In The Beginning

This is the first draft of a new story, so comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

In The Beginning

A vast cloud of single celled organisms had been traveling through the void for eons. Each was enclosed in shell of carbon atoms packed as densely as diamond, but arranged to reflect every trace of electromagnetic radiation back inside. For them to continue and grow, the microbes had to catch and hold every photon and every trace of matter it encountered during the millennia between stars.

Even though they caught and held every trace of energy and matter they encountered, the cloud was not dependent upon natural resources for their survival. By manipulating electric charges, they had formed a very intense electric field that held the cloud in a very precise formation. At the center, they had formed a core of heavy iron atoms that were continually being ionized to maintain the field. At the edge of the cloud, individual cells would capture electrons flying off the core, gradually building up a negative charge until they were drawn towards the core.

Before reaching the core, they would internally accelerate electrons pushing them at high speeds through a hole in their shield aimed precisely at the core. The core's positive charge would continue to accelerate the electrons until they collided with the force of a freight train. At the core, the energy of colliding electrons would push atomic nuclei together with enough force to fuse them releasing enormous amounts of energy that powered the whole cloud. Anything blown away from the core that was larger than an electron would be struck by incoming electrons until it was pushed back into the core. The electrons being blown away would evade those accelerating inward because of the repulsion of like charges and would continue outward at a decelerating speed until caught by one of the microbes.

Each time a cell made the inward journey, it would pick up a few oxygen, carbon and nitrogen atoms to use in growing new cells.

The entire process was no accident of nature, it was a mechanism the cloud had learned long before beginning its journey. It was capable of learning because it was sentient. Actually, it was more than sentient, as it possessed the intelligence and information processing capacity to build an object the size of a star by manipulating single atoms to a precise location to achieve a perfect nano structure.

Though it had the ability and capacity to build anything, it had no interest in doing so. It would have thought the process as interesting as a man, if man had existed back then, would have considered the digging of the panama canal with a teaspoon. What did interest the cloud was the creation of living organisms capable of reproducing and acting independently to help it acquire new information and knowledge.

And thus it was, when the cloud encountered an area of the great void where a higher concentration of dust and hydrogen had accumulated, the core and rear of the cloud slowed while the edges continued until the cloud had surrounded the unorganized matter. When the core came to rest in the center, it was allowed to cool. Without the continued bombardment of electrons, the core quickly became unstable, throwing out a dozen smaller globs of iron from itself with the repelling force of its now unbalanced positive charge.

As each glob was cast away, the microbes surrounding it renewed there bombardment regenerating the electric field that caused the new pieces of core to attract each other. With planned precision the new smaller cores began circling the original, sweeping up the unorganized dust and gas with their own net of electric fields.

Another eon passed while every trace of the new matter was absorbed and organized with a precision only the cloud could have engineered. Finally the cloud rearranged itself to englobe its new creation. More time passed while everything was made ready. In a complex system, the cells of the cloud communicated across the billions of miles it encompassed to establish a common time to act.

Finally it was time. At the signal 10 to the 147 power cells accelerated electrons at the core at speeds precisely calculated to arrive at the same instant. Immediately before arrival, the cloud said, “Let there be light”. And there was.

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