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

by John Scalzi

what is a wheel without an axle?

Humans do have a propensity for drama.

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

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 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.

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.

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.