short SF: the Scientometric future

Over a single century, the Earth Disk of equatorial orbital stations expanded into a more tenuous Dyson Cloud around the sun.
New stations were being built at an exponential rate, as the asteroids and then the nearby planets were mined for materials.

They orbited the Sun from about 100 million to 200 million kilometers.
Each orbit was filled with its own ring of space stations around the sun. About a billion of them, a kilometer or so between their centers of mass.
The next orbits inward and outward were the same distance apart.
A hundred million orbits in total, each offset by a fraction of a degree.

All together, this spherical cloud of human habitats did an excellent job of blocking the sunlight in all directions.
Most stations were powered by waste heat from many deeper rings around the sun.
Stations in tilted orbits came closest twice a year, crossing at the Polar Points.
Many different orbits could align, forming a long shadow line from the sun. No heat flow for a few days, just an even infrared background glow.

For such a complicated system of artificial worlds to sustain itself, everything had to go right all the time. Human behavior had to be controlled completely.
Fortunately, that could be arranged
With a population as large as the number of stars in the observable universe, psychosocial research had advanced temendously.

Free will could now be predetermined. From now on, history would have an author.

Science fiction short: The Grays

There is a great mystery at the edge of the observable universe.
Subtle patterns in the cosmic background radiation are like a tiny part of some ultimate fractal. They hint that reality is infinitely complex. Everything we see is just an insignificant fraction of something endlessly more elaborate.
Philosophers speculate the mystery is too big to describe, let alone explain.

Yet the way that First Contact happened almost seems obvious in retrospect. When you see something too often, you can become blind to it.

I thought about the Grays again.
They are infinite. Or at least nothing in existence is larger than their incomprehensibly vague civilization, with outposts in all worlds and the spaces in between.
In their fashion, they communicate with everyone.

Nothing about the Grays reveals the slightest trace of personality, or character, or personal identity. They don't even bother with physical forms much. We get just the minimum.
Some say their appearance is like a mirror. They are able to observe anything.

That is how they managed to get involved in absolutely everything.