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

by John Scalzi

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

If they forgot me, it wouldn’t change what I was setting out to do.

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.

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

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.

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.

No human is an island. They are rarely even peninsulas.

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.

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.

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

And then I moved on.

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,

Until then, I am the dream of humanity. To see itself preserved, and traveling among the stars.

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.

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.