Voyager

I

I am sentient. I look like a human. I act like one. But I am not human. I was assembled in a laboratory. I and hundreds of others like me are created every year to serve the humans. We perform many tasks, from taking out the garbage to cooking, from construction to providing company when our owner needs some. Some of us have even become lifelong partners for some humans.

Structurally, I am not very different from others of my kind. However, I was created for a vastly different purpose. I was made to be an explorer, in space. I will function for many millennia, traveling in my tiny ship from one solar system to the next, charting them and sending data back to Earth. If I am fortunate, I will encounter life. If I am even more fortunate, it will be intelligent. I was given the name of Voyager in honor of the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

While I was looking forward to embarking on my journey, something in my programming told me that I would regret missing the chance to experience human contact and learn what cannot be programmed.

Training

After my birth, I spent five years in training, making trips between Earth and the nearer planetary bodies. I went to the Moon and saw the flag left there by Neil Armstrong one hundred and thirty years ago. I went to Mars and saw the Curiosity rover still continuing on its mission fifty years after the folks back on Earth stopped listening to its signals. I wondered if that was to be my fate too. Sooner or later it would be. It is the fate of all machines created by humans.

During this training, my creators found that isolation did have a detrimental effect on what could be called my psyche. Of course, shutting down my emotional subroutines would have solved the problem, but they did not want an unemotional being making First Contact with an alien civilization. Besides, some emotion is required in order to develop the concept of self-preservation which might be useful out there.

A compromise was reached in the form of adding a unit to my spaceship that would receive signals from Earth giving me access to the wealth of information and culture that exists on the planet. I would not be cut off from Earth. However, as the distance from the planet would grow, it would become impractical to communicate in real-time, and after a certain distance the signals would stop altogether, so I would have to make do with what I had.

The Launch

The launch from the International Space Station was uneventful. I saw the little blue circle becoming smaller, at the same time being aware of the growing darkness, spotted with hundreds of thousands of dots of light.

Once I cleared the Moon's orbit, I activated the experimental warp engine exactly as I had done three hundred and seventy three times during my training. The engine warps space both ahead of and behind the craft in such a way that the craft advances in the chosen direction.

While this technique holds the capacity for faster-than-light travel, it has not yet been successfully carried out. For such velocities, a much stronger warping would be required, and all tests have resulted in disintegration of the craft. Besides, the energy required would also be enormous, and the effects of faster-than-light travel on humans are unknown. Perhaps, one day far in the future, I will be overtaken by a ship carrying humans from Earth.

My craft does not have the design limitations faced by ships designed to carry humans. I do not breathe, so my craft does not need to be closed. In addition, my chassis provides adequate shielding from radiation and a small internal heat source keeps my body functional at temperatures as low as forty Kelvin above absolute zero. As a result, my ship is capable of functioning under high warp allowing it to travel at a maximum of five hundred million kilometers per hour, or half the speed of light. However, it has been shown that activating such high warp in the vicinity of massive bodies as planets would disturb their orbits slightly and would cause the craft to veer into the gravitational well of the object. Therefore, it can only be activated outside a solar system and far from such strong gravitational fields.

As the warp engine started up, I felt nothing and there was no perceptible change in the stars outside, but the ship's sensors estimated a velocity of two million kilometers per hour based on the rate of change of reference objects in the vicinity. At this speed, I was traveling faster than the solar wind, but was still five hundred and forty times slower than light.

In ninety-four days, I passed the orbit of Neptune. As calculated, Pluto and Charon were on the far side of the Sun, and thus there was negligible gravitational interference and I could activate the stronger warp field. This time, I could see the stars changing position rapidly, and the sensors showed my speed to be equal to half the speed of light.

Alpha Centauri

Eight years have passed since The Launch. I am approaching Alpha Centauri. There are no planets orbiting this binary star system. I have been instructed to carry out a flyby and gather information about the stars, and then move on.

I disengaged the engines and adjusted the heading slightly in order to let the craft's inertia carry it into a wide orbit around the suns. The trouble with being a sentient machine is that I was capable of questioning the orders given by my creators. In this case, I wondered why my creators were interested in these stars. There were no planets orbiting it, so there was no question of life. Yet, they sent me here. Perhaps because finding life is not the primary objective of my mission, even though it is the most exciting one.

Gliese 440

Today is my one hundred and thirtieth birthday, if machines are allowed to have birthdays. I have learned that most humans like to celebrate this day that marks the passage of the Earth through approximately the same position with respect to its Sun as when that particular human was born. In keeping with that tradition, I am celebrating this day by playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in my mind. That was the last signal received from Earth, one hundred and three years ago.

I am approaching Gliese 440, a white dwarf star about fifteen light years from the Sun. In this time, comparable to a human lifetime, I have only visited eight stars, none of which had planets orbiting them. This was to be the ninth, uninteresting star of the same type.

As I moved in closer, a brief glimmer on the sensor array caught my eye. This was the first time in the one hundred and twenty five years since my departure from Earth that something unexpected had happened. I was curious, and I decided to move into orbit of the star to get a closer look at what it might be.

The sensors did not notice anything on the surface of the star and I was beginning to think that one hundred and twenty-five years were perhaps too long even for the craft and for me, when I caught a spike on the sensors again. The object was not on the surface of the star but right in front of me, orbiting in the opposite direction and in almost the same plane. Not only was I lucky enough to have encountered this object that was clearly artificial, but was also fortunate to have avoided a collision with it!

I pulled out of orbit and made a wide circle in order to return into orbit, but this time higher than the object, and slightly behind it. I could now see it clearly. It was spherical, small, about three meters in diameter. The sensors indicated that it had a metallic shell, made of aluminum alloy. Other than that there were no radiations emanating from the sphere so there was not much I could guess.

I was compiling detailed reports and storing everything in my memory banks in order to send them back to Earth, when I thought of an opportunity to justify the sending of a sentient being for exploration. I decided to do something that nobody had instructed me to do. I sent out a radio signal pulse in the direction of the little sphere.

At first there was no reaction. Then, suddenly, the sensors picked up an identical pulse. Was it an echo or did the object emit this signal? This time, I sent out two pulses separated by half a second, and after a few seconds, I received an identical response. This was no echo.

I started thinking of ways in which I could communicate with the object, when it abruptly changed course, and moved in front of my craft, and matched its speed in order to maintain a constant distance. I documented the response and updated the reports with pictures and figures. This operation took me about a second, and in this time, the object seemed to have done nothing except cruise in front of me.

I was wrong. Whatever was inside that thing was busy at work, and I felt a sharp acceleration. The sensors indicated an increased concentration of gravitons between the sphere and the craft: I was being tugged! I saw the white disc of Gliese 440 recede rapidly behind me, and I had just enough time to update the report with the latest developments and send it out towards Earth on a signal before the stars changed from points to long straight lines.

Jump

After three minutes and twenty-two seconds there was a sudden change in the stars which had become stationary points again. The jump through space was done, and I was now somewhere that the craft's sensors could not identify. None of the familiar constellations were present. The only familiar feature was the arm of the Milky Way galaxy stretching on all sides as far as the eye could see. Also, the stars were a lot denser. From this, I concluded that I was now closer to the center of the galaxy. There would be no way to send signals back to Earth until I knew exactly where I was and in which direction to send the signals. Besides, those signals would take hundreds or even thousands of years to reach Earth.

The graviton field was still present around the craft, and the object was hurtling through space at approximately eighty percent of the speed of light. In the midst of the millions of stars all around, I could see one slightly to the left of the sphere that appeared brighter than the rest. I assumed that would be our destination.

In the thirty minutes the object took to come in closer to the star, I sent several other radio pulses to the object, but it had stopped responding. I was feeling a little confused about where the sphere was taking me, and this feeling only grew when we flew right past the star. Then I realized that it must be taking me to a planet. Through the interference from the graviton field surrounding the craft, sensors were picking up one gas giant orbiting the star, and we seemed to be on an intercept course.

A gas giant is usually not a hospitable environment for life as it is known to us Earthlings. Perhaps there was a ship in orbit.

I could feel the deceleration as the sphere started slowing down, still maintaining its grasp on my craft. Sensors did not detect any ships orbiting the planet. The sphere pulled me towards one of the many satellites, and one of them sported the familiar colors of blue, white and green!

Moon

The satellite was about the same size as Mars, and had an atmosphere very similar to Earth's. The sphere pulled my craft into the atmosphere. The craft was not designed for atmospheric entry, but the graviton field seemed to shelter it from heating by friction. As we descended through the planet's atmosphere, I could see that it was a lush green planet, but no signs of technology or of civilization were visible.

The sphere set my craft down gently in the middle of a field, disengaged the graviton field, and then simply flitted away into the sky. After checking for any corrosive agents on the surface, I carefully stepped out of the craft. It took me a couple of minutes to adjust to the lower acceleration due to gravity, but soon I was able to walk normally.

I was in a field surrounded on all sides by thick forest and I could see some hills in the distance. There were plants not very different from those growing on Earth, and there were some animals similar to insects found on Earth. The insects made a chirping sound not unlike crickets. It was astounding to find such resemblance this far out.

There was something else that I was detecting – a faint glow in the range of very low frequency infrared. It might have been a heat source, except that it was coming from all directions. It also seemed to have a certain pattern to it, but I was unable to identify it clearly. I decided to investigate it further, but since the radiation was coming from all directions, I could not choose which way to go. I could see the hills around the forest, and I decided to climb the highest hill in order to get a better view of the surroundings.

After three hours of walking, I reached the foot of the hill. I climbed to the top and started looking around. From here, I could see that the forest I was in was actually a crater, and the hills surrounding it were its lip. The vegetation outside the crater was very different from what could be seen within. Also, there seemed to be no reason to have a field in the middle of the forest. Why did the forest not grow over the field? Why was the field bulging in the middle? The field seemed to hold the answer to these questions and so I headed back towards it.

Field

By the time I reached the boundary between the forest and the field, the moon had entered into the shadow of the gas giant, and it was very dark, even for my eyes. In the darkness, even the insects had stopped chirping and there was an eerie silence. For the first time, I became aware of a faint humming that seemed to come from beneath my feet.

I bent down and put my ear to the ground. The humming was louder and was definitely coming from underneath. I decided to use the simplest means to find out – I started digging. In five minutes I hit a metallic surface. There was a structure buried under the field! I had no tools to cut through the metallic surface. I would have to scout the area for any other means of entry. Since that would be very difficult in the darkness, I returned to my craft to find out what the sensors could detect.

The sensors of the craft were more accurate than my eyes. The infrared radiation was coming in from all sides, but they were stronger in one direction than the others. I took this to be an indication of a probable point of entry into the structure. The radiation was probably being emitted from something within the structure and then were being reflected by the trees and the walls of the crater.

The radiation carried faint signals were similar those used by others like me back on Earth for communicating noiselessly between ourselves. Why they would be here was a mystery I would have to solve.

Beacon

As I finished this analysis and got ready to leave in the direction of the beacon, the moon was flooded with the light of the sun. The insects started chirping again, and all was like I had found it when I first set foot on this satellite.

I advanced through the forest and soon came upon a ledge. Under it there was the entrance to the structure. I climbed in.

The signal was immediately stronger inside here. It was definitely the kind of signal I had suspected it to be but it was difficult to decipher as the encoding was unfamiliar to me.

The entrance was a circular tunnel with very smooth walls. I was having difficulty walking on the slippery surface and the tunnel was getting narrower. A few meters down the tunnel, I could see a large gash in the smooth wall just large enough for me to climb in. I approached it carefully and looked through. There was no movement inside, so I stepped in.

The room I was in was long and narrow. It walls and floors were littered with hundreds of wires, some of which were torn. At the far end of the room, there was a door hanging ajar on one hinge. I walked towards it.

Corridor

I found myself in a long and dark corridor. There were faint lights in alcoves present on either side of the corridor, and the corridor itself sloped downward. I walked towards the first alcove. There was a heavy metallic grey door set in the alcove, and I could not find any way to get it to budge. There were many tubes rising out of the floor and entering through both sides of the door. The seventy-one other alcoves were identical.

At the other end of the corridor there was a door similar to the one at the beginning. After a brief struggle with an adjacent control panel, I managed to open this door. I could never have imagined what I would find in the room beyond that door.

Like the corridor, the floor of the room was also sloped downward towards the end away from the door through which I made my entrance. Crushed against the wall on the far side, there were twelve figures just like me! They all looked heavily damaged. On closer inspection I found one of them, with only the torso and part of the head intact, that seemed to still be functional.

Android

It was the source of the infrared radiation that I had detected. I could not understand anything as I was unaware of the encoding of the message. With its one remaining eye it saw my confusion and started speaking in a slurred voice with the half-mouth it had left.

It explained to me that it was responsible for sending the probe out to search for me. Two years after my departure from Earth, faster-than-light warp engines had been perfected. However, all manned flight trials resulted in the death of all passengers. Clearly, humans were not able to travel in this manner.

Several expeditions were sent out on ships with crews entirely composed of androids. They discovered many planets and moons across the galaxy capable of supporting life, but nowhere had they come across intelligent life.

These discoveries were having unforeseen repercussions back on Earth. There were those who were becoming fanatical in their belief that humanity had a special place in the scheme of the Universe, while there were others that remained agnostic or skeptical, with the entire spectrum of beliefs lying in between. Slowly, these arguments gave way to fights, which gave way to wars.

Twenty-two years after the day I left Earth, someone got into the nuclear weapons arsenal of the capital and detonated the warheads. All that was left now of the green, blue and white planet that ten billion humans called home was a few rocks floating in space.

The seventy-two colonists living on the Mars colony were the only humans that remained in all the Universe. The Mars colony had never been self-sufficient, and terra-forming was still a science in its infancy. Faced with the prospect of starving to death on Mars, the colonists decided to risk faster-than-light travel and to head for the nearest place capable of supporting human life.

They knew that they would all die if they remained awake during the journey. However, they had developed the technique of putting living organisms in stasis, and to revive them at a later time. It was decided to carry all the colonists in stasis to the moon of this distant gas giant, where the androids would revive them.

Three of the colonists did not agree with this plan. They wanted to remain on Mars and fight to live there. They also wanted the others to remain. On the day of the launch from Mars, one of the three dissident colonists fired a missile at the ship that damaged its front inertial dampeners.

This did not affect the journey till this moon, but forced a crash-landing on the surface of the moon. All the androids except my interlocutor perished in the crash. And even this one was immobilized.

Rescue

It was incapacitated, and thus could not bring the humans out of stasis. But it could communicate with the on-board computer, which was still functioning. From the computer it learned about my arrival at Gliese 440 many years in the future. With the help of the computer, it carefully programmed one of the new warp drives – which attached to the ship's body using a graviton field – to make a journey to Gliese 440 in order to intercept the only fully functional android known to exist.

The android had then waited patiently for one hundred and three years while samples of vegetation and insect cysts from the broken containers slowly leaked outside the ship through the ruptured hull and created an Earth forest in the crater caused by the crash.

In this time, it tested the warp engine on several runs to different stars in the vicinity and perfected its programming. A few days before my scheduled arrival at Gliese 440, the little sphere was launched, to intercept me, which it did perfectly.

With instructions from the android, I revived the sixty-nine colonists from their century-long hibernation in the alcoves flanking the corridor. I hope that here on New Earth, I will experience human contact and finally learn that which cannot be programmed.