Ultima

Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.

There’ll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do not want to get caught in that rain when it falls.

You’ll feel like Jesu Himself in the End Times, when He will descend on Rome with Augustus and Vespasian on His left and right hands, to establish the final dominion of the Caesars across the stars.

Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilisation, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of inter-faith conflict in Europe – no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.

And our sailors of space have a legend of the furthest star of all, where the gods lay their plans against us, or plot the catastrophes of the end of time: the pachacuti. We call this undiscovered star Karu, which means ‘far’.’ ‘As we speak of Ultima,’ Quintus mused.

And it wasn’t just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She’s always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she’d never fully imagined this side of their civilisation.

The “gravity train” was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century.

In the heart of a hundred billion worlds— Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse— In the chthonic silence— There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.

there’s very little I can do to change the trajectory of my society. Could you?

The ColU, sitting on its tabletop, seemed to Stef to twinkle. ‘I’m Colius the Oracle now.

A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

This is a strange situation, sir. Perhaps imagination is what we need.