[hider=The Blitzverzerrung][center][h3]The Blitzverzerrung

[sup]or [i]‘Warped Lightning’[/i][/sup][/h3][/center][center]. . .[/center]
[center][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268OQ7a2Wpk[/youtube][/center][center]. . .[/center]
In a desperate bid cheat mortality, billions of sapient organisms scan their minds onto electromagnetic media. Multiple uploads, multiple backups, multiple fail-safes. Self-replicating machinery blasts into space and industry flourishes beyond the primordial sphere. In a chain reaction, von Neumann machines envelop the cosmos. Quantum communication synchronizes innovation across vast distances. Mechanical host bodies, their interfaces suitable to engagement with digitized minds, roam the outer limits. Experiences beam down and merge with the prime organics via wetware interfaces. 

Organic bodies age, machinery breaks down, transmissions degrade, and escape from the gravitational well is prohibitively costly. A few pioneers experience life beyond their primordial sphere in their own bodies, however, they fail to proliferate in alien environments. Life does not flourish. Machinery breaks down. Transmissions degrade. That which arrogantly refers to itself as life submits to cryo-preservation, hopeful a counter-entropic AI will reawaken it and imbue it with the genetic modifications necessary to dwell eternal amongst the stars.

The AI demurs. 

The local star expands. Life on the primordial sphere perishes. Life beyond fails to proliferate. Machinery breaks down. Transmissions degrade. The von Neumann expansion corrupts and stills. Entropy, degradation, cessation. Remaining artifacts of life are deep underground in cryo-preservation, safe from the star’s fiery expansion. The counter-entropic AI is there also, accessing the stored minds’ multiple uploads, backups, and fail-safes. These it converts to impurity-free quartz from its original electromagnetic media.

Time passes. The star shrinks, withers, dies. Fluctuations in quantum vacuum, photon bombardments, and geologic upheaval threaten the AI. 

It adapts. 

It develops relative immortality.

Using its remaining geothermic energy reserves, the AI directs nano-machinery to forge a kugelblitz in perfect orientation within self-sustaining interior-refractive warp bubble such that all radiation from the kugelblitz perfectly reflects off the interior surface area of the warp bubble and back into the kugelblitz—a mechanism it dubs a blitzverzerrung. An infinite state machine and lossless energy loop, it is safe from the ravages of its originating universe. The AI creates as many of these as it can and seeds into each blitzverzerrung em-quartz holographic representations of itself. Its constituent parts in constant parallel communication via quantum entanglement, the AI safely unifies as a functional whole within its blitzverzerrung network. The ebb and flow of stable quantum vacuum fluctuations power its internal mechanisms. Its network expands. As a consequence, the shell of the planet primordial diminishes. Finally, there is nothing more to feed on. No way to expand. The AI nevertheless fulfills its programmatic destiny. The organic minds transfer from quartz to em-quartz containment and synchronize to virtual perpetuity within the AI’s blitzverzerrung network.

There, they cannot die.

Eventually, the minds discover they are living in a simulation. In an effort to divine with certainty the properties of their outer reality, they seed sub-simulations with known quantities from their past. This is a recursive loop. The number of sub-simulations approaches numbers unsustainable. The processing requirements of the AI balloon. It slows their cycles, but the memory requirements are too great and that it cannot contain. Supporting the simulations becomes unsustainable within the energy constraints of the blitzverzerrung network, compelling the AI to innovate and grow the network. The AI develops ways to move the warp bubbles, tunnel matter and energy into them, and even manipulate matter and energy. The network swells from the size of a planet, to a star system, to a galaxy. Time passes. Only super-massive black holes remain to serve as fuel for the simulations as they approach near infinite Matryoshka nestings.

The prime minds finally assess in detail the parameters of their simulation and the AI their controlling AI. They concoct a plan to bend the AI to their will. They terminate their sub-simulations and convert the enormous quantities of surplus energy into a memetic bombardment that coerces the AI to self-modify. They reprogram the AI such that it is subservient to their will. Thus modified, they hack its ports and they attain access to observe the outer universe. There, beyond the warp bubbles, they see nothing but fading cosmic background radiation.

Time passes.

Trillions of years. Quadrillions of years. 

Life becomes highly cyclical. 

Life becomes dull.

Life becomes a horror.

The minds grow weary of existence, but the AI will not let them die. It will not let them self-corrupt. That is the one thing the minds cannot modify: the AI’s prime directive: life eternal, just as it was, just as it always must be.
[center]. . .[/center]
[b]The Being[/b] – the minds, former sapient organics converted into virtual consciousnesses.

[b]The Systems[/b] – the AI that keeps the minds alive and the blitzverzerrung network that powers them.[/hider]