Akane realized that this fear and despair and death were all her own creations. Each time she shook the aether, lives were lost, one after another. Thus far, she had never faced death so directly. Despite all the people she’d killed, she’d never really caught a glimpse of what it really was.
“All right!” Akane screamed. “I know why there’s a voice! It’s the screams of the dead! The shrieks of those being slaughtered! Voices begging for help!”
In that instant, a violent beam of light sliced through the Moby-Dick’s flesh. The flesh swelled up, vaporized, and exploded. A white shockwave blew Akane away. The helmet of her spacesuit cracked, but the air was breathable, so she was unharmed. Sachii was right next to her. She was unconscious, not moving. Luckily, the sudden explosion seemed to have confused the spiders, and they’d stopped attacking. Akane abandoned her helmet, put Sachii on her back, and went outside, putting distance between them and the Moby-Dick’s corpse.
There was a pitch black isosceles triangle floating above them. It was firing lasers at the spider swarm. The Black Swan.
The handful of spiders that escaped The Black Swan’s beams were easily defeated with Seiyuu Karate.
When there were no more spiders, The Black Swan wheeled around, and landed. The hatch opened, and the Dark Seiyuu stepped out.
Shortly before, Akane would immediately have tried to kill her. But now that she knew what the voice meant, her attitude had changed.
“Congrats on finally hearing it,” the Dark Seiyuu said, sitting down next to Akane.
“Yeah. Tell me who’s generating that voice. Tell me everything.”
“Of course. I’ll start at the beginning. 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was born.”
“I think you might be starting too far back,” Akane laughed.
The Dark Seiyuu ignored this. “Long before matter existed, during the inflation directly after the birth of the universe, aether vibrated. In the Bible, it says the world was created by the word of God, but in fact, the universe was born alongside the voice. Parts of that voice became light, but some chose to remain within the world of the voice. To remain inside the aether, existing as sound. These are phonons, the particles of sound. The key to solving one of the greatest mysteries of physics. The source of gravity is phonons.”
“OK. So it requires a pretty insane coincidence for these phonon particles that have been vibrating since the birth of the universe to have the same wavelength as gravity does, right?”
As Akane asked, she felt hungry, so she picked up a piece of fried spider and took a bite. It tasted a lot like space whale.
“That’s what I’m about to explain. Just like the world of things we live in has, there’s been an evolution in the world of the voice. Phonons interacted, bonded, caused chemical reactions, and gradually developed into a complex system. Eventually, they reached a level where natural selection could occur. In other words, there was now life made of voices. Just as we did, the phonon life forms developed high-level faculties.”
Akane tried to imagine what a living voice would look like but nothing came to her.
“But one day, danger threatened the phonon beings’ paradise. The sheer number of them had increased too much. Phonon overpopulation was shaking the aether, turning into all kinds of radiation, heat, or particles and then vanishing. The key here, is that the mechanics of evolution still applied. Phonon beings that could efficiently harvest the aether remained, and those that could not died. This led to the development of organs that could gather aether. Gravitational forces are the result of that. Gravity is actually the predatory organs of living voices.”
“That’s odd. If evolution can produce it, shouldn’t computers be able to simulate it?”
“The world of voices is evolving much more efficiently than the world of things. Did you know there are two types of particles? Boson particles, where multiples can all be in the same state, and Fermion particles, where they can’t.”
Akane remembered studying this in physics class at training school, so she nodded.
“The protons and the nuclei in atoms are Fermions, but phonons are Boson particles. We know that Bosons can more easily display quantum effects. This led to quantum evolution. Genetically speaking, a number of informational states exist simultaneously and easily manifested in the phenotype, allowing the absorption of information that interacts significantly with the outside world. The gravity wavelength may be incredibly complex, but the result of quantum evolution managed to calculate it.”
“So the phonon beings’ genes are a sort of quantum computer.”
The Dark Seiyuu nodded.
“The result of this evolution is that areas where the phonon beings lived generated gravity, which created structure out of matter like stars and galaxies. On the surface it appears like the law of conservation of gravity is functioning, but that is purely a matter of appearances, since the gravity is actually being generated by phonons. Orderly sections of the universe, like the solar system or the Milky Way, are actually made by phonon beings.”
“Then is it also thanks to the phonon beings that the Earth never fell into the sun?”
“Yes. The solar system is a feeding ground for them. With a dissipated structure. Structures that are orderly succumb to entropy faster, you see. This explains the three great mysteries of physics. The origin of gravity is the phonon beings. Aether that falls to the planet surface is lost because the phonon beings eat it. And the dark matter that maintains the solar system and the Milky Way is actually phonon beings.”
“But these days they’re calling it the four great mysteries and including seiyuu breaking the law of conservation of energy.”
“That’s true. I can explain that, too. Phonon beings have thrived. But that was the beginning of a tragedy. In time, life was born in the world of things. Genes in the world of things are fermions, so quantum evolution didn’t occur, but a faint quantum effect was generated by the microtubules in neurons. Eventually mankind, the species with the most developed neurons, evolved an organ that could amplify the microtubules’ quantum effect. This was the laryngeal sac, and the people with those genes were seiyuu. Via their laryngeal sacs, seiyuu were able to link the world of things with the world of voices. Microtubules entangled with phonon beings at a quantum level, stealing the phonon beings’ genetic information. This was, essentially, quantum teleportation. This is how the seiyuu are able to break the law of conservation of energy. Akane Yomokura, are you familiar with Maxwell’s demon?”
“Wasn’t it a thought experiment in which a demon that could tell the speed and position of every particle was able to create perpetual motion?”
“Exactly. In that thought experiment, information could be exchanged for energy. Seiyuu’s voices carry information from the world of voices to the world of things, which creates the appearance of breaking the law of energy conservation as far as is observable. Originally, natural seiyuu were quite weak. Mankind aren’t the only ones with weak seiyuu abilities; there’s also the space whales and the helium beings from the depths of Jupiter.”
“The helium beings? We met one of those.”
“That’s right, you did. Helium seiyuu are an amalgam of metallic hydrogen and superfluid helium, creatures with sound waves for nerves. Since superfluids have no viscosity, the sound waves can flow as far as they need to without ever degrading. Their seiyuu power activates when the phonons in the helium are mingled at a quantum level with the phonons in the aether. Their life spans are far longer than all of human history, and they spend all of that storing up genetic information from the world of voices.”
The power Akane had stolen from the helium seiyuu had been genetic information from the world of voices.
“With only natural seiyuu, the damage wasn’t so drastic. But mankind opened Pandora’s box. Genetic engineering created artificial seiyuu. Artificial seiyuu exploded in the Great Seiyuu Age, with powerful quantum teleportation powers, and began strip mining the phonon beings’ genetic information!”
The Dark Seiyuu was getting pretty choked up.
“Was the result of that the genocide of the phonon beings?” Akane asked, starting to figure out just what was going on here.