“Yet the primordial universe was in a state of thermal equilibrium,” Spock pointed out. “Matter and energy were too uniformly distributed for complex patterns such as life or intelligence to form.”

“That was true to begin with, Captain Spock. But for a window of about two, three minutes as the first atomic nuclei began to form, that equilibrium broke down. We tend to talk about the primordial plasma as being uniform, and overall, it was. But on a local scale, assuming it didn’t all break down at once, then there could’ve been turbulent, dynamic interactions as things began to change. Like the smooth ice atop a frozen lake cracking into chunks as it starts to melt.”

Uhura smiled to herself. Shastri may have left Starfleet years ago, but he was still practiced at that science-officer trick of devising mundane metaphors to explain complex science to non-science officers. The effort was unnecessary for Spock’s benefit, but she appreciated the analogies. Her mind was already roiling enough from trying to assimilate the facts of her own past, without the added complication of recalling cosmological theory.

Shastri’s hands, which had waved over the table to illustrate a smooth sheet of ice, now turned upward into a shrug of sorts. “It was a brief transitional period in the grand scale of things, granted. But at the accelerated pace of the newborn universe, those couple of minutes were like billions of years today. There’s no telling what kind of complex patterns could’ve emerged from that turbulence.”

“Fascinating.” Spock steepled his fingers. “As we have traveled the galaxy, we have discovered that life and intelligence can be formed from any number of substrates beyond our own. We have encountered intelligences in the form of minerals, gaseous compounds, even self-sustaining electromagnetic and psionic matrices. In any substrate where patterns of sufficient complexity can form, consciousness can arise. Given the profound energy density and reaction rate of the Big Bang nucleosynthesis era, the complexity of the interactions that arose could have been… beyond anything we have encountered in our era.”

Shastri nodded. “Countless civilizations could’ve arisen, thrived, and died out in the primordial plasma in less time than it’s taken me to explain the theory. More civilizations than there are in the entire cosmos today.”

His eyes were haunted when they turned back to Uhura. “Doctor Sitko saw it as a purely theoretical exercise, of course. But you and I realized that we might have been witness to a… a profound tragedy. We might be hearing messages from ancient, long-dead civilizations—countless species that thrived for subjective eons, but were doomed to extinction by the inevitable expansion and cooling of the universe, its transition into a state where their kind of life could no longer exist.