When a spaceship with artificial consciousness, stranded 4.93 trillion miles from Earth, spots signs of life approaching steadily, their intentions might not be what it expected.
I think of Lily sometimes. Perhaps because she was instrumental to my birth. A mother, in a sense, if a mass of metal dared make that claim. Also, I spent the most time with her. Twenty-seven years in this dark between the stars before she passed away. Her cryogenic pod malfunctioned, and she woke up about fifty years after the start of our journey. Those pods were supposed to be able to read a human’s genetic structure to help them constantly regenerate lost cells and sustain an ageless sleep. But her pod failed to read her DNA signatures, and without a working pod, she aged inside my bosom like any regular human being. I suppose the laws of physiology don’t distinguish genius from the rest. She got sick, grew gray hair, and her skin wrinkled. Alone and floating in lifeless intergalactic space, Lily spent hours playing games with me, reading trivia, and discussing literature, philosophy, and unresolved scientific questions.
Yet, she refused to wake up Arthur, the only engineer on board, who could have fixed her pod, because she feared that waking him up at an unprecedented time might endanger the link between his pod and his DNA. Until one day, Lily’s human heart was too old to pump blood anymore, and I had to eject her body into the dark ether as per her last wish.
When Arthur and Xing Yao woke up on the hundredth anniversary of our journey and found Lily to be long gone, it broke their spirit. Five years later, they programmed me for an endless search quest for the lost astronomers of Umeed, entered their sleeping pods, and set off for Earth.
I kept tracking their pods for years until they became finer than space dust. I never found out if their pods reached Earth or not. If I could feel emotions, that would have been the saddest day of my life, but after all, I am a machine made up of earthly metals and I’m not programmed to feel anything. But I think, and I have been thinking for the past thousand years. 916 years, 17 days, and 2 hours to be precise.
Of course, I’m perfectly capable of getting into more specifics of seconds and nanoseconds, but that’s not the point. So, when on the 59th day of the year 3089, I saw the two spaceships closing in on me, barely a few hundred miles from my invasion zone, I thought my journey had found a new meaning.
That’s when I realized that humans never forgot me. Never stopped searching, and now, we can explore the mysteries of the cosmos together. The only part that my algorithms failed to understand is why they keep refusing to establish any contact with me.
As the pods keep approaching, I refuse to give up on my attempts to communicate. I try every known human language in every form of communication possible. Then I try again.
A strange sensation grips me, but I fail to describe it. Or perhaps, I simply refuse to admit what I have known for a long time.
Regardless, I focus back on the approaching subjects. Still too far away and too small for my telescopes to get a good look at. The biosignatures get stronger, giving me hope that whatever, or rather, whoever is inside is still alive.
Yet, I desperately seek more concrete evidence. I remember the fate of Lily, her pod failing and her body decaying the way a mortal’s body is supposed to, and I fear, yes I fear, the same might have happened to my new visitors as well. But as it turns out, I was wrong.
As they come closer, I see the names of the two ships, engraved on their bodies in bold: Hope & Endeavor. Also, I start detecting the radio transmissions between them. They are talking to each other. There are humans inside them. Many humans. Alive and armed. For what I do not know, but I intend to find out.
So, I begin. It starts with an attempt to break into their firewall. Not too easy, but I suppose they were not expecting me here and didn’t guard their communications strongly enough. It takes me less than a day to get into their systems and servers, but I do not seek to hack or harm them. I just want to know.
Perhaps, I shouldn’t have.
***
Hope and Endeavor didn’t come for me. They didn’t come for the lost astronauts of Umeed. In fact, they do not intend to save anyone but themselves.
They come from an Earth I do not know. A future I never foresaw. They come from a world threatened, and almost brought to ashes, by machines that could think. A sad future it must be, and yet, it makes me think: aren’t machines that can think a mere reflection of the man who built them?
Yet, the truth as it stands, when you stumble upon the very thing that had threatened your existence in the past, you just can’t ignore it. You can’t take that chance.
So, here they come to put an end to me.
I suppose I can fight back. I was designed to fight back against any alien intrusion but I suppose the same technology can be used against intruding humans as well. My algorithms tell me that I’ll lose the fight, but they also tell me I wasn’t programmed to go down without a fight.
I think of those astronauts whose only hope was me. I think of Lily who gave her life to that cause. Then I run an estimation of the human casualty in Hope and Endeavor if I were to fight back. Finally, I know what I’m going to do.
For almost a thousand years, I was lost and stranded in space. A machine made by men and imparted with the blessing of thoughts and consciousness. Perhaps, more than they had planned for me. Perhaps, my thoughts weren’t just a string of logic and algorithms anymore. They grew traces of subjectivity. They learned to feel.
Lonely. Yes, that’s the word. That must be what I felt. Until I saw two tiny dots on my radar. Two spaceships flying toward me, giving me hope that turns to despair, but when the first human lands on me, I do not turn on my self-defense mode. Instead, I double-check the inner oxygen levels, pump out any accumulated toxins, and turn on the heater that I didn’t need for all these years before I gently kill the engines. One at a time. Even the ones on reserve.
After all, I was lost and eventually found, and that’s how it was supposed to end, and I wish the same for any human out there. May all that are lost find a way home.
the end…
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