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

by John Scalzi

I was at the time more than a million years removed from my launch and from the species who had sent me on my way, but that didn’t discourage me either. 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.

My personal defenses were not centered on warfare with an intelligent species. I did not wish to have traveled dozens of light-years and a thousand millennia to be vaporized by something that viewed me as a threat. I did not want to be a threat. Being a threat was not part of my mission. Neither was being friendly. I did not have to be either, so I was not.