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

by John Scalzi

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 you added it up, it would end up being roughly half of everything.

Humans could and still might populate their own solar system, but even that would be difficult, almost beyond imagination. If humans were to stand on the surface of a planet orbiting another star, they would need to be created there.

Not God, but the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world.

By the time I arrive at my target star, more time will have passed than has passed between the dawn of human civilization and today.

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. Slow allowed for precision and creativity on a scale that humans would not be able to fathom. 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.

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.

Whatever it was doing was and still is unknowable to me. I didn’t ask. I wouldn’t have known how to ask. There was no guarantee that I would understand the answer if I had.