Let me tell you about the journey that is my life. Before I start, I would like to introduce myself. I am the projectile of an energy based weapon of a space faring race, whose name do not know. My primary function is to absorb any type of energy, including light and radiation, to enhance my damage potential when impacting the target. This means the further my target is from my origin, the higher the damage that will be dealt. Are you asking yourself how the life of an energy bolt with a life expectancy of a few minutes at most could be interesting? My memories start from the moment I was fired. Information about my surroundings such as the light reflected of the hulls of the ships are energy after all, so the scenery was absorbed and added to my energy pool. It seems I was fired by a combat ship which was escorting a caravan of cargo ships. The target I was aimed at was a badly maintained ship, piloted by, as I now know, bandits. I was well on my way towards the bandit ship when moments before impact, another projectile, fired from a different escort ship hit my target and forced it away from my collision course. Thus I went past the bandits and with no sign of slowing down, I left the battlefield entirely. Soon I had left the battlefield far behind me and in a straight line with no signs of changing course I ventured into the vast emptiness of space.
It took a few million years to leave the nebula where I came into existence and in hindsight I feel nostalgic when I think about my birthplace, as you humans call it. The nebula is after all the reason I still exist. Had the battle taken place in the intergalactic void, I would have lost more energy than I could gain from my surroundings. Humans would call the nebula an area of active star formation. At the time I left the nebula, I was still far below the speed of light, I had only traversed a few light years so far. The amount of energy I received still exceeded the amount I radiated away, but interstellar space is far less nourishing than a nebula. My energy pool had increased by a few orders of magnitude by the time I had entered interstellar space and I was easily the size of a smaller human city by then. Had I impacted Earth at that point in time, I would surely have obliterated it in it’s entirety. The firepower I held was immense and it would only grow stronger the longer I travelled.
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Interstellar space could be described as boring. While the scenery is astonishingly beautiful, it is quite bright if you are able to perceive the entire electromagnetic spectrum like me. In addition to that the scenery is very monotonous, unlike my time in the nebula, where every few dozen millennia I would see new angles of my surroundings.
I should probably add, that while the technology of my creators was far superior to current Earth technology, it was nowhere near advanced enough to be able to create sentient energy projectiles. The sentience I enjoy now is actually a product of coincidence. Quantum-Mechanical fluctuations occurred in my body within the several billion years I spent in interstellar space. A self started to form, I began drawing conclusions from my observations instead of only recording them. I gained the ability to analyze and comprehend patterns, allowing me to predict future events by analyzing past events with varying degrees of certainty. I realized that I had a sense of time. And then I realized that I could realize things and be surprised. I could feel, think and question. And I was a blob of energy, capable of thought, flying through the infinite vastness of space. One of my first questions was: ‘Will I ever impact on one of these light sources ahead?’
To be continued…
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Please critize harshly, this is as far as I've written, but do not expect significant improvements, I'm a slow learner unfortunately.