All races become either spacefaring or extinct.
Carl Sagan
In the latest book of the Master Blasters series, soon to be released, the human race discovers more about the history of the Galaxy. The knowledge is hard won, and decidedly not boring.
The Fermi Paradox in the Orion Arm of the Miky Way Galaxy had a simple and brutal explanation. The Berserker War.
At approximately the same time, four sentient races, widely scattered through the Orion Arm, achieved spacefaring technology and the ability to build self reproducing artificially intelligent machines, von Neumann machines as the not-yet-born human race would name them.
Each of these races sent out slower than light probes to nearby stars to explore, report back, and create daughter machines and send them on to further stars to explore and report in their turn. What the precise intentions of the builder races may have been, the capability to build a ship which could pilot itself between the stars at a fifth of the speed of light could also build weapons of planetary destruction.
The clashes between AI probes when the expanding spheres of von Neumann probes interpenetrated may have been paranoid intent or tragic accident, but the result was the same. Word of hostilities spread from star to star at light speed, and exploration and survey craft modified themselves for war.
The titanic battles which ensued were conducted by AI’s which had lost, if they ever had, any regard for life bearing worlds in the systems they attacked or defended. That the evolving sentients on those living worlds were collateral damage rather than victims of genocide made no difference to the end result.
Being at the centre of a sphere of stars occupied by one’s own race’s von Neumann probes was no protection. Space was simply too vast. With grinding inevitability the tides of destruction rolled across the Arm. The builder races were all exterminated by a war over whose commencement they had no control and which they could not have stopped if they wished to.
Here and there, by chance, some worlds survived. Earth was one, protected by the chance that it lay within the area called the Local Bubble, where the interstellar medium was a tenth or less as dense as it was in most of the Galaxy. Probes whose propulsion systems used that stellar medium as the fuel for their propulsion systems could not operate effectively within it.
One such world held a race of great technological advancement which had refrained from sending out von Neumann probes. Faced with the extinction of their own race along with all life in the Orion Arm, they perfected the cosmic super-weapon humans would name the Portal.
It could, simply, transfer a mass across an arbitrarily large distance, instantly. Star by star they scoured the Orion Arm of the AI battle robots, dumping them into black holes or giant stars.
Those worlds which had escaped destruction began once again to evolve sentient races. The Portal aliens, enigmatic elder race to the evolving sentients, used the Portal to bind these races together in a network of trade and information interchange, watching them for any attempt at building von Neumann probes and forbidding under the harshest penalties any attempt to use the Portal network for warlike purposes.
Theorists among the younger races have deduced that the Portal network not only binds together the spacefaring races of the Arm, but motivates them to help each other by rewarding them for doing so.
These theorists further speculate that the threat the Gate Aliens are preparing against must be more terrible by far than the Berserker War …
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