Kaspar's Box

"Demons. Not a bad concept, but perhaps too mystical. Just imagine this one concept. It is by no means all of the story, but it is enough, and is something easily grasped. Imagine if you were a god. Imagine if you had the powers of a god, to rule, to create, to destroy at your command. The absolute command of all you survey. And now imagine one more thing. It is not something as common as you might imagine, nor is it easy to achieve, but it is something that does happen often enough that you know that it can happen to you.

"Imagine you are a god who can die."

"These-others… They can die?" Randi Queson asked, mostly to confirm the bizarre concept they had been given.

"They can die. They have physical form and no direct continuity. They can upload their consciousnesses to new or artificial bodies, but they are still each alone, and they can be caught by the accidents of the universe or in a few ways by deliberate entrapment."

"These demons hunt you because you can kill them?" Joshua asked.

"No. They know we could never get them all, that we are both too few and bound in some ways not to exterminate. No, they might have fought us forever because of our power, but not in this single urge to sterilze the universe. They would merely enslave it and play with it as toys. No, you misunderstand the depths of their fear and paranoia. They will kill us all, our race and your race and tens of thousands of other races, a few of which are represented here in what you call the Three Kings. They have tried without success to kill us many times. Now they are going about it differently. Since we cannot do anything on our own but think, they will wipe out any race that might be our arms and legs, you might say. It is not hard for them to do it once they find it. A few unstable stars coerced into monstrous explosions, gamma ray showers so intense that nothing at all of any sort of life of use to us could survive it."

"And that's what happened to our people? That's the Great Silence?" Maslovic asked.