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

by John Scalzi

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.