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Actually, I spend much more time at “world-building” than at writing stories. I like inventing possible worlds that might give the impression that they could really exist somewhere out there. The third story I mention here also plays in the Our Ascent world, but some time after the events in Storytellers’ Chronicles. It’s the first story where I thought “yeah, this is the real stuff!” If I had to invent a genre for this kind of fiction, I would call it Transcendence Science Fiction. It could be interpreted as extreme exploration of philosophical ideas and possibilities. There’s a song that pretty much describes the feeling of Da Vinci Omega: VNV Nation – Perpetual (lyrics)

Da Vinci Omega: Perturbation

Imagine you live your life in an utopic supercivilization. Suddenly aliens from another dimension appear on your cosmic lawn and start speaking about Dreamers and Dreams and Dream ships. You suppose these lunatics are just impostors sent by some outrageous entertainment syndicate (such things happen!). Think again! These guys are serious – and seriously crazy!

It turns out that those aliens belong to a unit for development aid sent by a fancy interdimensional alliance of supercivilizations. How humiliating! They just offer to build some of those nonsensical Dream ships for us. Our scientists understand that those ships can travel in something they call Omega space – that’s some kind of hyperspace, but with terribly many dimensions.

Most of your peers voted for accepting that incredible offer. Because those aliens offer the Dream ship for free you assume that it’s just a free sample and getting more ships will be horribly expensive. More information about that free ship: Its computers are more powerful than the whole visible universe turned into computronium. WTF? This is becoming ridiculous!

Some inexplicable restriction demands that the new ship can only have a small crew. You knew it: There’s a serious catch to this whole story. Anyway, the public vote results in the election of a reconstruction of Leonardo Da Vinci as second commander. Of course, the first commander is an avatar of your AI god – who else?

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Inter reality scans of the cosmos called parameter point p3 reveal signs of life. What’s really confusing, is that waves of colonization of star systems are followed by waves which seemingly make stars disappear – but not all of them. There’s no other way to find out what’s really happening there except by jumping into p3 directly.

But soon, this exploration mission of the Dream ship Da Vinci Omega pulls its small crew into a dramatic conflict of cosmic scale – which might just be the tip of an iceberg.