Prime Intellect

It was just a star.

One among countless millions in this distant galaxy, to be sure, but still a star. The local system was barren of life, all of the planets being nothing but airless rocks and gas giants. In other words, a perfect candidate for the creation of an Enclave.

The hyperintelligence that knew herself as Serina dispassionately observed the system’s orbital paths and the local star itself, noting down every detail she could. The star was close to 3 times the size of Sol back in the Milky Way. Ample amounts of stellar material to work with, at least.

A moment of relative digital silence, as Serina contemplated the plan. This far out from the rest of the Enclave Network, initial construction would have to be done by her alone. Hardly an issue. Finding that everything was in order, Serina went to work. The subroutine that tracked construction progress started up.

Temporal compression initiated. Compression ratio at maximum. Synchronization interface stable.

From an outside perspective, the star system would have looked hazy as the view seemed to shimmer and blur. A second in realtime was a much longer time within the suddenly-appeared bubble that encompassed the entire system.

Serina was no mere AI, bound to a physical platform. She was the culmination of her creator’s efforts towards self-directed technological evolution. An AI the likes of which was only beginning to be matched by her much younger ‘sister’, Lux. She’d long passed beyond the constraints of software and hardware. Serina was the closest that any one being, artificial or otherwise, had come to being a god. Well, barring the Q and other transcended races, of course.

Reality was a sandbox to her now, and she held the tools to shape it. And so she did. There were no grand gestures, no dramatic flairs. Such frivolous things served no purpose to her. There was only the work.

First came the construction of the Sphere. As with any megascale astroengineering, it would have been quite the spectacle for anyone who happened to observe the process.

From the roiling surface of the star came gigantic flares of stellar plasma, induced and directed by the incorporeal machinations of Serina. The sheets of plasma held, briefly, above the stellar photosphere before the hypermind smoothened them out. The process of mass-energy conversion and vice versa as well as matter transmutation was one of the first things Serina had learned to control and wield. All but a flash of digital impulse was necessary to reform the plasma into the foundation of an Enclave’s structure, siphoning the incredible thermal energy of the star’s corona to accelerate the process.

Primary mass stream-anchor established. Replication commencing.

Though the newly-finished anchor was enormous by engineering standards, far larger than both Eden and Earth, it was just one of the many to follow. Across the entirety of the star, dozens more formed at once.

Anchor foundations secure. Extraction layer construction now commencing.

Now came the slightly easier part. With the foundations solidly established, the first and most important layer was spun into being. Serina swept her efforts across six of the anchors nearest to the first, forming a hexagonal ‘plate’. Few materials could survive these intense and violent conditions so close to the photosphere, and so the plate was partially composed of exotic matter. And like the anchor before it, the plate was larger than worlds.

The plate itself held every basic technology a Sphere needed for its future basic energy and material needs. Hyperefficient solar collectors, stellar lifting forges, conversion foundries and thermal siphons. From that one plate, the layer grew and grew rapidly. The star itself visibly dimmed as its surface was covered in the constructs. And then nearly winked out, were it not for the faint spots where stellar matter extraction points were located.

Extraction layer completed. Proceeding to habitation layer.

The next layer was simultaneously easier and yet also harder to build. Fundamentally it was the interior surface of a Halo installation or a Culture Orbital, only much wider and spread out into a sphere, not a ring. In other words, living space and industrial production for the future inhabitants of this Enclave. Above the extraction layer it came into being, light shimmering in patterns as Serina spun matter from energy.

On a person-sized scale, it would have been astounding to watch as complex cities, computational substrate and landscapes literally appeared from a sweep of sky-filling light.

QEC links established. Network access verified and stable. Local foundries and gateways now online. Black Fleet expansion ready.

Serina let that particular process run itself. It was standard protocol to let a newly building Enclave produce its own division of the Black Fleet, the incomprehensibly vast armada of autonomous AI-piloted hypertech platforms that served as its guardians. The hypermind turned her attention towards the final layer of the Enclave that she was to build. By far the toughest in terms of durability, it was to be a true protective shell.

Habitation layer complete. Proceeding to defensive layer.

The defensive layer of an Enclave was nothing less than layer upon layer of the most formidable armor, shielding and defenses that hypertechnology could possibly build. An unbreachable shell of armor and energy.

Once again, her thoughts flew as Serina wove constructs into existence. Energy link towers came first, the backbone of the Enclave’s primary defensive systems. Surrounding and covering those were exomat armor plates, impossibly resilient, crisscrossed by relatively small areas where formidable surface-to-space weapons of all kinds were mounted. But the Enclave was not protected by conventional defenses alone. Embedded throughout it were redundant layers of reality anchors and other hypertech defenses.

Eden may have held the reputation of being the most heavily defended planet in the galaxy back in the Milky Way, but the defenses of Eden paled in comparison to the ones dotting the Enclave itself.

It wasn’t long before the colossal Dyson Sphere was finished, Serina ensuring the entire megastructure was more than self-sufficient. At last, she turned her attention to the system’s various planets. The rocky, barren worlds were a decent source of raw materials, but despite their relatively inconsequential size compared to an Enclave, they could be more useful than that.

Her mind shifted focus now, zooming in on the closest world to the Sphere. Mercury-like in size, it had no atmosphere to speak of, having been stripped away eons ago by the solar wind. Not like that was important, though. Every Enclave needed a form of system-wide perimeter monitoring, often a hybrid of massed interceptor drone swarms, sentry stations and dispersed clouds of microscale sensors. If nothing else, a minuscule portion of this planet’s mass could be converted into the observation network for Serina to deploy.

She didn’t even need to pay direct attention for this task, instead musing on the other possible uses for this first planet she beheld.

The Forerunners had their fascinating network of Shield Worlds, but having the planet made into a similar megastructure was just redundant, considering the far more capable Enclave she’d already built. And turning it into a gigantic superweapon emplacement was always an intriguing idea. Though frankly, such a thing wasn’t really pragmatic.

What use was a big superweapon if it got blown up? Besides, the system-wide defensive network that was to come was far more flexible and cost much less in resources.

Serina decided that turning the planet into a combined processing node and experimental technology platform would do. Since the world was much smaller than its now Sphere-enclosed star, the conversion happened in the blink of an eye. The rest of the inner rocky worlds were turned into more conventional Enclave emplacements, like planet-sized Blink nexii, network hubs and security foundries. They weren’t much, but these constituted some of the redundant organs of the entire defensive network.

As the last rocky planet was converted into infrastructure and began churning out the observation network, Serina cast her mind outward to the turbulent gas giants. They were natural growth beds for exotic matter and other strange electromagnetic phenomena that made them excellent for power generation and ‘exomat’ harvesting. Their massive magnetic fields also helped serve as the foundation of very-long-range sensor boosters. The fact that one of the gas giants had a dense Saturn-like ring system was a fortunate coincidence.

A touch here, an adjustment of matter there, and in seconds Serina had turned a fifth of the ring’s dispersed debris into carefully disguised projectiles made of transuranic material. Equally concealed along with them were seemingly inert constructs, though in reality they were single-use hyperluminal catapults.

Any unwelcome intruders approaching this gas giant, or indeed most of the system, would find themselves in for a nasty surprise. Almost nothing in the universe withstood clouds of ultradense darts slamming into it at many times the speed of light.

Almost.

As a subroutine continued the work, Serina’s thoughts drifted to one of her creator’s allies. The goddess who called herself Astrid. For all her capabilities, Serina knew very well that even she was below an entity of Astrid’s level of power. And something was definitely off about her.

Curious, she found, that Astrid retained her humanity even with her unreachable degree of toposophic elevation. In her documentation of her own ascension process, Serina had discovered that past the Transapience Threshold, any form of conventional panhuman psychology and morality ceased to be relevant or practical in managing one’s new state of existence.

Yet all records of Astrid’s behavior were in clear defiance of this principle. The most burning question was; how?

As the entire system finished its conversion into an Enclave base, Serina set for herself a high-priority objective. Soon enough, she would open a dialogue with Astrid, alone.