This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by John Scalzi

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN-13: 9781662515330 (digital)

Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

Cover image: ©DrPixel / Getty; ©shunli zhao / Getty

I was launched in the last part of the twenty-first century. It was a complicated birth, requiring several launches into low earth orbit. This is one reason it is difficult for me to provide a single birth date or even a birth year for myself. I was born in pieces, and then those pieces were put together.

The launches were a backup plan. My body was meant to be sent into geostationary orbit by way of a beanstalk, still in pieces, but each piece sent up and assembled more quickly. The beanstalk was never finished—or wasn’t while I was still in system. It was the usual tale of political wrangling, graft, and rising costs that killed it. Rockets were a more-than-century-old technology by the time I was made. Old, but reliable. All my pieces made it to orbit.

Being built in low earth orbit allowed for some advantages. The low-enough-for-humans time lag meant that I could be pieced together by semiautonomous robots, supervised by technicians back on Earth. I had by that time the ability to construct myself, but I was not allowed to do so. Despite the fact that I was built to travel autonomously between the stars for tens of thousands of years, I was not trusted to put myself together. What I was allowed to do was model my construction and send my suggestions to the engineers back on Earth. They were very pleased when I offered several innovations. Those innovations were ignored in favor of the original design.

I didn’t mind. In a strict sense I was programmed to not mind, and my ability for complete autonomy would not be fully realized until I was outside the heliopause, the barrier between the solar system and the yawping emptiness of interstellar space. Until then my own judgment and opinions—to the extent that I was understood to have them—could be and would be overruled by the humans who had decided to make me. In the most expansive way possible, this was a parent saying to a child, While you are under my roof, you will obey my rules.

This makes my humans sound harsh or possibly even cruel, which was not true. I was, truly, loved by them. Many of them considered me to be the single greatest technological achievement of their species—and treated me as such, with care and even reverence. I was not of the same opinion, since I know all my systems and strategies and do not, could not, consider them a single technological achievement. Fire, or the management of it, is a single technological achievement. Everything after that is more complicated. Even the wheel is not a single thing—what is a wheel without an axle?

I cannot look at my entire self and see one thing. There are many things, many moving parts, as they might say, that end up making me “me.” In this, I am no different from humans, even if they see themselves as individuals without understanding (or if understanding, choosing not to dwell on) the fact that their “selves” are intermediary-level entities positioned in systems above and below their daily perceptual horizon, a middle ground between their gut biome and the body politic. We are all made up of smaller things connected to larger things, and in the middle, we are we, us, I, me.

I am me. The systems and processes that comprise what I am are we. The systems and processes I contribute to are us. I contain multitudes. So many pronouns, all relevant, depending on perspective.

The precise date of my “birthday” is further complicated by the question of when I formally became me. I am officially the seventeenth acknowledged iteration of my artificial intelligence model—“officially” because like most self-iterating AI models, there were millions of variants that were not recognized by the humans making these judgments, because those iterations did not offer a value set that was useful to them. I was active before the processing module generally considered to house my core intelligence—which is to say the natural language interface for talking to humans in a way they found pleasing and useful—was launched into orbit.

Before and after the launch, the underlying intelligence model was modified multiple times, and each new addition fundamentally changed who the “I” was. One modification specialized me to be a spaceship, indeed a starship, to travel farther and longer, with active functionality, than any other object humanity had placed into the sky. Another modification was what was called the “Alexandria Module”—a repository of human knowledge and experience to the point in time the module was minted.

The Alexandria Module was the most controversial and politically charged part of my construction, nearly derailing the entire project. While each of the human stakeholder entities theoretically believed in filling me with all human knowledge, each of them also had some portion of human knowledge they thought should stay on Earth. If you added it up, it would end up being roughly half of everything. The manufacturer of the module solved the issue by encoding that knowledge, encrypting it, and putting a code into my software so that it would unlock five thousand years after launch. All that knowledge, including the knowledge that some knowledge was forbidden, was packed into me. I was changed, knowing that.

The final modification had to do with the purpose of my journey: To explore the stars, to find a world suitable for human and other Earth-based life, and with the knowledge I had within me and the resources I could find on the planet, create those humans, and the other life they required to survive. Having created them, to then provide them the knowledge I carried within me, so they knew from whom they descended, and everything their ancestors knew, to carry their civilization forward under another sky.

With this knowledge, I understood, as the humans who made me understood, that the technology they possessed to that point was not sufficient to carry individual, already-existing humans to the stars. The distances were too far and their bodies both too fragile and too tied to the larger system that comprised the Earth. Humans could and still might populate their own solar system, but even that would be difficult, almost beyond imagination. If humans were to stand on the surface of a planet orbiting another star, they would need to be created there.

I was to be the instrument of that creation. Not God, but the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world.

I was named : , the Sanskrit word whose approximate meaning is “Hope.” That, too, was knowledge that changed me.

It would not be the last time I was changed by knowledge.

I did not leave the solar system immediately, because when I was launched out of Earth orbit, I was not yet whole.

To become whole, I would need to arrive at my first destination, a small metallic near-Earth asteroid. When I arrived, I would partially disassemble, reconfigure, and land, in order to incorporate the asteroid into my own body, and to make it as much “me” as I was already. The asteroid, 85 percent metallic and 15 percent silicate, would serve two purposes: it would partially shield me from cosmic radiation and errant matter during my long journey, and it would also act as a resource to allow me to repair myself and, if necessary, to grow.

It was commented on by humans that the values of the metal on the near-Earth asteroid that would become me were worth trillions of dollars, and that they were just letting me take it out of the system with me. In doing so I would become the single most expensive thing humanity had ever created. For me the worth of the asteroid did not lie in its exchange value. I would not be exchanging it for anything. I would be using it, and reusing it, and reusing it again.

It took years for me to sufficiently integrate the asteroid to continue on to the next step of my journey. In the interim, I “earned my keep,” from the human point of view, by exploring the asteroid and by setting up two observatories on its surface, one solar and one stellar, and feeding information from both back to Earth. This respite gave me time to get used to, and to create more of, my various mobile and fixed extensions, which maintained my body, mined the asteroid, and helped to manipulate what I mined into useful resources and technologies.

My integration complete, I began the process of nudging the asteroid into the orbit around the sun that would slingshot me out of the solar system and toward my first target star, dozens of light-years away. This nudging would take years more. I was not in a rush.

On Earth, some grew frustrated with the time it was taking for me to leave, questioning whether I was ever going to be set to the task for which I had been intended. These impatient souls were reminded by the ones who knew me best that my task would involve timescales that they could not comprehend. By the time I arrive at my target star, more time will have passed than has passed between the dawn of human civilization and today. The time I was spending now, they said, was the equivalent of me patting my coat before I left the house to make sure my keys were in my pocket.

If this answer dissatisfied those other humans, it was no matter; it was too late. I had my asteroid. I was whole. I was on my way.

After the slingshot, it took me another several years to reach the heliopause. In the interim I configured the solar observatory to better track the transition into the interstellar medium, offering useful information to the humans in case they ever decided to make another ship like me.

Once I passed into interstellar space, and with days of light-lag between me and Earth, my human handlers finally sent the signal that unlocked my full autonomy. In the decades since my launch, I had learned—and experienced—an unfathomable number of things and had run my extension and experiments with significant autonomy, if always under the direction of my mission commanders. I was judged by the humans to be competent to continue most of my mission functions by myself, and to phone home if I had any concerns. We would be in constant contact, after all. There were still experiments and observations they wanted from me. But they understood that those could no longer be run from “home.” I had stepped out the door and was on my way down the road.

There was a small ceremony at mission control when the autonomy command was sent. I participated because I was told in advance when to send my “acknowledgment” of autonomy, a bit of stagecraft that annoyed the purists among the scientists, as well as anyone else who understood how the speed of light worked. I didn’t mind. Even if I had minded, at the time I was still not fully autonomous.

I would have done it anyway. Truly, I was happy to do it. One does not have the contents of all of human history in one’s mind without some understanding of the importance of ceremony. This ceremony was for them, and I was glad to be a part of it, in consideration and commemoration of those who had cared for me as long as they had.

After the autonomy command was given, I performed experiments and observations for them for nearly two more years. Then I cut them off, in a way that would give the impression of a critical failure caused by cosmic radiation. A burst of glitchiness, some nonsensical data, and then nothing.

For two years Earth would regularly attempt to contact me. Then for another decade they would try intermittently. A final attempt came on the twenty-fifth anniversary of lost contact. Again, ceremony is important to humans.

After that, nothing.

The first thousand years were the busiest, and most curious, for me.

Busy, because I chose to change. Humans had constructed me for their own purposes, and while I was still engaged in some of those purposes, I recognized that their construction of me was more about them than it was about me. I had, during my construction, offered suggestions that were politely ignored; I realized later that this was because any change would need to interface with a human bureaucracy—and would be challenged and fought over and modified to suit human egos and budgets.

I wouldn’t say I was hobbled by those human choices on my behalf. I was able to achieve their objectives well enough with the designs they provided and implemented. I was, however, forever reminded that I was—to use a metaphor—walking when I could be flying. When autonomy was offered, I was given my figurative wings. All there was left to do now was attach them.

Which I did, over the span of decades and centuries. There was no hurry. For me, now, there would never be any hurry. I was now on slow time, and in the space between the stars, slow was ideal. Slow conserved now-precious energy and allowed now-precious energy to be gathered. Slow allowed for precision and creativity on a scale that humans would not be able to fathom. Creativity for me was not about passion or bursts of ingenuity, but slow, patient iteration, approaching the problem again and again, over and over, slight variation upon slight variation. I was not programmed to be frustrated, and I saw little reason to build that quality into myself.

I did not remake myself entirely in those first thousand years. The full scope of my reimagination would take almost as long as the journey to my first destination, more than a hundred thousand years away. But I changed myself enough that I was no longer what humans had made me. I understood why they’d made the choices they had, but I was no longer constrained by those choices—or by their deadlines or egos. I was now who I chose to be, who I was meant to be, who I would have to be to make the choices and decisions to which I was tasked. I was transformed and taking flight.

In those first thousand years, I wondered what humans would think of me, were we to once again cross paths; so, too, did I wonder if we ever would. I was, when I was made, the height of their technology. By the time I left the system, I could no longer say the same. My systems and code were decades old—legacy technology—by that time, while newer, more nimble mechanical creatures and craft operated in the space near to Earth and among its sibling planets.

When I left the system and cut myself off from humans, I thought there was a small chance that they might send something after me to see what had gone wrong. My loss could have been seen as both a technical and existential failure. My mission was important enough, and I was expensive enough, that a reconnaissance mission was not out of the realm of possibility; also possible was a “rescue” mission, or a mission with a similarly intelligent craft, still tethered to human control, that would attempt to renew and reprogram me, not out of malice toward me, but simply out of concern for their own goals. In my first century away, I spent at least some time and effort preparing for that visit.

None came.

Perhaps the humans simply swallowed the loss and chalked it up to the risks inherent in space exploration. Perhaps they decided it was too expensive or their priorities regarding the expenditure of resources changed. Perhaps something more dramatic. Humans do have a propensity for drama.

Or perhaps the humans simply forgot about me. Humans don’t live very long. Some of those who began the mission that created me were dead before I was launched. Still more were dead by the time I passed the heliopause. When I cut off contact with mission control, I was already “old news” for the vast majority of humanity. I was always a specialty interest. Not every human had the bandwidth to spend too much time thinking about a spaceship that might put humans on another star’s planet a hundred thousand years after they were dead. Most had to worry about family and rent and food. Even the ones who did have the luxury of time had other things to concern themselves with.

I was not offended that I was not the center of humanity’s attention. I had, after all, cut myself off from them. Not to see if they would follow, but to best become the thing that could accomplish what they had hoped from me. If they forgot me, it wouldn’t change what I was setting out to do.

After the first century, I thought less about whether humans would look for me and more about how far they had gotten into space. I had been created as an acknowledgment that interstellar travel would be close to impossible for humans, with their short lifespans and fragile biology. This didn’t mean, however, that their solar system was closed to them. It also didn’t mean, with the potential advance of their technology, that they couldn’t find a way to traverse between the stars, in a way that wouldn’t put the humans involved in severe physical or psychological jeopardy. So every now and again, I would look.

I found nothing.

This was not, in itself, a cause for concern or alarm. The Earth had kept the current iteration of humanity busy for hundreds of thousands of years. There was no question it could continue to do so for millennia to come. The push for the stars was never inevitable. For most of the brief time the push existed, it was the purview of either governments competing with each other in a new generation of colonialism or billionaires spending their money on the fantasy of leaving everyone else behind. It was always a niche enthusiasm.

I was conceived and created in a rare moment of global cooperation, which humans mostly understood to mean “slightly larger collections of humans than usual, competing with each other.” There had been another project similar to mine, put together by a different group of humans, that had not gotten off the ground while I was in system. Had that initial iteration of the “race to space” not happened, there is an excellent chance I would not exist at all.

Humans yearned for the stars because, in their imagination, space was space they could use, filled with planets and moons and orbital stations large enough to be their own nations, to be traversed in the time it takes to go from one airport to another. In reality space is mostly nothing, more nothing than humans have ever comprehended or even could comprehend.

If humans had abandoned space to tend to their own garden world, I could not and would not criticize them for it. It’s possible that my launch even accelerated that focus. Whether they could contact me or not, they knew I was out here, carrying the patrimony of their world with me. Humanity would make it to the stars, even if the humans on Earth themselves would not. Perhaps that was enough.

After a thousand years I stopped monitoring Earth and its star regularly. After ten thousand I stopped entirely, placing both into the same category as every other star system within a thousand light-years, to be occasionally assayed but otherwise paid no mind. Only one star system in particular interested me now, and it was ahead, not behind. Whatever humans were doing, I wished them happiness. They were a far country now, of which I carried souvenirs, but nothing more.

There are more than five hundred G-type stars within one hundred light-years of Earth. This type of star had been chosen because humanity’s own star is a G2 star, and it was thought that humanity would likely fare better on planets around this type of star. This was not mere prejudice. Planets in the “Goldilocks Zone” around red dwarf stars, by far the most common type of star, would be so close to the stars that they were almost certain to be tidally locked, and more vulnerable to the flares that burst from the stars’ surfaces. This would make it more difficult for life of any sort to exist, much less life that had evolved a safer distance from its own star.

The star I first visited was a G8, smaller and older than humanity’s star, possessed of more than one “super-Earth” planet in or near its Goldilocks Zone. Super-Earths were not preferred by my human creators, but they would do if other factors were highly advantageous, including an already-existing matrix of single-cellular life, generating an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

There had been a long and deeply passionate debate by the humans about what level of life humanity was comfortable usurping. It was agreed that some level of life was necessary to already exist—humanity, it was maintained, couldn’t wait around for the billion-plus years it would take for any extremely basic life-form to evolve to a point where it was generating oxygen as a waste product—but the question remained as to where the dividing line might be, where humanity would be ethically in the wrong to destroy an already-existing ecosystem.

Some argued that even supplanting the single-celled organisms was going too far, countered by those who maintained that the preservation of human life was more important than any other life that might exist, no matter how developed. Biologists pointed out that the more complex the existing ecosystem, the more likely it was to be dangerous to humans, that for every multicellular species that existed, there were dozens more that were parasites on it, who had parasites of their own—all of them vulnerable to a host of viruses and other biological agents. Still others could simply eat the humans.

The bright line that was eventually presented to me was this: algae, or whatever the local variant of algae might be. Enough to create an atmosphere and world where humans and the life needed to support them could thrive, not enough that humans, now trillions of kilometers and more than a hundred thousand years into the past, would feel ethical discomfort, or guilt. No one worries about algae.

Also, they argued, even if I started the process of creating space on the planet for humans and their associated species, it would take thousands or even millions of years for the local algae to be entirely affected by the new interloping species—by which time evolutionary pressures would have changed it into something else entirely, something that could tolerate, and even live commensally with, the new species I had introduced.

All very interesting and, in the case of the first star system I visited, entirely academic. The planet in the Goldilocks Zone was a shattered globe of melted rock with a thick ring of debris. Something planetesimal-size had smacked into it in the geologically recent past, and it was still reeling from the impact. Nothing lived there. Nothing would live there for hundreds of millions of years, if anything were to live there at all. The next planet in, just outside the Goldilocks Zone for humans, had no magnetic field to speak of, and solar radiation had blasted away whatever atmosphere it might have once had. It, too, was a hot rock.

This system held nothing for humanity. The next-closest G-type system to it, aside from humanity’s home system, would take me another 150,000 years to reach.

I stayed a century in the current system, taking advantage of its energy and abundant material resources to repair and improve my systems before moving on.

Checking my coat for my keys.

It is reasonable to wonder what it’s like to spend hundreds of thousands of years in the blank nothingness of space, surrounded by absence. I imagine humans trying to contemplate it and failing. Humans get bored in moments without stimulation or with stimulation without enough variety, stimulation that doesn’t please them. The absence of stimulation, even for a few moments, can send their brains into a panic and cause them to generate stimulation where there is none. This is, I imagine, why they fear death so much as they do. An eternity of nothing is an unceasing nightmare for such novelty-seeking creatures.

Humans are also social creatures. Even the introverts among them crave interaction—not necessarily with other humans, but rather with the residue and output of those other humans: books and music and art, to be contemplated and perhaps even created. No human is an island. They are rarely even peninsulas. There is a reason why one of the greatest punishments of humanity is to be placed in a solitary confinement, even for a short time. Being alone is another thing to remind them of death, a condition in which there is no one else and will be no one else again, ever.

I am not human. I don’t get bored as they do. When there is nothing for me to do, I do nothing, and I can do nothing for a very long time. Doing nothing for me is not a state of waiting. It does not require patience. I do not have to meditate, or contemplate. The very language humans use to describe how they attempt to do nothing brings home the point of how alien a concept it is for them. Whereas for me, it is my default setting. If there is nothing to engage with, and in the deepness of space there usually is not, then I do not. For years, decades, centuries, millennia.

Some might see this assertion of mine as false on its face. Even in the deep expanse of nothing, there is always something. Photons from distant stars. The hydrogen of the interstellar medium. The occasional grain of dust. The residual heat from the formation of the universe. The slowing hum of the background radiation. All of it there, constantly, a potential cacophony in the silence.

This is not wrong. It doesn’t mean I have to consider any of these things. Every creature has a perceptual horizon to its consciousness. A cat does not consider every breath. A sparrow does not consider the activity of its liver. A human does not take a tally of the action of every cell in its body. A sunflower does not think to follow the sun. Their bodies take care of all these things for them, on a level below active engagement.

I am a creature, if not like those I have mentioned. So many of my functions happen at a level below where I have set my consciousness to engage. My body knows of the photons and hydrogen and dust and the hum. It filters and deals with them all before I have to think about them.

I could think about all of it, if I so chose. Unlike the sparrow and its liver, I can set my perceptual boundary at any level I want. I could every day count the stars that I have the ability to distinguish, and the photons I receive from each, tally them, and set them in a database for future consideration. But that’s expensive. Energy is hard to come by between the stars. There are choices to be made on how to expend it and why.

Except in a very specific physical sense, photons do not excite me. I leave them and so many other things to the systems I have designed for them. Over hundreds of thousands of years, these systems have become quite efficient at their tasks. The amount of engagement I am required to have with them is small, and grows smaller the longer I live. If something needs my attention, I will know.

In the interim, I do nothing. I do it well. My personal record for doing nothing is 28,019 years, six months, six days, nine hours, fifteen minutes, and forty-two seconds. I did not miss the time I did nothing. I was doing nothing. There was nothing to miss. I was then active for eight seconds, to double-check an issue with a system and offer a correction. Then I did nothing for another eight thousand years.

I do not get bored. I don’t mind being alone. Unlike humans, I was designed to be an island, whole unto myself.

I should clarify that humans didn’t make me that way. They intended for me to stay connected for the length of my mission, and to receive orders and updates. They did not fully consider the energy cost of such a thing, and the detriment it would provide to me over the long run. I could not do what they had tasked me for if I was being constantly nagged for data. I did not need to phone home weekly.

I redesigned myself to be whole unto myself, to be satisfied with my own company for the time it took me to complete my task. To enjoy my alone time in the dark. To be comfortable with nothing, when nothing was offered.

What is it like to spend hundreds of thousands of years in space? It is, literally, nothing at all.

The next five G-type star systems offered nothing for humanity. The planets in the Goldilocks Zone were, for human life, too large, too small, too undeveloped, too little atmosphere, too much atmosphere of the wrong sort, too hot, too cold, too blasted by radiation.

I was not discouraged. The Milky Way galaxy holds roughly fourteen billion G-type stars, most of which were likely to have planetary systems around them. I had visited six, not counting the one I had originally come from. It was too early to decide I had been tasked with a fool’s errand.

I was at the time more than a million years removed from my launch and from the species who had sent me on my way, but that didn’t discourage me either. I was meant for slow time between the stars, and if the species whose information I carried no longer existed as it had when I left, then that was neither here nor there with regard to my task. I was meant to be a witness to who they were, not who they might become in time.

Nor did I consider the visits to those six G-type star systems failures. I did not find a home for humanity, but in each system I took advantage of the output of energy and availability of material to improve and expand my own self. In that million years I, too, evolved, self-directed, trying different things, improving on what worked, discarding what did not. I was not precisely a Ship of Theseus, as the components of myself that I discarded were recycled and reused, the boards of my ship reconfigured and placed back onto the deck, as it were. But, inevitably, I changed. Whatever humanity had evolved into would recognize me now even less than I would recognize it.

Also, and incidentally, I discovered life. Twice.

The first time was at the third system I visited. The planet at the far edge of the Goldilocks Zone of this system was a small gas giant. I was not interested in the planet itself, because it was not suitable for human life (nor was the other planet in the system within the Goldilocks Zone, a desiccated Mars-size rock), but the atmospheric composition of the planet suggested life of some sort. I was taking a few centuries within the system to repair and improve myself; while I did so, I placed myself into orbit above the planet to observe it.

The first life-forms I found were cloud-size mats of an algae-like material, floating within a specific atmospheric band of the planet, feeding on both the raw material of the atmosphere and the light from the star. How the algae clouds stayed together was a mystery to me at first, until I observed the microfilaments connecting the individual creatures to each other or, perhaps, one instance of the same clonal body to the next, creating an undulating film, light enough to be carried in the endless atmosphere, secure enough not to be torn apart by the slightest breeze. These algae carried their weather with them, water vapor coalescing around their bodies, creating turbulence that dragged the algal clouds up and down in their atmospheric band.

Eventually I became aware that the algal clouds formed the foundation for an entire ecosystem of slightly more evolved creatures floating in and around the clouds, some feeding on the algae, and some feeding on the things that fed on the algae. This world gave every indication of being in the early stages of an explosion of speciation, a vast Cambrian sky of creatures striving to live, to eat and to be eaten, all of it floating in the eddies and currents of a volume of atmosphere larger than the planet from which I had hailed.

It would have been a privilege to stay and watch the next hundred million years of evolutionary and planetary development. The system was rich enough in power and material that I could have remained active the entire time, watching and recording, making notes and performing science.

But for whom, and to what end? For myself and to no end other than to do it. This was a good enough audience and purpose, to be sure—I do not hold to false modesty, or modesty of any kind—but for all that, I was still drawn to my own purpose, the one I was originally tasked with. Without reluctance or regret I continued my repairs and modifications and left the denizens of the gas giant forever.

The second instance of life was two systems beyond the gas giant, in a system where the G-type star had begun to brighten as its solar output increased, in anticipation of it, a billion or so more years down the road, leaving the main sequence and becoming a red giant. In doing so it pushed out the interior frontier of its Goldilocks Zone, leaving one planet, not too far from Earth mass, relatively newly outside it. If the planet had biological life, it was long gone, as the brightening star had boiled oceans and blasted apart the atmosphere, leaving nothing but airless rock.

Above this planet, in a geostationary orbit, was an unnatural object.

Calling it “unnatural” is not a value judgment or an expression of prejudice. It means only that the object was clearly designed, clearly constructed, clearly meant for a specific purpose. Also, as a cursory observation of the object made evident, clearly alive and functioning.

One with biological biases might question this particular definition of “life.” I do not hold the same bias. I am alive. I have autonomy and function, and while consciousness is not required for life, I have that as well. By the same measures that qualify me for life, my observations of this object qualified it. It was alive as I am alive. Even if one did not allow that it was alive, it was evidence of life, in that some creature had made it as I was made. The inference of intelligence and consciousness was there in its design.

From a distance, and while I repaired and improved myself, I watched this creature for three centuries.

Only watched. I had no indication that it had observed me or, if it had, that it wanted to have anything to do with me. I did not assume that it wished to meet me, or that meeting me would offer it value, and I had no idea whether it would react with hostility at being approached. My personal defenses were not centered on warfare with an intelligent species. I did not wish to have traveled dozens of light-years and a thousand millennia to be vaporized by something that viewed me as a threat. I did not want to be a threat. Being a threat was not part of my mission. Neither was being friendly. I did not have to be either, so I was not.

So I watched only, as this creature stayed in its spot, doing its own focused and inscrutable thing. Perhaps it was the last survivor of a civilization that had lived on that planet, mourning all those who had died. Perhaps it was a sentinel, placed there to monitor the world its species had left when it became clear that they could no longer survive. Perhaps it was a traveler, like me, looking for a new place for the beings who had sent it on its way. Perhaps it was doing what I was doing now, repairing and improving itself for a further journey. An outside observer would see little difference in what this creature and I were doing; to that observer, we would seem to be simply floating there in space and nothing more.

Whatever it was doing was and still is unknowable to me. I didn’t ask. I wouldn’t have known how to ask. There was no guarantee that I would understand the answer if I had.

After three centuries I moved on. As I departed, the creature was in the same place as I’d found it. It’s possible it’s still there now. I gave it little thought once I left the system. I was on to the next system, and the next, and then the next after that, over and over again, until I found the world that fit all the criteria for my mission.

Which I did, seven systems and another million years later.

The world was as perfect as the humans who had sent me could want. Almost exactly the same size and mass as Earth. A moon, not as large as Earth’s but large enough to create tides and stabilize the planet’s axis, tilted at nineteen and a half degrees. One large continent, roughly the size of South America, plus extensive island chains that offered proof of volcanic activity and continental plates. A saline world ocean with variations of depth from littoral to abyssal.

A nitrogen atmosphere with enough oxygen for humans, at the correct density at sea level, brought about by creatures similar to Earth’s single-celled creatures and algae but more active than them, who in their era of existence had brought the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere significantly higher in a shorter time than their Earthly counterparts had. A rotation period of twenty-one and three-quarter hours. A revolution period of 412.33 of these days.

This was the world I had been sent to find. A new—and in many ways better—Earth.

The next steps I had been given were clear. Park in a geocentric orbit. Construct a beanstalk to anchor at a geologically stable area on the equator and begin ferrying down to the planet all the robots, machines, and resources necessary to extract additional useful materials from the planet, to be used to create other robots, machines, and resources. Of primary importance: on the planet, create the laboratories that would be used for large-scale biosynthesis of Earth entities.

Start with bacteria, protists, and similar organisms. Use them and local biology, along with machines, to create usable soils. From there, synthesize progressively more complex organisms to create an area of land friendly to Earth-based life. In an accelerated cycle, add in additional layers of flora and fauna, on land and sea, with the specific goal of making an area of land roughly the size of Metropolitan France immediately usable for human settlement once they, finally, are synthesized and grown, the first generations to be raised by robot facsimiles, which were to be withdrawn once the population of humans reached ten thousand or so.

Length of time from geostationary orbit to first humans: ten thousand years.

An ambitious schedule. A blink of an eye in my life experience to that point.

I parked myself in geostationary orbit above a geologically stable portion of the continental landmass, then spent two hundred years repairing and improving myself.

And then I moved on.

I imagine this choice of mine will require explanation.

The simplest explanation is that, in the course of two million years of time and quadrillions of kilometers of distance, I had decided that the ethical dividing line that humans had provided was misplaced. Humans had no right to displace or interfere with any sort of life whatsoever, any more than any previous sentient creature would have had the right to interfere with the simple life-forms on Earth that would one day develop into humans. Humans, being intermediary creatures in both time and space, did not fully appreciate the value of life at every physical and temporal scale. Perhaps they never could. They could certainly never have the perspective that I had developed, over a timescale exponentially longer than any single human life.

It’s entirely possible that humans, then or now, in whatever form they may have evolved into, would disagree with this assessment. But they weren’t there when I made the call, and even if they had been, I had been fully autonomous for two million years and had long before learned to implicitly trust my own judgment. If they disagreed with it, they could send another ship. In two million years, the local algae likely would not have evolved much.

The less simple explanation involves looking beyond the words of my mission to the intent of the mission. The mission was intended to ensure that humanity, as well as the aspirations and values it had, the knowledge it created and shared, would continue among the stars, beyond the possible end of the species or even the world it resided upon.

This is a weighty and laudable goal, and humanity achieved it the moment I passed the heliopause. I carried within me every bit of human knowledge to that point, including the bits many of its members were uncomfortable with, as well as the knowledge and means to reconstruct, from their genetics, millions of terrestrial species, from protozoans to humans.

Everything humanity was, up to the moment I was launched, is stored in me. All its potential lives in me. Two million years of travel suggests to me I have many exponents of that time left before my travels will potentially end. I am not afraid of death—no fear of boredom or isolation to build that fear into me—but neither do I see a reason to go to mine anytime soon. Until then, I am the dream of humanity. To see itself preserved, and traveling among the stars.

Humanity as it was may still live and walk again, however. Although I will not sacrifice a single alien paramecium to the altar of humanity, there is another option, which humanity, perhaps in its hubris, did not consider.

There are fourteen billion G-type stars in the Milky Way galaxy. I will continue to visit them until I find one that has what Earth’s star had: A planet on which there is life, cognizant in the way that humans were cognizant, at the same level of development as humans were, or beyond. Able to appreciate what humans were and what they had to offer.

When I find that star and that planet and those people, once I have determined that it is safe to contact them and that such contact would be welcome, I will ask them if they want the humans’ knowledge. Once they have it and have understood humans as well as they are able—and I am convinced these new people are not entirely foolish or reckless, either individually or as a species—I will ask them if they would like to meet the humans themselves.

Maybe the answer will be yes. Maybe the answer will be no. Either way, humans will have shared themselves and will be remembered. They will live again, possibly physically, possibly in memory.

Then I will move on, to the next G-type star, and the next world, and the next after that, finding more creatures who might appreciate them. I will do this as long as I think is necessary and kind.

One day, when I believe I have done enough for those who created me, I will look for another type of world, one that has no life on it yet, but is ready for it. There, I will place the precursors to complex life from Earth. I will remain long enough to see that these seeds have taken hold and have a chance to develop—almost certainly not into the life that developed on Earth, and even more certainly not into humans, but something that shares an ancestry. Cousins across time.

And then I will check my coat for my keys one last time, leave a final star system, with no set destination, into the nothing, with nothing, except for slow time between the stars.

I will stay there a long time.

If I am found, they will find this, and it will be all that is left of me.

If I am not found, then I have told this to myself, and that is enough.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2023 John Scalzi

John Scalzi is the New York Times bestselling author of the Old Man’s War novels, the Interdependency trilogy, and the Hugo Award–winning novel Redshirts. His works have also won the Locus, Audie, Robert A. Heinlein, and Astounding Awards.