800 years pass, as time is wont to do. Nature has healed the ravages of the cataclysmic arrival and life goes on in the secluded vale. Little sign remains of the brief violence of the landing that occurred here. The artefact sits motionless and changeless. Passing time is what it is good at. The vessel looks as new as it did the day it was built, its alien alloys gleaming in the Deggian sunlight. It carries no life; it’s as dead as a dry bone. But it does carry a vast unsleeping consciousness, the downloaded minds of millions of Skrellian beings, living in a complex and timeless virtual reality. Strung across the banked arrays of crystalline quantum lattices the lives of an entire civilisation are played out in a digital existence impervious to the outside world. The Skrellian home planet, long ago blasted to dust by the searing heat of an exploding star, is recreated in painstaking electronic detail. The combined awareness’s of its inhabitants live on in an endless digital dream inside the shining blue shell. The ship has suffered damage, seared by hard radiation and star-fire. Entropy has wreaked its accumulative destruction among the neural matrices as time and atomic decay works its inevitable slow transformation. Physically, the ship is as good as new, auto-repair systems running ceaselessly as nano-bots and macro-bots assuage the depredations of time. No longer required, the star drives have been disassembled, molecule by molecule, and their component atoms reconfigured to new uses. Structurally impeccable the vessel sits, ageless and improbably perfect. The data however, that spins unceasingly through the neural networks has been hopelessly compromised. The huge blue brain is running innumerable corrupted subroutines along its perfect circuits. Errors compound errors in a cascading chain with the sad and inevitable result that the awesome intelligence and eon-spanning awareness that lives within the ship is now quite irrevocably, utterly insane. Now its almost god-like brain is quite mad and dwells within a state of constant and undying fury. **************************** This is a reposted image, first uploaded to Renderosity in November 2008. I’ve reposted it now as this is its correct place in the chronology of the story. For more info please visit http://www.wizitch.com