Old Ones

Hers was the light, the radiant beam from heaven that shone down upon us.  She was the herald, the voice, the emissary.  She would lead the First Ones home, so our Makers could walk among us again.  She told us all of this, in our own languages, using imagery and myth from our own religions.  She sang scripture from the skies above sprawling cities, healed the sick with a kiss, sanctified the desert, making it fertile.  All flocked to her, seeing a savior.  There were none who disbelieved.  The most fundamentalist zealot knelt beside the most cynical of atheists in worship of her.  She loved us, she said, filling us with joy.  But hers was nothing to the love of the First Ones.  The First Ones are love, she would tell us, they are love incarnate.  Her miracles had been wrought, she explained, to make the world holy enough for its creators to return to.

The First Ones came among us as solid light.  Walking prism-men that dwarfed the tallest skyline strode across the surface of the world and called it small.  They convened in a crystalline structure that folded space in 10 dimensions and a man approached their merged hard-light forms, proposing to meditate upon them.  At the 10th second of the 10th minute of the 10th hour of the 10th day, he finally saw past the humble 3 dimensions of human perception, first seeing time become solid around him, then the latter 6 opened with increasing impossibility.  When he unlocked the 10th dimension, his mind went, drawn from him, peeled off from his soul as it uploaded to the vast hypercomputers of the Third Ones.

And so did all the great thinkers and holy people come to the First Ones, gazing deep into their 10-dimensional geometry.  As with the first, they all become operating software for the machines that map the multiverse, as one with the precision devices of the Third Ones.  Their still-living bodies were guarded by those left behind, those who remained to prepare for the coming of the Second Ones: living nightmares, a failed god experiment.

And then she rose again, her light once more a beacon, no longer dimmed by the radiance of the First Ones.  Her light split the Second Ones asunder as they came, casting daylight into the shadowy murk that sustained them.  Their shades were captured among their creators' prism bodies, to be returned to the edge of the universe that spawned them.

We are the Tenth Ones, the Last Ones, called the Empty Ones by the uncharitable among the shimmering choirs.  

None will come after us.