I've stopped for a final refuel before making the last set of jumps to where the Signal is coming from. What I find between me and the signal explains the strange static I've picked up.
There is a moon of the Gas Giant I am orbiting to refuel in the image. It is a bare three light seconds away. It also throws off the scale of what the image shows. I've been studying this for days as I refueled. I thought, with all the weirdness I have seen. All the amazing sights. The Dark life. The tiny universes, no bigger than a single galaxy. The star systems, like Home, out in the void where they shouldn't be, unbound from any universe. Yet here I sit as I refuel, simply flabbergasted by what the sensors are telling me.
A nebula, but not like anything, ever. Every dot in the image is not a star, not even a galaxy, like that lightning bolt in space I saw all those years ago when I first started out. Each and every dot is a universe as big, or bigger, than Trost. So many of them, so close together that they are literally overlapping each other and creating a single amalgam universe. A Nebula Universe.
The Gas Giant I am at is in a small universe, only a few galaxies worth in size, that is on the outer edge of this Nebula Universe, and is technically a part of it. Sensors say that, deep down in the center of this Nebula Universe, is an active fissure in space. Only, unlike that lightning bolt that I took pictures of all those years ago, this one is still very much active.
This is based off of the readings of active universe birth deep down inside this Nebula Universe, as well as some math from CT that I don't fully grasp yet. The filament like structures are branches off the core rift or fissure in in space.
This thing is simply breathtaking, though I don't like the implications of CT's math. I keep running the numbers, based on the data I have, and the outcome doesn't make sense. It implies that, if not stopped, this fissure will eventually crack the entire spacial bubble that is the void, and if that crack gets too far, it would result in the literal unraveling of space, and the end of everything. The equations talk about a reversion, a collapse back into a probability field. I really don't get it.
Yet, I also see activity of the Dark life here as well. Activity that seems almost deliberate. Possibly even Intelligent? At the end of each filament section, I see the Dark life swirling. The largest specimens I have ever seen, and there, at the end of the filaments, like terminating anchors are super-massive black holes. Some of them with masses larger than Trost.
I also see a group of Dark life, seeming to shepherd another black hole of universe sized mass towards one of the filaments that doesn't currently have a black hole terminating it. If the Dark life are in fact actively, knowingly, doing this, than I cannot think of any more concrete proof that they are intelligent. It is another breathtaking thing to think about.
All of which doesn't actually give me any better answers, or even do more than increase my number of questions. Perhaps whoever created the signal will have some answers.
Well, I'm done refueling. Need to stop by the moon in the picture to do some mining, and then back to the Gas Giant to top off before making the last leg to the Signal source. With everything else. As astonishing as this Universe Nebula is, I understand it. But to create a signal, in gravity, so powerful that I was able to pick it up all the way back to Trost. I've already dropped a full constellation of satellites here to measure, monitor, and observe this Nebula Universe. Almost time for the last leg of this journey.