“Several, actually, doc. The first is environmental destruction. Regardless of the details, increasing industrialization always has negative effects on the environment. Species that fail to deal with it always poison or heat-death themselves into extinction. The second is nuclear war. Lots of species go down that way. The Uploads have found a ton of planets that are radioactive wastelands. Generally, they’re not usable for a long time, not even by the Uploads. The third is the Singularity, where the species builds an artificial intelligence that ends up supplanting them. Arts.”

“Uploads? Arts?”

“My words, of course. I’m translating everything into English concepts. Arts is short for artificials. As in A.I.s. The A.I.s that supplant biological species tend to consider that a winning strategy, and will continue to do it to other species as they find them. I think they view biological life in general the way we’d view a fungal infection.”

“So these would be the bad guys?”

“The ones that the booby traps were distributed to watch for, yes.”

“Right. So who created the booby trap? The Uploads?” Kemp took a loud slurp of his coffee and Ivan laughed.

“Yes. One of the ways of surviving environmental destruction is to grow a collective brain and gear down your society to a pre-industrial level. No one picks that option, strangely. The other way to survive is by uploading your intelligence into machines and reducing reliance on a planetary environment. The Uploads. They also, therefore, skip the Singularity.”

“Uploading their intelligence into machines. The whole population? Is the process like what happened to you?”

“Well, generally the first attempts are a lot more primitive. Scanning a brain, neuron by neuron, and running the result as a simulation in a computer. Often, they have complex Virtual Reality systems created to keep them entertained. And sane. My experience, with the nanites, is the end result of a million years of technological advances.”

Captain Jennings stared into space for a moment. “So the Makers, who are Uploads, send out booby traps to convert hapless indigenes into Uploads, who then are directed to contact the Makers. My God, that would take forever.”

“They’re immortal, Captain. They can wait a hundred thousand years. For that matter, they can control their clock speed or even suspend execution, and sleep through long boring periods.”

“And what’s the ultimate plan, once they’ve contacted a new race of sentients?”