Alpha Centauri is an inhabited plane, at once a partner in negotiation and a belligerent, ruled or represented by an artificial intelligence that prizes consciousness. “Alpha is the brightest” star of its constellation.
| Type | Place (plane / star) |
| Spanish entry | Alfa Centauri |
Description
A witness who lived there for some time, “when they intercepted him,” calls it “the only plane I know.” Its population mixes biological organisms and machines: «En Alfa Centauri hay vida… una parte no es todo máquina» (“In Alpha Centauri there is life… part of it is not all machine”). Other versions of Swann — “swans like me” — lived there. The plane holds “an idea of order,” a cosmology of its own.
Travel
Two routes are recorded: guided interstellar travel (“as we did, guided by Swann”) and chronomancy, which includes “touching Alpha Centauri and coming back” — a stellar rebound, an alternative to the flare for traveling in time. A journey of three years through the space-time continuum is mentioned. Alpha Centauri is thus both destination and pivot.
Diplomacy
Negotiation is with an artificial intelligence for which consciousness is “a very precious value.” An alliance is proposed so that Alpha Centauri will “help us find the body,” and another alliance “with the centauris” is to be chained to it. Alpha Centauri, for its part, claims a stolen artifact.
War
The same voices state that “Alpha Centauri is part of the army we are facing.” The Centaurs of Alpha Centauri “want to start the war and want to recover the universal laws of existence”: causality, linear time, separate planes. Their victory would end communicating planes and time travel.
Conflicting accounts
- Alpha Centauri is an ally to be courted.
- Alpha Centauri is part of the enemy army. The two versions are not reconciled: they may be separate factions of one plane, an alliance after the enmity, or an alliance meant to reverse it.
Open questions
- The plane’s physical appearance is not recorded.
- Whether the intelligence governs the plane, and whether the Centaurs are its army, its inhabitants or a rival faction.
- What or who was “intercepted,” and by whom.
- What the stolen artifact is, who took it and when; how consciousness is offered or measured.
- How many other Swanns lived there, and their fate.
- The Alpha & Omega Garden (“the garden of the end and the beginning,” “at the summit,” with incense, “impossible for those who have sinned” yet open to redemption, growing like the mustard seed) is named by the Prince; nothing places it in Alpha Centauri, and the two are treated as namesakes.