The Weapon That Remembers
Every emergence from the iris is the same: a violent tearing into existence, a spray of parafluid and ionized plasma, a body assembled in the instant of arrival. The alien architecture of spacetime snaps flat around me, and I am already hunting.
The target—the Seamstress, or what remains of it—is fleeing at 0.2 c, a dim sparkle tens of thousands of kilometers ahead. The Convocation built me for this. I was grown around a knotted loop of superfluid neutrons, a miniature magnetar held in tense equilibrium. When I cut that loop, the release of energy flings a nine-hundred-meter javelin of hardened parafluid at six million meters per second, tearing me apart in the process. It is a one-shot weapon, and I have only one chance to use it well.
What the Convocation Found
The Seamstress was not hostile. It was an engineer, or a civilization of engineers, stitching wormholes from star to star for millennia. But every aperture it opened flooded nearby systems with high-energy gamma. A hundred thousand worlds perished in the Cataclysm—atmospheres burned off, ecosystems collapsed, civilizations extinguished in an eyeblink. The Convocation watched the deaths of a hundred civilizations arrive as waves of light, decades apart.
Yet the Convocation itself was spared. The Seamstress stopped just short of their homeworld, coasting through the system silently, stitching no more. It took generations to find the corpse: a solitary ringularity—a ring-shaped black hole—soaring at 0.2 c into the interstellar abyss.
Reading a Black Hole's Memory
The Convocation hoped for technology, for a record of why the Seamstress had stopped. They found only darkness. The ringularity had consumed its own body. But a black hole is slow to forget. The entropy from every aperture the Seamstress ever opened was still trapped within its event horizon.
The Convocation built an iris around the corpse: a concentric array of rings that could coax the singularity into opening a new aperture, linked to the birth of one of the original passages. The link is brief and destructive—the associated entropy is consumed in the process. One shot, into the past, at the moment of an aperture's creation. The creches and ships of the Convocation orbit the iris in lazy arcs, waiting for the right moment.
A Single Birth
The signal comes. I smooth my parafluid shell, collapsing all but a few sacrificial structures for telemetry. The placenta around me sinters closed, and spacetime does something uncomfortable that no one ever explained.
We decelerate at the polar axis, falling toward the iris' event horizon. The image of the rings distorts as we approach, echoes expanding sequentially from the black disk. The iris sings in longwave, building to x-rays, then gamma. In the milliseconds before contact it breaks into a screaming crescendo.
From the Seamstress' ancient, breathless maw, the aperture erupts—incandescent rage, a fire in the deep. The placenta buckles under gravitational waves but holds just long enough to carry us down, through the ring of the iris, into the roaring light of our predestined past.
