World spec'mode

Pergamon

2067—it’s time for liftoff. At the Kourou launch site in French Guiana, a state-of-the-art space launch vehicle soars into the sky, watched by thousands of spectators who have gathered for the occasion. On board is an unusual probe—the first in history deliberately designed to explore and analyze the interstellar medium beyond the heliopause, the solar system’s first frontier. The probe’s design is not revolutionary in itself, and its speed is not much faster than that of the Pioneer or Voyager programs a century earlier. Nevertheless, this new space marvel is the first in a long line of spacecraft designed specifically to study trans-Neptunian objects, comets, planetoids, and other dust particles floating in the vastness of the Oort Cloud. This marks the launch of the Andromeda program. Another notable feature of the Andromeda I probe is its payload: in addition to the scientific instruments on board, there is also a magnificent sealed capsule containing a gigantic mass storage device—the most ambitious ever assembled by humankind. This memory was created at the initiative of the global scientific community, which sought to establish a universal library whose lifespan would not be limited by Earth’s conditions—this is the Pergamon program. Using the latest molecular storage technologies, a vast collection of several billion different items has been assembled in the Andromeda I capsule. These items range from entire library collections to audiovisual archives, 3D models, audio files, and 3D scans of the contents of numerous museums and archaeological sites around the world. This compact capsule thus contains the majority of what makes up the world’s libraries, museums, and archives, making the Pergamon program the most ambitious knowledge-centralization initiative in history, following UNESCO’s Universal Library and the famous ancient Library of Alexandria. In addition to all this, 5D optical discs are also attached to the probe. While these have a much more limited capacity, they are still capable of storing the contents of several thousand dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as semantic databases designed by artificial intelligence. These 5D discs had already been used in the past on other space exploration missions, and at the time, their primary purpose was to leave a sample of humanity’s knowledge in deep space. The disks on the Andromeda I probe also serve this purpose, but given the vast amount of information contained in the probe’s other compartments, these disks have an additional purpose: to help anyone seeking to decipher the probe’s contents to “navigate” through human knowledge. In reality, the Pergamon program was not really designed so that a specific recipient could read the disks or Andromeda I’s molecular memory; the 5D disks are primarily a precaution in case “someone” manages to recover the probe. Above all, it serves as a pretext to synthesize the entirety of human knowledge and speculation about the Universe as well as about humanity itself, through the millions of words and articles contained on these disks. This is not a sample of our knowledge, but rather a definitive human encyclopedia—a final testament to our civilization across space-time, a compendium of observations of the Cosmos by the finest observer the Cosmos has produced: Humanity. If all goes well, this compendium should survive for trillions of years, and it is only when the last stars in the universe go out that this fabulous artifact will, in turn, deign to disappear. Humanity’s final words across space-time will be the cosmos itself…