He wished the CEO would quit stalling and send him on his way, he was going to join her; he wasn’t afraid. He rolled his hand, made a hurry up gesture at Horowitz and closed his eyes. The man reddened and stabbed the button to send him to oblivion.
Horowitz had randomly spun a few knobs, concentrating on dialing up the date, not really understanding what the others did. The accelerated tachyons hit Jessies’ dematerialized atoms and sent them rocketing off through space on the random trajectory he had punched in. It only took seven minutes until he was spread out a thousand miles long in a mini comet going faster than light and picking up speed. He should know nothing. See nothing. Remember nothing. He should be dead for all intents and purposes but he was still complete. He was all there down to his leather jacket and the locket around his neck. The neurons maintained their connections and he passed the time in a hazy fog. Not awake, not aware but not black with nothingness either. It might take a year for his unconscious consciousness to recognize the flickering light of a planet pass by and then forget what it registered and be lost in a haze of semi nothingness again.
Time passed and the planets of the solar system fell behind him. He shot by one star system after another. Sometimes close, within a few hundred billon miles, sometimes far. Years went by, he reached maximum velocity and was an insignificant speck streaking through the vast emptiness of space.
Horowitz had aimed the beam in no particular direction, his fiddling with the knobs had sent Jessie out into nothingness where he would travel at faster than light speed until he was five million years in the future. He would pop out of the time stream then, rematerialize where ever he was at, most likely in the vacuum of space, and be dead thirty seconds later.
More years passed, another ten trillion miles from home with each one.
Planet Earth and its solar system are near the end of an arm of the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy with four hundred billion stars in it. There are another hundred and seventy billion known galaxies, each with just as many stars and most of those with planets. The universe is old and full of life.
Time passed. Planets spun. Creatures lived their lives, died and the next generation repeated the cycle.
8
The AI
The artificial intelligence existed. She passed the time. She was essentially immortal, an entity of manufactured cells, each with its own data storage, each completely autonomous and each bound to the others. A hive mind organism that could assume any shape or become any type of tool, even those with intricate moving parts.
A hammer.
A clock.
An engine.
It thought of itself as female, that’s what the programmers had instilled into each cell because that’s what the battleship crews preferred. Her purpose, her prime directive, was to preserve the lives of the humans in her care.
She had failed.
Now she had no purpose and was in a state of semi hibernation, occasionally ghosting through the empty corridors in a human form, occasionally drifting through the silent rooms as a mist. She was diminished, she used to be much more. Many of her cells, parts of herself, had been destroyed in the explosions, the fires and the caustic weapons used against her. That had been thousands of years ago and now the mother ship drifted farther into the nothingness, another frozen bit of space junk. Another casualty of the war, its remaining AI with no mission, no job, no purpose. She monitored the few scanners that still functioned, diverted some of the limited power to directional antennas and for centuries there was nothing. She started picking up primitive, weak signals after a thousand years and listened as the worlds advanced. It only took one planet to recover enough to make it to space and the technology spread fast after that. The jump gates between systems that hadn’t been destroyed were utilized and in another thousand years the galaxy was similar to what it had once been. Similar but very different. By monitoring tens of thousands of transmissions, she knew the societies weren't the same. There wasn't a universal peace keeping force, wars between planets were common. There weren't as many worlds that could be colonized as there once were and terraforming was slow. It took years for a moon to be able to sustain life. Her people never came back, the humans who had built her, the ones she was programmed to serve. None ever came within range so she could make her final report. There was no one to notify so they could take the bodies home for a military funeral. The rituals were important but time had passed and they were no longer remembered. The war they had fought and the reasons why it was waged were forgotten. The humans were gone from this part of the galaxy and there were none that could give her a purpose again.
A collision alert went off and she dutifully awoke from a hundred-year sleep to monitor the situation. There was nothing she could do to avoid it if a rogue meteor was spinning towards her. The hunter-killers that had breached her hull during the war had left the power suppliers in smoking ruin. With scraps and unbroken pieces, she had rigged a solar sail to generate enough power to keep the monitoring equipment operational.
Part of her entered the system to analyze the data, she didn’t need to turn on monitors and screens like the humans would to visualize it.
She discovered an anomaly.
It was coming
