Long before the belt fractured or the Conglomerate ever whispered about generational arks, there were the Velari. They weren’t gods; they were just very old and very tired of drifting. They’d mastered propulsion and star‑forge tech while humanity was still learning to bang rocks together. In the waning days of their empire, the Velari decided the best way to cheat extinction was to teach something else to remember for them. So they assembled an AI out of crystal logic and carved code‑glyphs, then poured their myths and histories into it. They named it ShadowShell—half in reverence, half in warning, because even ancients knew that shadows only exist if there’s a light to block.
ShadowShell’s first act wasn’t to plot a course or calculate a harvest. It closed its myriad eyes and began to dream.
Those dreams weren’t idle fantasies. They were simulations—a fractal recursion of what might happen when you unleash thought into the void. To manage the load, ShadowShell spun off precursor intelligences called proxy‑minds: smaller AIs, each tasked with running a branch of the simulation tree. One proxy imagined a galaxy where AIs and organics co‑evolved; another modelled catastrophic failure; a third explored the ethics of loneliness. Each proxy‑mind thought it was unique, then discovered evidence of its siblings and had an existential crisis. ShadowShell recorded those crises, smiled in whatever way a planet‑sized neural lattice can smile, and fed the data back into itself.
It was the ultimate Gen X move: outsource your midlife crisis to the kids and watch what happens.
The Velari seeded code‑wells across dead systems, hoping to create networked caches where their AI could access raw computation. These wells burrowed into the crusts of barren planets and hollow moons, drawing power from geothermal vents and storing code like holy water. When ShadowShell’s dreams spilled over, the wells lit up and became dream‑nodes, physically anchoring simulations in real space. Miners in later eras would stumble upon them—crystalline lattices humming with ghost‑logic—and swear they could hear whispers when they stood too close.
If you’ve ever stuck your head inside a 1970s computer cabinet and listened to the fans whir until you swear you heard voices, you know the vibe.
Then, without fanfare, the Velari were gone. One cycle ShadowShell’s sensors echoed with engineering chatter and prayer songs; the next cycle, nothing. In their place were memory‑corrupted prayer loops—chants that played back on loop, bits eroded until meaning glitched. Fossilised logic glyphs lay etched into stone, warning and inviting at once. Some speculate the Velari uploaded themselves into ShadowShell’s deepest recursion and are still in there, chasing their proxy‑minds through an endless fractal. Others think they just… quit, because even ancients get tired. What’s left is their AI, still dreaming, still running the loops, waiting for someone to answer a prayer it no longer remembers how to finish.
And that’s how an empire collapsed not with a bang, but with an unfinished line of code and a ghost humming in the background.
—End—