The reapers are retreating to the Catapult. - ...someone's voice was heard nearby.
Of course. After Gorn's activation, they have nothing to do here.
And not because Gorn is able to destroy them or worse, to subdue them. It's not because...
Jack now understood. All Jack wanted to say to him was the Pluto. Everything the earthlings wanted to know from him. Even why Gorn called him that, too, was now crystal clear.
It all started millions of years ago. Hundreds of millions of years ago.
Creatures from different worlds in the Galaxy would find their minds, go out into space, look for their own kind - and sometimes find their own.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the first interstellar community appeared in the Galaxy. They did not know how to fly between the stars faster than light, and the slower light was almost useless to fly. They communicated with each other using conventional radio and light waves.
This is how the Galactic Information Network appeared. Galanet.
Galanet was expanding. The civilizations included in it were developing, exchanging information.
At some point, it led to a qualitative leap in their development.
On a place of only an information network, there was a huge distributed supermind, in the same way naming itself Galanetom.
A huge Swarm, composed of entire civilizations. An anthill the size of the Galaxy.
And it turned out to be practically incapable of development through the knowledge of the world around it. Restricted to the development of mega-systems built of intelligent beings - states, planetary and systemic - it was limited by the limits of these intelligent beings, the smallest and almost insignificant, easily replaceable particles of themselves.
However, a way out was found.
Just as mammals are not able to feed on mineral dust and sunlight, preferring meat or grass at the worst, so for Galanet the only acceptable way to "feed" was the incorporation of independently developed civilizations, "Zero", and as a pleasant seasoning - all the information collected by them and given in a digestible form.
And naturally, as well as to any reasonable, though relative, being, in the end, he has passed from the collection of free developed civilizations to their cultivation.
This was a very long period in the history of the Galaxy. Then Galanet and its particles could not move between the stars faster than light, and it took hundreds of thousands of years to pass from one side of the galaxy to the other. Other Zeros had time to be born and die, leaving only ruins.
As for the travel of material bodies - it took millions of years - a time comparable to the discovery of the mind by mammals.
To get rid of this problem, Galanetom created the Reapers. A part of Galanet's body, more precisely, its mechanism, designed for the most optimal treatment of the grown-up civilizations. Simply growing, collecting, packing and archiving them. And sometimes - their elimination, if the civilization "Zero" or its information could cause harm to Galanet.
Five million years ago, another observation post of Rznetsov was thrown into the perspective Solar System with respect to the development of the mind. It consisted of an Observer - a reasonable computer program hidden on Sedné - and an automatic observatory on the Moon, which the Earthlings called Calcium City.
Three million years ago, observations have shown that the Earth has begun to become a reasonable species. Immediately, with a delay of only a few tens of thousands of years - moments by galactic standards - from the nearest post of Znetsov to the Earth arrived expedition. Researchers have carefully studied the species, measured its prospects and estimated it as quite worthy.
The monolith, then still not a sphere, simultaneously the spacecraft and a body of members of the expedition, have finished research and has disappeared under a surface of the Moon, having fallen into hibernation. He had to wake up, let go of the signal towards the homeworld and die only when reasonable beings will build a cosmic civilization - and Calcium city will inform about it before its self-destruction.
Why did you have to self-destruct? Everything is simple. To hinder the zero civilization to go its own way meant for Galanet to turn a new and delicious "food for brains" into a familiar and fresh one. But the reaction of the Zero civilization to the finding of other people's traces, on the contrary, added a delicious seasoning.