SLIDE 6.
Three billion years
pass.
Two huge, glittering
clouds of sentience fall through each other, a magnificently
coordinated flypast of fleets of worlds meshing across the endless
void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, and millions of
massive, short-lived new stars ignite and detonate like
firecrackers. The starburst is indeed enormous. But for the most
part, the inhabited worlds are safe: swarms of momentum-transfer
robots, their numbers uncountable, work for millions of years ahead
of and behind the event to direct the closest encounters. Emergent
flocking rules and careful plans laid far in advance have steered
colonies clear of the high-risk territories, marshaling brown
dwarfs as dampers and buffers to redirect the tearaway suns—and
both galaxies are talking to each other, for the expanding sphere
of sentience now encompasses the entire Local Group.
Earth is no longer
inhabited in this epoch; but the precious timegate remains, an
oracular hub embedded in a cluster of exotic artificial worlds,
conducting and orchestrating the dance of worlds.
There are now a
hundred million civilizations within the expanding bubble of
intelligence, each with an average population of billions. They are
already within an order of magnitude of the Stasis’s ultimate
population, and they are barely a thousandth of its age. The
universe, it appears, has started to wake up.