The Ship’s Confessor uses the distraction to anesthetizes everyone except the pilot. He needs the pilot to take command of the starship and to pilot it. The ship stays to observe which star the Superhappy ship came from, then takes off for the nearest Babyeater world. They let the Babyeaters know what happened, and tell them to supernova the star that Superhappies came from at all costs.
When everyone wakes up, the Ship’s Confessor convinces the entire crew to erase their memory of the true Alderson’s Coupling Constant, ostensibly for the good of humanity. He pretends to do so himself, but doesn’t. After the ship returns to human space, he uses his accumulated salary to build a series of hidden doomsday devices around every human colony, and becomes the dictator of humanity through blackmail. Everyone is forced to adopt an utility function of his choosing as their own. With every resource of humanity devoted to the subject, scientists under his direction eventually discover a defense against the supernova weapon, and soon after that, the Babyeaters are conquered, enslaved, and farmed for their crystal brains. Those brains, when extracted and networked in large arrays, turn out to be the cheapest and most efficient computing substrate in the universe. These advantages provide humanity with such a strong competitive edge, that it never again faces an alien that is its match, at least militarily.
Before the universe ends in a big crunch, the Confessed (humanity’s eventual name) goes on to colonize more than (10^9)^(10^9) star systems, and to meet and conquer almost as many alien species, but the Superhappy people are never seen again. Their fate becomes one of the most traded futures in the known universe, but those bets will have to remain forever unsettled.
The Ship’s Confessor uses the distraction to anesthetizes everyone except the pilot. He needs the pilot to take command of the starship and to pilot it. The ship stays to observe which star the Superhappy ship came from, then takes off for the nearest Babyeater world. They let the Babyeaters know what happened, and tell them to supernova the star that Superhappies came from at all costs.
When everyone wakes up, the Ship’s Confessor convinces the entire crew to erase their memory of the true Alderson’s Coupling Constant, ostensibly for the good of humanity. He pretends to do so himself, but doesn’t. After the ship returns to human space, he uses his accumulated salary to build a series of hidden doomsday devices around every human colony, and becomes the dictator of humanity through blackmail. Everyone is forced to adopt an utility function of his choosing as their own. With every resource of humanity devoted to the subject, scientists under his direction eventually discover a defense against the supernova weapon, and soon after that, the Babyeaters are conquered, enslaved, and farmed for their crystal brains. Those brains, when extracted and networked in large arrays, turn out to be the cheapest and most efficient computing substrate in the universe. These advantages provide humanity with such a strong competitive edge, that it never again faces an alien that is its match, at least militarily.
Before the universe ends in a big crunch, the Confessed (humanity’s eventual name) goes on to colonize more than (10^9)^(10^9) star systems, and to meet and conquer almost as many alien species, but the Superhappy people are never seen again. Their fate becomes one of the most traded futures in the known universe, but those bets will have to remain forever unsettled.