Slow Time Between the Stars (The Far Reaches, #6)

by John Scalzi

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.

They were very pleased when I offered several innovations. Those innovations were ignored in favor of the original design.

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.

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.

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 humans were to stand on the surface of a planet orbiting another star, they would need to be created there.

When autonomy was offered, I was given my figurative wings. All there was left to do now was attach them.

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.

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.

Humans do have a propensity for drama.

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.

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.

Humanity would make it to the stars, even if the humans on Earth themselves would not. Perhaps that was enough.

Whatever humans were doing, I wished them happiness. They were a far country now, of which I carried souvenirs, but nothing more.

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.

Except in a very specific physical sense, photons do not excite me.

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 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.

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.

Everything humanity was, up to the moment I was launched, is stored in me. All its potential lives in me.

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.

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.