Captain Trix is a space farer. He travels close to the speed of light around the universe. 'Close' because there still was no way to make things massless. He liked his sub-luminal engines and how he traversed the parsecs with them. He tried doing warp drives once, but the incident smashed a considerable portion of a galaxy and he felt that it was inappropriate for him to dabble again with technology that he still was not that familiar with. After all he could just give a portion of his energy supply and leave it with a local civilisation and come back some thousand years later. From the civilisation's point of view, that is. Captain Trix had a power source. A white hole of sorts that had formed, or rather jumped into existence by mere quantum chance, he was speculating. Like, there is the possibility of you materialising somewhere else, but to give the slight chance circumstance, you would have to wait longer than the estimated heat death of the Universe. This Universe, that is. Captain Trix did not bother with that a lot, though. He knew that to crack the problem of travelling dimensions more minds were needed. So instead he was just travelling around, injecting endless amounts of energy, which were warped in from another place - not this Universe, and pumping up his engines at close to luminal speed.
Not exactly an accomplished scientist he had tried warping space-time to produce FTL - faster than light, but the delicate bubble of space-time contracting up in front of him (from his point of view) and down behind him, had fluctuated and burst. The energy invested had all been released and at least a solar system had been dissociated (that is, turned to plasma). Later he had seen a protostar forming up in that place and was happy things were returning to normal.
It was fun travelling with time dilation, though. You could witness different things in the same place. Or many different places, while not ageing much. At least from the point of view of the...places. Zipping around in his small doughnut-shaped ship he had seen a quite a few things. Turns out that all life is Organic (Carbon based compounds). Not because there were not any Silicon based microbes or different sorts of bacterium swimming in ammonia, but because those did not get far. It was not beautiful when the silicates got in touch with the Oxygen on their world(silica sand is chemically quite durable). Carbon was forming the most stable structures around and with the highest variety of elements, plus it required less energy to form bonds with them. Additionally the energies needed to bond with Carbon were generally equal, making for consistency in the chemistry of life. So organic life was, kind of, omni-present around the Universe. It was the thing that was able to adapt. It could get to the point where it would be able to choose how to proceed.
Last week, from the point of view of Captain Trix, he visited a civilisation of late homo genome people who were exchanging the Carbon in their bodies for other elements. But they only managed to live well in their own immediate and very limited environment.
There was the case, he observed once, of the Oceanic planet that had no moon. Its poles were very unstable and its Milankovitch cycles were extremely disproportionate. Throughout the history of its evolution it had gone through many and abrupt climatic changes. The creatures evolved on that planet were extremely hardy; the progress of life there had seen it overcome various and often hardships and as a result their late sentient type and earliest common ancestor had almost ninety percent similarity in the code. It was not a tree of life there but more a line. The flexible spiritual perceptions and economical innovations of that culture had astounded the human mind of Trix.
Apart form being all very adaptive, apparently Organic life was also capable of respecting and understanding its Carbon reiterations around the Universe. It was a collaboration on a cosmic level these days and Trix was quite happy to witness it.
Sometimes he would wonder, while watching the compact haze of the near-luminal speed flight, whether or not he was merely an ordinary hedonist. He was trying to do some science, of course; like that time when somebody wanted to trap his torus-shaped ship with a magnet, the size of a jovian planet. They had even innovated a way to mask it as a gas giant. Trix had to infuse the magnet with raw, high-energy plasma, which raised the potential of the magnetic fields. He then had introduced a magnetic field with opposite poles from his small ship to that of the large magnet, essentially propelling him remarkably fast. Not as fast as when he was pumping his old-school(from the point of view of the Universe) drives, but given the circumstances, tremendously fast - 0.7 c.
Despite the endless amount of energy available and his knowledge, the inexhaustible amount of electrons, beams, particles and electro-magnetic radiation he produced had to go somewhere, he thought. So sometimes he would seek scientists, lend them a hand and then inadvertently catch the eyes of the authorities and get pursued in an attempt to have his stuff confiscated. He could not stay at one place for long. Quantum entanglement worked, for a bit - a 'radio' developed by one of the non-human scientists out there. It worked by communicating with quantum particles, connected across space and time, each spinning up or down and monitored by the mechanism. Trix had proposed the good old fashioned 01 language and it was a success, allowing them to send messages without time dilation across vast amounts of distance. Several luminal travels later the scientist was sadly, dead. At least they were able to crack a few energy production problems and some n-dimensional equitations as a bonus. Last Trix heard of them, they were happily living without monetary exchange to the woes of his own kind, which was still struggling with some sort of lame meritocratic nonsense. Trix was wondering if he could become non-human, by replacing things from his body. Reprogramming human DNA and slowly adopting the structure of another species... why not? Maybe he could look into it later. The 'radio', though, had broken last month and he would not venture that side of the Universe for a bit. Actually, he was not sure whether or not he would find the leftover cinder of their short-lived A-type White Star solar system. The Bahamas there were no joke - the egg burned too quickly.
Yes...Trix was a good guy. He did not fire weapons, although he could ablate things badly. High energy dissociating ion beams were not beyond his capabilities. Just put more energy in. If he fired at a target, he had to pulse it short, because particles on the surface of the target would become extremely excited and turn to plasma, which then would fly randomly in all directions and on occasion eject back. If aimed at a planet, it would be enough to propel the planet on a course out of its trajectory, acting as a sort of a rocket engine. But that was non sense. He was quite happy not to do any of that and just observe the unfolding of time before his eyes.
Once, he was trying to persuade a group of pirates to stop their trade, while they were bombarding his ship with various sorts of energy weapons. Trix had covered the outer shield of his ship with some anti conducting isolation material and deployed superconducting induction plates in a web in the space outside of his ship, running a powerful current through them. This had essentially produced a giant capacitor, trapping him in an impenetrable ion electro magnetic shield. He was coding the message by flashing parts of the shield in a type of a Morse code, as it would have blocked any radio transmission. Something he had not anticipated was some of their ships tried getting too close and became fried by the intense micro wave radiation that was extremely potent because of the inverse square law. Additionally the gamma radiation was producing Carbon fourteen isotope which was very unstable and would decay in merely five thousand years, but that did not matter any more as the dehydrated bodies would surely not need it any time soon.
Apart from the pirates not being able to understand his message, he had noticed the small calorimeter on board had started detecting particle showers in the ship, so he decided to scram out of there. It was above the usual reading in open space far from star formations. Weird enough those were photons - most probably forming from other decayed particles, which were possibly vibration energy starting to condense from the extremely strong electromagnetic field. Higgs bosons, maybe? Otherwise photons would not be able to find their way in. Powering the drives, he just discharged and hopped out of there.
Sometimes, he would take a break at some of his favourite old places. This one was an ancient black cloud of cold stellar content that stood dormant against the bright background, generously dotted with galaxies. Every time he visited, the cloud was changing a little bit; he could see where new stars would form by the mass collapsing under its growing weight; it would be interesting to see how many there would be in the end. Maybe a giant black hole, when everything was said and done, preceded by one large local neighbourhood composed of smaller stars forming smaller solar systems. All orbiting around the enormous local gravitational behemoth of a Super giant O type Blue with a Giant B Blue-White type in a central binary star formation.
He had some anti-matter lying around, but was rather displeased with the thing. It was decaying readily, despite the shifting strong magnetic fields he had set up to contain it. Neutral quantum particles like neutrinos were penetrating everything and were pushing the buttons on his anti-matter on the quantum level, changing their set-up and spontaneously transforming anti-particles into particles, which then quickly annihilated into each other, producing a strong gamma radiation expanding front on the minuscule level. The gamma rays had the chance of further disturbing it and initiate a chain reaction that made the anti-matter decay in the matter of months. It was annoying. At first it was fascinating to use his small table-top accelerator and just infuse massive energies into it, while isolating it behind a shield of EM field. He was readily smashing particles and extracting any anti-fermions that sublimated in the remnants of the collision spree. He just had to guide them away and leave them sit all by themselves and they would naturally clump into anti-atoms, then into anti-matter. It would have been a slow process were it not for his endless generation. But even so, he had no longer seen any benefit of sitting around with something so exotic and was not convinced that it was even safe to keep it around any more. He gave his last supply to a positively dis-positioned civilization of quite welcoming fellows on a sandy planet. They managed to recreate very early models of the Big Bang and as far as they were concerned that left them quite happy with the discovery.
And so Captain Trix was travelling the universe, not looking for trouble, but enjoying his unexplained and so far inexhaustible power source. Lucky fellow.
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