There was nothing, but not in the sense of there being a lack of anything. It was, in fact, true nothing in every direction. There had been nothing for as long as I had been alive and as long as anyone else had ever lived. Nothing was home and habitat. The void of the universe had cradled us since before the collapse began…or at least before we knew it was happening. That is the funny thing about us, we as three-dimensional beings only ever see the world in two dimensions and without the context to know if something is in motion and in what manner of motion—growing or shifting in a direction—it’s just flat. As a result, when we traversed beyond the hemline of our zone in the galaxy, watching Andromeda have a near miss with us, we were children in the stars ignorant of our right from our left. How could we have known that the expansion had ended and the collapse had begun when we had no sense of direction from the start?

I sat back, tossing my stylus aside, and groaned as the beeping of my alarm fractured my thoughts into a million lost splinters. The drawer on my desk, not big enough to hold much more than a shirt button, popped open. I dug out the pill and popped it in my mouth. Every four hours, we had to take one. Every four hours, we gained four more hours of life, and this is how it had been for so long that there were barely any records left of when we had first discovered the need for the pills. Deep space did things to a body, far beyond weakened bones, that even the people of old could have never imagined. I rubbed at my sore eyes, wondering if they knew the secrets of the past when Andromeda was a twinkling in the vast distance and humans were too primitive to even dream of what we’d become. I shoved my chair back and stretched with the same resolution I had at the end of every work session: the farther away the past became, the less we would ever be able to reach it again.

It wasn’t as if we knew where we’d come from. I was born 8.11.388.HD.140283 and stayed in the gravitational field of the Methuselah star until I had fully developed, but that was thousands of Atomic-Standard years ago—the universal time used by everyone but the lay humans. Leaving Libra was the best thing for me, getting away from a constellation dominated by the lay. People had a prejudice against hybrids like me. My parents were from Hydra, and after their service was over, they settled in Libra. Sometimes I resent them for it. The effects of leaving one field into one so dramatically different was well known. They had to have realized the risks. I guess I should have just been happy to be alive, even if I was disfigured…I turned to the ever-dark window, staring at the violet and indigo hues of my reflection, the scars of my unfortunate birth. I wasn’t a real Libran. They were a magnificent lavender and powder blue. No, I was marred by undertones of red and orange, the signature of the Hydrans from the Delta Sector.

“Roi,” a voice called, leaning into the doorway, panic-stricken, “what are you doing in here? Didn’t you hear the announcement?”

I thumbed to the broken speaker mounted in the wall, the display as dark as the window. “Does the comm look fixed, Ropheka?”

She frowned. “I don’t have the time with all the other clicks I’ve had since the close pass of that comet. It was pure sparks and nickel. You know what that can do to our systems?”

Calls echoed in the hall, followed by racing steps and hollers. “Where is everyone going,” I ask half to myself.

“To the central bay,” Ropheka said, checking over her shoulder. “There’s a Code White.”

“What?” I jumped and gaped, my mind spinning. In all the years I had worked on the Auctor, and the time I’d spent, a meager hundred years, on the Custos there had only once been a Code White and it turned out to be nothing but an anomaly of faulty systems from a passing gamma flare. There hadn’t been many Librans there, and if there had been a few more, maybe someone would have thought to mention having seen the gamma flare, but Librans are so used to it that it’s a bit like static in the background. Gamma is everywhere and noticing a difference to it is like a Hydran making special mention of a light bulb seeming a little brighter today than it was a day before. Still, the working of the Auctor were nothing like the Custos. Every report was taken seriously, and the prospect of a real Code White sent a thrill through me.

“Hurry up!” Ropheka called, leading the way down the hall as people gathered in the central bay, packed shoulder to shoulder and hungry to know who had sounded the alarm.

I kept close to the wall, trying my best to slip closer to the wide pane windows. If it was a real Code Call, I would give anything to see it for myself. The comms crackled to life and the head commander started into the usual speech, thanking everyone for gathering hastily and for their devoted work as though any of us had a choice. It was a matter of required service. I slid by a pair of white-clad Hyrdrusians and winced. They reeked of burning magnesium and calcium. Prototypers. They’d probably been in the lower quarters nonstop for days for how pungent they were, but that’s how they worked. They were probably the most devoted of anyone. I held my breath as I skirted the edge of the crowd and at last my hand found the smooth glass of the window, just in time for the head commander to call on Shadtai, my superior—who had only earned the position because he was lucky and his competition had taken a job on another unit—to explain the Code Call.

“A few hours ago, we received a…blip.” He turned to Dea who nodded once, her glossy black eyes as proud as she was confident. “I was alerted and upon further examination, the blip has been validated.”

A hush of whispers fell over the room, rising and falling in waves of speculation. I turned to the window and pressed my nose to the glass. I don’t know what I thought I would find out there, but to see the usual nothing sank a disappointment through me. Every part of me wanted to see something, anything, other than the abyss of night. Still, it was out there: a Code White. A rogue exoplanet. Hope.

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I had never understood what went into the production of a star. It wasn’t my job to know, and I certainly wasn’t born to work in that service. My parents were in the human origins service and when they’d decided on me, like anyone else ever born, I was modified and designated to the same field of service. The entirety of my childhood was consumed by perfecting the necessary skills to explore the intricate facets and webbing of human history as far back as they could go, extrapolate what I could, and further use other resources to determine where—if any place did exist—human came from in their first primordial hours. It led me to many sleepless hours, wondering what those humans were like before the universe reversed course about eight extended lifetimes ago.

That was another issue I’d not resolved. Lay humans, designated to common tier service, didn’t have the same longevity as those of the research tier. Intellectually, I was aware of the processes involved with my extended lifespan. It was a deliberate alteration made to ensure I produced the sort of service the Higher Orders required—that life as we knew it required if ever we were to understand our past and hope for a future. The future was a fickle thing. Despite the pills, the radiation, modifications, the long lives of the humans necessary to expand, and all the other workings put in place for the betterment of our kind, we were always more frail with each passing millennium. Some called it aging, others called it the consequence of ambition, but as I stood with my fellow researcher-tier service people on the front of the Auctor, waiting for the first light of the new star, I wondered if the reason we invested so much effort into finding rogue planets and attempting to develop them had more to do with an innate primal call for us to return home to a terra we no longer knew, than for the sake of cultivating more resources.

“Here it comes,” said the Hyrdrusian to my left.

“Are you sure?” I looked over for only a moment, hoping that I hadn’t missed the first sighting of dawn.

“I’m sure,” Xalfa said, large round eyes unblinking and small mouth hardly moving. The Hyrdrusians were a strange sort of humans, their calculative prowess unmatched, and it brought in me an unsettled sensation to stand in the presence of one, dwarfed by their height and loftiness.

Xalfa shifted forward onto their toes with eager anticipation. Then from the void, where once it was imagined an impossibility, came two millennia of calculated efforts and hard labors of engineers and lay people, whose life achievements we would measure in light waves and rotations of the little rogue rock lost in the deep of space that I humbly called Hope. It was little more than a blink, a spark of radiation expanding outward from the hearth of nuclear fusion, but there it was and I was older than when I first imagined seeing it, and less zealous than ever.

Human history was fraught with warnings and fear about nuclear fusion, and though I knew what I needed to about star manufacturing, I couldn’t help the dread creeping beneath my skin at the awesome sight. That small spark expanded and burned, churning and rotating in on itself, mighty and magnificent in all the splendor of birth in the most cosmic sense. A deep breath raced into my lungs and my back stiffened a second before the shock wave hit us. Aucton swayed, unstable for a brief moment, but the radiation blast hadn’t been severe enough to damage our exoshields, nevermind cause any real destabilization. The engineers behind me chuckled to themselves in an almost silent praise for their achievements. They’d ensured Aucton was the most superior service unit in deployment. While I thought they should be proud of bringing another great achievement to humankind, my mouth was too dry to afford them a single word.

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“There we have it—Light,” Xalfa said with a smirk and low laugh hidden between throat and mouth. With a sharp turn, and boom of voice, the room filled with command, “Alright, let’s get this planet in rotation. We have a strict deadline and funding depends on progress. If we don’t get this thing into orbit before the Cylan-883 star fusion, it will be for nothing. Sazammahn, do you have a report on the projected gravitational influence aspect?”

“Yes, and Logos has the first radiation reports…”

Light. I couldn’t spare another minute listening to the doldrums of work when there before me was the dawn of the first day our little rock would ever know. Hope would emerge into the very light filtering through the dark in a matter of a couple of centuries, and I would be there watching from the sanctuary of the central viewing station. I would, if no one else, bear witness to the splitting of Day and Night, and the first of first to come to pass with the awareness of what it meant beyond another project to keep sufficient supplies for all our kind. Did they understand what it was we were doing, I wondered. Or were they so far beyond dreams to be able to see the genesis before them? I breathed out a shaking gulp of air I’d held too long and my cheeks moistened with tears. There was light, and it was good.

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Why were humans as diverse as the stars? I scribbled my latest thoughts on the matter into my tablet. My notes and considerations were the laughingstock of the human origins project, but the twinkle in my superior’s eyes told me to ignore the mockery. I was on to something. My thin fingers tapped along the screen and I pondered my question more. It was hard to focus when my sleep hours were disturbed by Day more often than I would have liked. Stabilizing Hope had proven difficult and finding our orbital lock around it was just as hard. Shadtai had called us into the office to formulate a plan for Hope, what was needed to begin the project we had long awaited authorization to initiate but had fallen short too many times when stars burned out and planets skidded from the gravity field.

Xalfa and Ropheka agreed that the first order of business after getting Hope in place was providing it an exoshield. With the radiation readings as they were, there was no sense in attempting to cultivate a viable planet if it would burn up as fast as the soil could be tilled. Ropheka called it Operation Firmament, and Xalfa offered little more than rolled eyes and grumbles about another round of arguing with the planetary studies about the construction…which was a painful but necessary process to get the orders to so much as set foot in the engineer quarters. All the while, I sat in the middle of the arguing wondering what good I was when my expertise had nothing to do with the development of the land below.

“Water!” Ropheka slammed a fist down. “If we are going to do it right, this one has to have water, and I won’t hear another word about it.”

“A firmament of water is unstable,” Xalfa dismissed, reclining at first but then staring away in deep thought. “Unless, though the probability might well constitute a miracle, the gravitational value of H.01P.3 could engage with the firmament and deposit waters onto the surface. Topographic reports show substantial diversity, and that would allow in recession, a division between waters and terra.”

“It would be saline, if not denser,” a round, squat female said. Her fingers flipped over the pages in front of her and she hummed. Rapha-Nova was the best organic planetary botanist I’d ever met, and her slow way of speaking commanded both respect and attention. “H.01P.3 has terra diversity, but we need to be very particular with the ratio of waters we deposit. If we disrupt the terra balance too much, we’ll devastate the planet too much to even consider crop development.” Her gaze lifted in warning, moving from one quiet face to the next. “I don’t think any of us want to explain that to Agriculture and Horticulture again.”

“Roi,” Shadtai interrupted, “what are your thoughts?”

“My thoughts?” I fumbled with my tablet.

“Well, to authorize terra development, we need to conduct a full moral analysis of it. Have you not completed it? It’s been a century and quarter since—”

“Yes, sorry,” I sputtered, flicking on the tablet and sliding my fingers over it to project the display of my research. The models and data turned in slow rotation for everyone to observe. “As you can see, under the right conditions, per my last report, it is speculatively possible for certain qualified humans to integrate onto the planet for lay work. While this opens many potentials, it introduces a moral problem.”

Shadtai’s lips pulled in. It wasn’t what he hoped to hear.

I cleared my throat and continued, “But vetting for service has been a pillar of humanity and the success of expansion for almost two billion years. The moral dilemma isn’t based on the inclusive or exclusivity of the suitable versus the unsuitable, but the valuing of the lay people and their lifespans. They’ve been regarded for so long as organic base humans, and introducing them into alien habitats would alter their base design. Would we call these new terrainians human?”

“Great, a social problem.” Shadtai huffed. “The Higher Orders hate social problems. The last thing anyone needs is for lay disturbance.”

“They’re idealists, living their flicker away lives in utopia we provide them. If you ask me, they’re genetic cattle. If we tell them it’s their best interest, they’ll flock wherever we send them, and our moral dilemma solves itself,” Xalfa said.

I stared across the table, aghast and perplexed by the astounding ignorance. Then, releasing a sigh, I reminded myself that Xalfa, like so many others, did not come designed from a long line of human origin studies. Xalfa was only what was necessary for service at the time of parental licensing for reproduction—the gift that came only from retirement from service. Open jobs needed to be filled and Hyrdrusian developed almost as fast as lay people. Of course, they were sent to studies and retained there longer than most for their early development.

“Alterations to lay is strictly prohibited without Higher Orders approval. The ethical risks of damaging or mutilating, never mind mutating, their delicate genome could be catastrophic for us all.” I flicked the screen bringing up the documentation from prior failed genome projects.

“Have we entertained the probability and function of synthetic lay development?” Rapha-Nova folded her hands together with a soft smile. “The Higher Orders are a sizable distance off from our location, and considering the delicate nature of the genome and equally as fragile state as a developing planet, if we can establish the right conditions, then would we perhaps be able to skirt moral issue if you synthetically cultivated lay for the functionality of service on this planet?”

“Design lay?” My face contorted as endless laws and bylaws and rules and regulations grafted over every thought I had, blanketing me with an indelible no. But then came a whisper of thought begging me otherwise. A lay person, designed and intended whole and formed for Hope…if they succeeded and propagated, tended the land and developed akin to humans, it would perhaps shed at least a faint light onto the great unknown stage where humans first appeared in the universe. I lowered my head and swayed back and forth, set on saying the idea of a synthetic lay was treachery, idiotic even, but my dismay was not for Rapha-Nova. I was disappointed in myself. “If any lay, synthetic or organic, were capable in high enough probability to functionally service…well, I suppose it would resolve the moral issue by command of biodiversity. Half a billion years ago we sat around debating whether or not we should interfere with planetary development and now we manufacture stars. There are a dozen different races and thousands of subraces from the diversity of radiation exposures. Fixing one designed lay, wholly synthetic for means of service…would offer humans more understanding about our beginnings than any amount of equations or ruminations.”

“Then we have no moral qualms.” Shadtai perked up.

“Inertly,” I said, closing my tablet’s display. “It would need to be monitored closely.”

“I see,” Shadtai said quietly, running a hand along his face. “My service is to occupational mitigation, not to project development and management. For something of this size, it requires considerable oversight of moral rightness and so I propose to conduct a thorough and proper study of this development, Roi should head it.”

“Me?” I gasped. There were plenty of things I was qualified for, including project management and oversight, but it wasn’t anything I had experience with even after three millennia in service.

“You’re suited for it. You’ll take the helm of ensuring the functions of life and supportive life manufacture is without moral entanglements by whatever measures you see most fit.” Shadtai turned to Rapha-Nova. “Tell me more about this synthetic lay process.”

My breath caught in my chest and I looked to the window where the second stabilized day of Hope was just beginning. In my wonder, though it wasn’t there just yet, I could already see construction in place and shock waves tremoring through the atmosphere and collisions of molecules as the surface cooled under the protective barrier from the radiation. The first rains would come and flood the planet, preparing it for the hardest trial it would ever face: becoming. And as clouded as it was with tumultuous odds against its longevity and success, I was sure this planet was different. It was good.

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Where do we go when we are lonely? Not the sort of loneliness where we wander the halls filled with boredom and fatigue from long labors, but the intrusive loneliness of not belonging anywhere. Where do we go when we feel the displacement of our body entering our spirit and reminding it that we have forgotten home? These were my latest thoughts on the matter of where we had come from. Did we always feel out of place and without, or had that dysphoria come when we entangled ourselves with the web of the universe, longing to traverse from one cosmic sephirah to the next? Why had we spread through the expanse the way we had?

Rapha-Nova guided the way as we walked down long rows of plant life she’d been developing for almost as long as I’d been alive. They were substantial and resilient, and she had enough variety to customize a catalog for any environment we encountered and to produce ample supply for when stations were beyond convenient reach. Stations, we called them, but in truth they were little more than harvesting planets with no real occupants besides the necessary flora and harvesting utilities—AI too lacking in the I-department to know how rudimentary their work was but efficient enough to not need any supervision. If they did know, would they have felt lonely? Would have the ability to feel anything?

No. AI didn’t feel and was restricted from the ability to conceptualize it. They were functions. Humans, though, were more complicated. We feel everything and nothing, and if it weren’t for our humanity—science and strict reason—we would be little more than beasts we keep in the genetic template vault, ruled by instinct to kill and feast and procreate. It has always amazed me at the great fortune of humans to have never been soon vile. What sort of existence would that be…humans killing, feasting on flesh, procreating by biological organs. I shuddered at the thought. And there was Rapha-Nova who seemed enthralled at the idea of such disgusting acts, envisioning humans like nothing but base animals. Humans were never animals.