Wandering the Sprawl (Story)
It was a silent evening in the sprawling cityscapes.
A human of unknown origin stood as a mote of dust, a dead pixel in the endless sterility of the phantom metropole, a monument to a society he never was a part of. The human had never truly processed to him what exactly the scope of cosmic creation could be. Always it was in simplifications, “galaxies are easy to colonize on astronomical timescales”.
Which meant in effect, FTL. And FTL means the galaxy is easily colonized, pump out many warp ships, colonize every star within a mere few thousand years.
He felt that assuring. After all, the laws of physics had been proven wrong by the Spinoza Constant. Relativity was said to have been a subjective thing, but there were loopholes. It turned out there was also another special frame which allowed for warp travel. It existed in defiance of everything which was meant to be logical. Resolving the special frame paradox has never been achieved. By humanity.
One problem. The Sprawl existed.
The Sprawl’s existence was absolute in its invalidation of our sense of exceptionalism. The Sprawl should not exist. Humans should not exist. Yet both somehow exist. There was eons of time before us both. The Sprawl with a cosmic eyeblink already had advanced to a galactic civilization. How did we exist? It left one bewildered.
And yet looking upon the writhing roadways, spires that stretch kilometers and empty arcades, balcony-like structures and bridgeways so close helped little in that sense. He had not known how long he had wandered the Sprawl or where he landed to begin with. The soft, alien humming of the occasional machines without any apparent means of propulsion toiling at whatever blemishes existed only made the realm feel more distant.
The machinery outlived whatever once lived here. Somehow he was not harmed by any ambient dangers in this forsaken environment. Even than, the human found himself always concerned that some corridor, some basement, some aqueduct or access to the lower layers may be filled with some incomprehensible horrors he had no defense against.
For that reason he kept to the open streets, of which were the safest just because nothing really was around beyond the serene machines doting about the blank architecture.
Machines which only appeared to exist as needed, evaporating into the mist once their functions were carried out. As they had in the millennia since anything truly lived here.
All of which only highlighted how this was but an upper layer of a world belonging to a civilization so winding and endless in its Escherian geology that it is known simply as the Sprawl. These endless cities had been built above many layers. And below, ever further down was countless more layers of activity produced across thousands upon thousands of years. Whatever ]alive may subside in those depths. The human never dared to check, as the surface already was a web work of impossible pathways with lead to impossible destinations. All once inhabited, once populated.
All now gone.
The estimates of how many beings that could have lived in these worlds would be of numbers impossible to give proper respect. The human knew that each number was an individual like himself. Most certainly not human, but living and with a complex life they had lived all the same. A being with agency, unlike the automatons who appear to be the sole inhabitants of the surface.
He decided to calculate how many people may have existed here. He would continue to wander aimlessly across the cityscapes as the calculating kept processing in his head. It was a number with countless factors. For the nature of the inhabitants known varied heavily. This wasn’t only one species. It was a cosmopolitan galactic civilization. As a result, any average would be rough at best. He assumed an average size larger than humans regardless, as the architecture seemingly had attuned to beings somewhat larger than humans in size. In the range of a bear? That didn’t seem right to him, knowing the scale of virtual minds and their ability to compress their space to such minute sizes. But the average range was meant to illustrate, not be truly precise. The scale of a bear worked well for that. As it means even if they were the size of a bear… it would still be a world where quadrillions lived.
There may well have been over a million inhabitants per cubic kilometer*. The whole world was already bigger than earth and with a volume that had artificial constructions going to the core. That isn’t even counting their known use of hyperspace realms, of which may have once allowed for even higher populations and means to offload their waste. The rough estimate was 2 trillion cubic kilometers of Sprawl for one planet. A planet considered middling scale settlement when the fallen galactic civilization strewn about the galaxy was at its zenith.
In aggregate, quadrillions of beings lived here once. The human can’t even make heads or tails of that. It is impossible to understand that number. It is impossible to get the scale of suffering that implies. It is impossible to see past that number. The mind simply blanks out, hides it. The amount of lives lost, the communities, cultures and harmonies that once roiled throughout this place.
The singing minds, the intricate and vast social structures. A realm beyond anything the human could get truly. Post scarcity fails to even understand the reality here. They built a world which made heaven look like hell. They were winning the game of existence in ways humans with their upstart society could only dream of. And then…
Silence.
…
…
…
…
The human fell to the floor in despair.
Crying.
— — -
*Over a million people per square km lived in the Kowloon walled city, of which didn’t have km tall buildings.
