"What do you hear?"
"Nothing but the Rain."
"Then grab your gun and bring the cat in."
(http://41.media.tumblr.com/b83f42e83645bc4ea144f5248b5e143f/tumblr_nf1g91LqYX1u3t3e6o1_500.png)
Nothing but the Rain
It had not even been a war.
In the end there had been death and destruction, sure, harrowing tales of escape and last stands, sadness and hope, but it had not been a war. Not in the sense that you fight an enemy that has a strategy, resources, positions, soldiers or even worries. How would you? How do you fight the weather? How do you fight entropy? How do you fight the Rain?
No one knows when the Rain started or where. It just started, and spread. First it may have been rumours spread by wormhole explorers returning with tall tales of strange systems: Here Be Magnetars or Beware the Shattered Planets. Remember a time when it was rare to see a planet just... fall apart? I do. But I also remember when Seyllin happened. That should have been a warning but, well, few people remained actually alarmed in the long term.
The problem with smart matter is not that it is smart, it is that it wants to be efficient. It seeks more matter, not caring how dumb it is, it learns and it multiplies. You could stamp it out if you wanted, but if a sliver was left, it would Rain again. It would move by wormhole, slowly diffusing into connected systems, or it would hitch a ride through several gates while it munched on a covops' rusty bits. As long as it was sunlit it would gnaw at asteroids, disassemble moons or rearrange entire planets, bit by bit. It would take its own sweet time, hundreds or thousands of years, but the result was always the same, a star surrounded by a dust cloud of thinking matter basking in the light, and not much else.
Nothing but the Rain.
Systems that happened to be free of Rain did not remain that way forever. By the time hi-sec miners noticed their asteroid belts looked oddly different, explorers had found entire systems which had had their planets pulverized and turned to Rain. People like to say it was too late by then but, come to think of it, things were over long before. They just did not know.
The funny part is how I slept through the entire thing.
(continued (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=6809.msg114634#msg114634))