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

by John Scalzi

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.

We are all made up of smaller things connected to larger things, and in the middle, we are we, us, I, me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.