Xeelee
The Xeelee are a species that feature in Xeelee Sequence.
Contents |
History
The Xeelee
The Xeelee became aware of the Photino Birds approximately 13.5 billion years ago. Seemingly as a unified species, the Xeelee have concerned themselves with defeating the Photino Birds for almost the entire history of the universe. Despite their state of high technological advancement, the Xeelee are ultimately unsuccessful.
While recovering from a brutal occupation by the Qax that enforced stagnation and flirted with extinction, Humanity adopted an extremely xenophobic imperative that aimed to ensure the future of the species (known as the Druz Doctrines after its founder, Hama Druz). Eventually Humanity again began to expand into the galaxy, wiping out an uncounted other species during their advance. Eventually Humans became the second most advanced and widespread race in the galaxy, second only to the Xeelee. Humans had no knowledge of the Photino-Xeelee war or even what was at stake, making the Xeelee actions interpreted as being sinister. Building the Ring had the appearance of being destructive on a galactic scale because its larger purpose was not understood until the very far future, and many smaller Xeelee projects, such as changing the orbit of Callisto to preserve the bacteria living in the ice, lacked an obvious explanation. Though there were several orders of magnitude fewer Xeelee than humans known to be in the Galaxy, their high degree of technical advancement made them a formidable enemy.
Overview
They were believed to had combined themselves with their technology and, as such, may not have a distinct individual presence that Humans would be familiar with.
It was known that they used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged, the event horizon was one of the few thing that survived from earlier epochs that they understood.
The Xeelee were masters of time and space.
The Xeelee use an exotic form of matter for most of their construction. Known by the generic name of "construction material", the substance is very dense, though it shares virtually no similarities to expected properties of degenerate matter such as neutronium. Instead, it appears as if the material violates the Pauli exclusion principle, allowing electrons to simultaneously share quantum states.
Construction material has been observed to be synthesized or grown from a small flower-like object, known anecdotally as the Xeelee Flower (as seen in the short story The Xeelee Flower, found in Vacuum Diagrams).[1] This device creates construction material when the control unit is removed in the presence of sunlight. It is unknown if the Xeelee have other methods of creating the substance. The only things known to be able to damage it are magnetic monopoles and gravitational singularities. During the third human/Xeelee war the Xeelee encased stars in this material, this prevented any radiation and heat escaping and so forcing humans to leave those systems or die.
Their starships, known as Nightfighters, are crafted from a strange form of matter that seems to violate the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two electrons of the same atom can be in the same state at the same time. The material is sharp, hard, and transparent. Due to its unique space-time construction, it has strange gravitational effects.
The Xeelee hyperdrive functions by moving the ship from one point in space to another instantaneously. Though the travel time between points is zero, there is a short pause between each jump required to compute the parameters of the next jump. This pause was a couple seconds when a Xeelee Nightfighter was flown by Jim Bolder. However, it is implied that Xeelee pilots operate their craft more efficiently. This hyperdrive can cross at least 100 parsecs in a single jump if required, however the Xeelee have been known to use much smaller jumps tactically, even in combat. The hyperdrive does not rely on the craft being entirely made of Xeelee construction material, as an instance of one jumping with another ship tied to its back was shown in The Ring.
The Discontinuity Drive used by Xeelee Nightfighters directly pushes on Spacetime. This is done by a pair of extremely large "wings" that can extend from the Sycamore seed shaped Nightfighter. These wings are not made of typical Xeelee construction material, but are constructs of pure spacetime and in this way they can directly exchange momentum with the fabric of the universe itself. The means by which the wings interface with the degenerate matter Nightfighter cockpit is unknown, but it is suggested that this may be a fundamental aspect of Xeelee physiology and/or technology. The wings appear jet black and seem to be at least as durable as the cockpit. The discontinuity drive is capable of tremendous accelerations, and is observed to allow a Nightfighter some degree of maneuverability even near the surface of a Neutron Star. This suggests accelerations on the order of 10^12 - 10^13 m/s^2, allowing the Nighfighter to go from a dead stop to near the speed of light in about 100 microseconds. It is also suggested that the Xeelee ships perform better in regions of highly curved spacetime, so their accelerations in flat space may be a couple orders of magnitude lower
The Anti-Xeelee was a universe spanning quantum-wave consciousness constructed by the Xeelee to manage their projects. Its name is derived from the particle/anti-particle naming convention to convey its paired and complementary existence with the Xeelee; it does not describe an opposition to the Xeelee. It further implied that the Anti-Xeelee, was travelling backwards in time like some anti-particles are thought to do.
Notes
- The Xeelee were created by Stephen Baxter and featured in the setting of the Xeelee Sequence universe.
Appearances
- Timelike Infinity:
External Link
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