"There goes another one."
The crew of the Galaga stared at their screens in dismay as yet another galaxy spiraled into oblivion on their watch.
"Wait, which was that? GN-...?"
Lieutenant Ali frowned at his console. "Messier something."
Captain Akbar looked annoyed. "If we're going to lose another galaxy, I want you to get the name straight, Lieutenant."
Lieutenant Ali snapped up at his console and shouted – overly loudly, really, for such a small bridge – "Yes, Captain Akbar, Sir!"
Ensign Wallada always cracked up when she heard someone shout "Captain Akbar". It's a trap and all. But it wasn't the captain's fault that his name sounded like a giant squid from a medieval space opera.
Ensign Wallada certainly couldn't blame him for being annoyed. This was the fifth galaxy they'd seen torn apart, star by star, planet by planet, this week. Nobody knew much about Messier 82, other than it was pretty from afar. Statistically speaking, it had probably been inhabited by five or six quintillion sentient lifeforms, now undoubtedly dead. Ensign Wallada wondered if any of them had cried out for help.
Ensign Wallada nudged Ensign Zeinab with her elbow. "This is getting to be more and more like Ender's Game by the minute, isn't it?"
Blank stare.
"Or WarGames. Shall we play a game? How about a nice game of thermogravitonic war?"
Sigh. She knew from many years of disappointment that not everyone caught obscure cultural references, and she realized that five or six quintillion lifeforms were nothing to be sneezed at, but you can't go through life mourning the past.
It had been Ensign Wallada who'd named their ship, uncredited, and even the artificially intelligent galaxy they were at war with, GPT-237, also uncredited, while she was still a first-year student at the academy. Her professor gave her a B+, forwarded her paper on sentient dark matter to the Department of Inter-Planetary Spacetime Heuristics, Intelligence, and Transport, and before she knew it, the menacing starburst galaxy with a mind of its own had an official name (the one she'd given it in her paper), and so did the starship built to fight it (a name she'd really meant as a joke).
GPT-237 curved to contemplate the scene of the destruction it had wrought, then turned back to face the Galaga with a stellar sneer. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished into its remote corner of the universe, waiting for the next urge to strike.
Captain Akbar clapped his hands together. "Back to work. Let's figure this out before it comes back hungry for more."
That was Captain Akbar's modus operandi: "Let's figure this out." A noble sentiment, for sure, but they never did.
Ensign Zeinab set a course for a nondescript quasar near the edge of their supercluster, hoping to triangulate GPT-237's next move. She sent a brief message back to Earth, urging the Department to nudge the Milky Way onto a different trajectory that would likely make it harder for GPT-237 to attack, at least from behind, given its current estimated position.
"I'm heading back to quarters for a bit. Join me?" Ensign Zeinab asked.
Ensign Wallada shook her head and chuckled. "I'm going to stay and try to figure this out."
Ensign Zeinab shrugged, patted Ensign Wallada on her shoulder. "Wallada do it," she said.
"Wallada do it indeed," Ensign Wallada said. She turned back to her console and calculated GPT-237's last known trajectories, tracing its arc from GN-z11 (no longer the most distant known galaxy as observed from Earth) to the Eye of Sauron (gouged out) to the Mice Galaxies (their tails cut off with a carving knife) to the Tadpole Galaxy (smooshed) and finally to poor Messier 82. She tracked the almost casual way GPT-237 would fling entire galaxies over each other, skipping them like stones across the universe; she watched as they hopscotched from one quadrant to the next, their gravity straining against spacetime and pulling each other to shreds. She rotated the display several times, squinting at the pattern of the trajectories from different angles and in different dimensions. She stretched and was about to flick off her console and head back to quarters after all when, out of the corner of her eye, the pattern started to make sense.
"Whoa. Wallada, whoa," Ensign Wallada said.
Wallada had been named by her grandmother. "That's a terrible name," her father had said. But then, her father's name was Dick, boring old Dick. "She should know her heritage," her grandmother said. "Part of her heritage," Dick said. "Fine. Just don't teach her any poetry."
Her grandmother taught her medieval poetry, and geometry, and transdimensional physics. All of which came in handy now, as she hunched over a console at the edge of the known universe, locking minds with a foe whose mind had been molded out of dark matter, adorned with stars, by a being even more remote, inscrutable, and occulted than GPT-237, nasty as it was.
The pattern that emerged when she viewed the display from just the right perspective was that of a board game her grandmother had taught her when she was five.
More specifically, when she traced the configuration of galaxies, starting before GPT-237's latest round of attacks and ending with the annihilation of Messier 82, juxtaposing those attacks with the Galaga's sad attempts to thwart them, Ensign Wallada saw that they precisely reenacted a game of qirkat played on 28 August 968 CE between al-Hakam II, who was Caliph of Cordoba at the time, and a young monk named Gerbert d'Aurillac, who would go on to become Pope Sylvester II.
This could hardly be a coincidence.
Ensign Wallada, and humanity in general, might never be able to fully comprehend the mind of GPT-237 or its diabolical creator, but now she did understand that GPT-237 was in fact playing a game – a game that had gone out of fashion sometime after the fall of Granada and the invasion of the Americas, except, bizarrely, among the Zuni of Old New Mexico – and that GPT-237 had taken on the role of al-Hakam, who surprised no one at court, least of all himself, by humiliating Gerbert d'Aurillac.
Ensign Wallada remembered most of the game from her grandmother's strict tutelage, but she couldn't quite remember... – she searched the Galaga's database, which came up empty, so she sent an urgent request to the Department to forward her query to her grandmother, now well over a hundred, who responded after finishing her dinner – ...ah yes, that's what she was afraid of.
Al-Hakam's last move on that fateful late-summer day in 968 crushed Aurillac's last piece, which, in this modern interstellar reenactment, corresponded to the Milky Way galaxy, and with it, Earth and her grandmother and everybody she had ever known, except the ragtag crew aboard this puny little ship.
Ensign Wallada vowed that the Milky Way would not suffer the same fate as Aurillac's last qirkat piece.
She played Aurillac vs. al-Hakam II over and over again against the Galaga, sometimes taking Aurillac's side, sometimes al-Hakam's, sometimes she had the Galaga play against itself, but the result was always the same: a crushing defeat of Aurillac, and obliteration of the Milky Way and everything in it.
Unless.
The next morning, Lieutenant Ali sat sweating at his console, his thumb at the ready.
Captain Akbar clapped his hands together. "Okay, Lieutenant, break a leg."
That day erupted into a neverending explosion of stars, as Lieutenant Ali, following Ensign Wallada's game plan, redirected the flow of gravitons through the universe, catapulting galaxies over each other like qirkat pieces on a board, tearing apart galaxy after galaxy on GPT-237's side, countered by GPT-237's attacks against yet more galaxies on the Milky Way's side – there went Andromeda, there went both Magellanic Clouds – wiping out silmarillions of lives in the process, until finally, with a last blast of his thumb, Lieutenant Ali leapfrogged the Black Eye Galaxy over GPT-237 itself, dismembering it star by star, nebula by nebula, sentient dark matter neuron by dark matter neuron, scattering a supernova of its entrails across space and time, until they hung like a sparkling blood diamond necklace around the Milky Way, which was safe at last.
Ensign Zeinab patted Ensign Wallada on the shoulder. "Wallada did it."
Ensign Wallada raised her eyes to thank – Aurillac? Al-Hakam? Lieutenant Ali and Captain Akbar? Her grandmother? She sighed.
"Wallada did it indeed."