balance point between God and the pulsar, then took our own lives so that God wouldn’t destroy our ship and this record.

We do not know how God came to be, but we know the last species who tried to appease it were the Vreel. Their race inhabited gas giant worlds and used a network of decoys to direct God against their enemies, offering them as sacrifices. God eventually tracked the Vreel’s decoys to their source and obliterated all of their planets. Somewhere in the galaxy, there is now a swath of stars with no gas giant planets at all.

It was the Vreel who created the first version of this message. The next were the Shayda, who lived on the dark sides of tide-locked planets. Their explorers didn’t understand God’s nature until it was too late. Next came the K’ul-K’ul, an avian species who lived on mountaintops above their atmosphere’s depths. They too tried to deflect God with sacrifices, but by then it had learned to see through such tactics. After the K’ul-K’ul, God encountered the Zsizs, who tried to stop it by sheer force of arms. A handful of scattered monuments is all that remains of their empire.

The next species to meet God were the first to avoid leading it back to their home. All we know of them is that their captain’s name was Ѭ. He and his crew destroyed their own ship, leaving only an annotation in the records of the Zsizs. By destroying themselves, they caused God to go dormant until the next explorers came along.

Those explorers were the first we’re aware of who tried to lure God to its death. They let it chase them into a star going nova, and the scoring across half of God’s surface shows how close it came to the blast. Those explorers left behind a record of their attempt, but nothing about who they were as a species. That is now the rule for all of us who follow.

The next souls to meet God tried to drive it across a black hole’s event horizon. They nearly succeeded, and perhaps would have done so if the black hole had been much more massive. The following species made the same attempt, and they were able to measure the strength of God’s engines. Their data revealed that God can escape the pull of any object of fewer than 1.5 million stellar masses.

Thus began the crusade of which we are a part. We can’t defeat God, and we cannot destroy it, but with determination and guile, we can lure it toward the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, which we hope to make its final grave. We led it this far before our fuel ran out, and now you’ve become the next link in the chain. Once God is awake, you must let it hunt you as far as you can lead it down the path. When your resources are spent, leave a copy of this message, take your own lives, and let God go dormant.

We do not know anything about you, and we cannot reveal anything about ourselves. We do not know if your species has concepts such as “hope,” “honor,” or “love.” We do not know if you cherish your children, or what you wished to gain by exploring the stars. But whoever you are, and whatever you do, please trust that your sacrifice will not be in vain, and we wish you the very best of luck.

Fare well.

~

“God of Extinction” appeared in New Mythologies in Space, Flame Tree Myth & Fiction's limited edition newsletter that was distributed at WorldCon 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland. For more stories like this one, sign up to Flame Tree’s monthly fiction newsletter at FlameTreePress.com.

“God of Extinction” © 2024 Jared Millet