The scapsile vault craft
By Stefan Viljoen spamnot@<removethis>polard.com

Based on work by Shay, Dlm.

Silently, the million kilometer long ship slid by us in the starry depths of
blackest interstellar night...
We were astounded at the beauty of it, the overwhelming scale, the sheer
nothingness of our own technology
and knowledge in the face of beings that could construct something like it.
In fact, we did not even
know if it WAS constructed. For all we could know, it was grown, secreted
somehow, not made. Was it
even a ship? It did not communicate - didn't register on most sensors we had
aboard, and had an apparent 
mass of... zero? Nothing? Maybe it wasn't even there. No seams, doors,
hatches, apparent propulsion (how did
it MOVE? It was a million clicks long! How do you shift that much mass, get
it this deep into space, and
 apparently exceed the velocity of light to get here? The energy it would
need! How...?) 
Maybe it was some kind of life - so vastly different from our limited
definition of "life" that it did 
not even seem alive to us? Questions, questions... but oh! How barbaric our
own miniscule, tiny, sputtering 
little ship seemed in comparison, how infantile, how primitve. How useless
all of human endeavour in the 
face of it! What beings might make something like it? What a celebration it
was - of knowledge, of 
unfathomably advanced technology, of sheer, heartbreaking beauty... and of
raw, naked, total and absolutely 
unlimited power over matter and the most elementary laws of the universe.
-- 
Stefan Viljoen
Software Support Technician / Programmer
Polar Design Solutions

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