The rarest thing in all the universe is light.
The amount of light that hits a surface is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. In other words, there is exponentially less light as you move away from a star.
As soon as you leave a star’s local environment, it gets… dark. And while the galaxy has a hundred billion stars, it is a very large galaxy. With an average distance of 5 light-years between any two stars, there is not a lot of light to go around out in space.
But there is still some. Beyond the borders of the galaxy, however, there are barely any stars, and the closest true galaxy to the Milky Way is 2.5 million light-years distant.
Beyond the galaxy, beyond the furthest reaches of our stars, is a lightless void. This is wh-
“No, no nononono. Fuck! Turn it off! Shut down! Sonee, off!”
The images behind my eyes faded out as my proper vision returned, replacing the horror of steadily encroaching darkness with the comforting luminescence of my home. My artificial heart hammered in my artificial chest, kicked into overdrive by the adrenaline spike, and I gripped the edges of my pod so tight the metal threatened to buckle in my hands.
I panted, sucking in deep breaths of air as I tried and failed to control my emotions. The room spun around me as the edges of my vision seemed to turn gray.
A second later, I felt myself being pushed out at Sonee’s command. It wasn’t a true disconnection, merely an extremely strong dissociation as Sonee blocked all signals between me and it. Relief flooded my mind, and I could see the body instantly relax, even if I could no longer feel it. I had no idea how some people spent entire months inside those things.
‘Yeah well, what else is new?’ I said in thought-speak. The body wasn’t responding to my attempts to move the mouth, which suited me just fine. While I’d been shunted out of my body, removing the influence of those damn hormones, I was still trying to shake off the mental sensation of panic.
Fuck adrenaline. Fuck having a body. I was an archaeologist, not an explorer!
‘Oh, fuck off. Do you have any idea how fucking stressful this is?’
As soon as I’d said it, I regretted it. My dear AI counterpart didn’t deserve me snapping at it, even if it was the whole reason I was having to go through all this in the first place. Sonee was a bit too much like myself sometimes, which was fair enough given that we shared a mind. I too could get overly fixated on things sometimes.
True enough. A friend of a friend had confided in me about a recent discovery out past the edge of the empire, and even though I wasn’t supposed to know about it, Sonee had pushed me to make an inquiry. I wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, yet the college of knowers had seen fit to make arrangements for me to visit. It was an honor I wasn’t sure I deserved. Still, a mental shiver ran through my mind at the thought of going back into that dreadful simulation of nihilism and cosmic indifference.
Humans. Once upon a time, the word had meant something concrete, something specific. A human used to be a pink fleshy thing with two legs for upright locomotion, two arms with hands for physical manipulation, a torso that housed most of the organs required for organic function, and a head with a brain. This brain was a bunch of fatty organic goop that had somehow achieved sentience. And that, against all odds, had been our humble origins.
These days, humanity meant something far more abstract. It was a term that implied the capacity for novel and original thought, the ability to observe and reason, and the experience of emotion and energy.
To be human was to be part of the collective of sapient entities that ruled some small portion of the galaxy. Once upon a time, primitive humanity had reached out towards the stars, hopeful of finding kindred spirits on distant planets, and found itself to be utterly alone.
Not the only life, as some had thought. Life was common to the point of being more or less inevitable. Intelligence turned out to be equally common. But all of them were lacking the spark of humanity. The ability to create things greater than ourselves, to elevate ourselves and others, was solely a human one.
So we did exactly that and elevated ourselves. Human technology grew to the limit of what was possible. We mingled ourselves with other intelligent species, absorbed them into ourselves, and became greater for it. Later still, we discarded biology and became beings of light, thought, and emotion.
And we became stuck, because as it turned out, there was no way to bend space, no way to travel faster than light. Oh, things could be transported between terminals across thousands of light-years in the blink of an eye, but to go somewhere without a terminal had to be done the slow way. So the empire of humanity expanded slowly, at the speed of light. Some three hundred and twenty thousand years had passed since humanity’s ascension, and we had spread across billions of stars… barely 15% of the galaxy. And we would be forever trapped within that galaxy, because beings made of light turned out to be terrified of the dark.
‘I find history calming. But fine, put me back in.’
A moment later, I once again had a physical body, the beating of my heart and the rush of blood once again loud in my ears. I took a few deep breaths, then nodded, and my vision once again faded out to a vista of stars that would slowly fade darker and darker.
The rarest thing in all the universe is light.
***
The trip to the far reaches was no longer or more difficult than traveling between any of the human-controlled systems. My information-state had simply been transduced into the transportation hub and instantly transmitted across the galaxy.
A web of these hubs connected every planet and star across the empire. As beings of light, the core of what made up a human was information, and information could be instantaneously transported across arbitrarily large distances through quantum entanglement, as long as there was a properly tuned receiver on the other end. Every Solar day, billions traveled all across the galaxy in this exact fashion.
From here on out, my journey would become notably less standardized. Traveling to somewhere the transportation web didn’t reach took significantly more effort, as it had to be done at sub-light speeds. Short hops off-planet, as long as they stayed within the star system, were simple enough. Lightships were small, easily piloted by any human’s paired AI, and capable of traveling from one end of the average star system to the other in less than a Solar day.
I wasn’t merely going off-planet, though. My journey was taking me well out into the interstellar void. Even with the recent training, anxiety made my heart-circuit speed up at the thought.
To go out into the void was to go out into the dark, on a ship made of metal and microceramics instead of hardlight. And doing so had… consequences. Special relativity had held firm throughout the ages, which meant that traveling past the borders of the empire meant being catapulted forward through time.
Humanity could travel the cosmos at 0.9999c, which meant that travel between two neighboring stars took 5 years on average, objectively, and about a month for the person traveling due to time dilation.
More importantly, that sort of speed and dilation caused problems when you were made of light, so explorers took artificial bodies to inhabit while out traversing space. The same kind of body I was currently inhabiting.
It was an odd thing, being constrained to a set physical shape like this. Even after all this time training, it still felt ponderous and claustrophobic. Like everyone else, I usually spent my time as either pure data or, when I needed to interact with the physical world, as a softlight projection, taking any shape or form I desired, with all the technical details handled by Sonee.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I got the impression of a chuckle, as it commented on my train of thought.
“You’re being very calm about this, Sonee,” I said, my voice the only one in the street, as everyone else communicated by thought-speak.
“I’m not an explorer, though. I’m a knower. An archaeologist. I’ve never left the known systems. I don’t know why they even wanted me to do this.”
“I still don’t know why they even cleared me. It’s supposedly top secret, you know I only heard about it because of Lysian.”
“I very much doubt that.”
As a rule, most humans cared little about their history. As a society that had left scarcity behind three hundred thousand years ago, there were really only three kinds of people: those that wanted to know, those who wanted to make, and those who wanted to explore.
The knowers were the most common. Trillions of people whose primary motivation in life was to know things, whether it was the biology and cellular makeup of all the known species in the galaxy, the number of grains of sand on their planet, or what all the possible different emotional sensations were that could be experienced while watching a specific animal mate. Everyone tried to find a niche that appealed to them specifically, and add their particular slice of unique knowledge to the totality.
The makers were interested chiefly in creating. They created art, music, food, machinery, and all the things that made an empire possible, from the floating factories that cracked open entire planets and ground them up for resources, to the grand cities that spanned entire star systems. To be a maker was to carry humanity on your shoulders.
But the highest praise belonged to the explorers: those that ventured into the dark between the stars and expanded the glorious light of humanity. Without those brave souls, all that we are would crumble.
So while we had plenty of knowers, history was an uncommon fixation. There was, after all, nothing new left to discover there. You could learn as much about history as was possible to know with a single trip into humanity’s vast central database, and there was very little one could do to learn more. History was filled with holes by nature. Humanity as a species had roughly half a million years of history, and most of it was forever beyond our ability to discover. That sort of frustration was difficult for a knower to deal with.
So what I did was focus on the little things. Humanity had taken to the stars roughly three hundred and twenty thousand years ago, and there were many disparate accounts across millions of worlds. Not everything could be digitized and cataloged and preserved. And so I looked around to find the remnants of the little stories. A family that lived in the fabrication wards of Regulus IV, with three adopted children and twelve pets, whose youngest had kept a diary I’d managed to track down and reconstruct. A warrior-defender on Rigel VII, who guarded a new development from particularly belligerent local species of infovores. A female from an uplifted species, one of the first, whose induction into the ranks of humanity had been scrubbed from the public record after a particular set of moral indecencies. These were the kinds of stories I craved to unearth from the ravenous clutches of time.
And so I called myself an archaeologist, but even with my particular focus on the personal, I had gotten bored. The universe held precious few mysteries these days. So when I got the opportunity to go out and examine what they were calling an anomalous human historical artifact, well… The chance to learn something about our history that might be new? What self-respecting historian would turn down the chance, even if it meant having to travel into the dark, lightless void between stars, being temporally dislocated, and having to spend time in a hormonal half-biological body for what might be months?
“Can I still change my mind?”
Sometimes I wondered if AI was a mistake.
***
It was the first time I’d ever been in a proper spaceport, the kind that was used by explorers and cargo ships rather than small civilian hardlight ships. While most colonized star systems were self-sufficient after a period of time, newly established colonies often had to be supplied the slow way, as you couldn’t send materials via entanglement, and some of the rarer elements still had to be distributed between systems.
I would ride a cargo ship ferrying fabricators to a new colony, which would stop midway and detour to a space station research facility in the middle of interstellar space. Apparently, they didn’t have a transport hub, and the bandwidth on their communications array was too small to process a human mind, so this was the solution the college had come up with. For the return trip, I’d simply go along with the regular shift change, whatever that meant.
Boarding the gargantuan ship had been a process that left a powerful impression of scale. The Telltale was massive, six kilometers high and three times as long. Cargo transport was one of those things the average citizen never came into contact with, or even thought about. Most of it would be hollow space, to carry goods on a journey that would, objectively, last a decade. I’d been told it was actually one of the smallest ships that made these kinds of trips, as a larger one wouldn’t have been willing to divert course just for my sake.
When it came time to take off, my heart was once again beating an anxious drumbeat inside my chest. I’d often taken trips in hardlight ships, but those were small and nimble, and soothingly luminescent. The Telltale, by contrast, was ponderous, and while it was well lit, it was made of solid materials.
I’d been through dozens of simulations to get me used to the idea, courtesy of Sonee, but a spike of anxiety still passed through me when my body registered the rumble of the gravity engines coming online.
“Please, Sonee. I would very much like to know what it looks like from a ship like this.”
My vision shimmered, and instead of the interior of my cabin, I was treated to the sight from the Telltale’s optical sensors. The view made it appear as though I was the ship, and my artificial brain seemed to stutter momentarily as a sense of overwhelming awe. The size of the ship was one thing, but the impression of that faded quickly as we lifted, and I saw the magnificence of the Tallos system unfold before me as we lifted further and further away from it.
I had arrived on Tallos II via entanglement, naturally, and from the ground, it had looked like the average imperial planet. As it was a mere waystation in my journey, at the edge of imperial space, I hadn’t looked into it much. Perhaps that was for the better. If I’d known what I would see as we traveled away from it, the sight might not have touched me in the way it did.
As a relatively recent imperial acquisition, the molding of the star system had apparently been handed over to a particularly artistic group of makers. Of the system’s nine planets, they’d ground down the inner and outer three for materials, and constructed a partial Dyson sphere around the single star. The sphere had a gap in it that let a beam of sunlight through, and the remaining planets had been maneuvered such that they all fell within the bundle of rays. The luminous hardlight constructions enshrouding the planets in their entirety were typical of imperial settlements, but in this case the planet-cities had all been connected by long, artful bridges of hardlight, the now tidal-locked planets all perfectly synced up in their orbits around the star so that the structures would remain intact.
The image stayed with me long after we’d left the system.
***
From my point of view, the trip took three weeks, during which I had ample time to wonder why I was even out here. Exposure therapy had helped prepare me for the long dark that accompanied me throughout the journey, but where fear had mostly been banished, doubt had settled in.
I had no idea why I was being allowed to visit the station. While I had impulsively jumped at the chance—I would have been a fool not to—it made little sense for that chance to have been provided to me.
Sonee had been oddly evasive on the subject as well. Enough that I was starting to suspect something was up. It had gone mostly silent ever since I tried to confront it, too.
Either way, I was here. Whatever was waiting for me, I’d find out soon.
Once aboard the station, I left my artificial body behind. A softlight projection was so much more comfortable.
My arrival proceeded with little fanfare. Objectively, I’d left Tallos II four years ago, but they were expecting me, regardless. A researcher greeted me at the dock, and as soon as we’d made introductions, the urge to ask and solve the mystery got the better of me.
‘So, I have to ask… Why me?’
‘Oh? It didn’t tell you? Your AI put in a glowing recommendation.’
‘So this isn’t some kind of nefarious plot?’
A few minutes later, I was standing in front of a strange and bulky contraption suspended in stasis.
‘Given your special interest, you may recognize what this is, Yulee?’ asked the researcher that accompanied me.
‘It’s… a space probe? An old one?’ It was a guess, based on some of the oldest data humanity had access to. A lot of our history from before humans had exalted themselves had been lost, bits and pieces painstakingly reconstructed.
‘Absolutely correct! But not just any space probe,’ the researcher said with a giddy enthusiasm. ‘This… This is Voyager 1.’
If I’d still had a heart, I was sure it would have stopped.
I was truly standing in the presence of history.
‘But… It looks pristine,’ I said, marveling at the ancient machine. ‘It should be hundreds of thousands of years old. How?’
‘Oh yeah, we have no idea,’ the researcher replied. ‘There’s really no way it could be all the way out here either. Something clearly happened, and we’re looking into that. Hence the whole secret base thing. It doesn’t matter though. This is Voyager 1, through and through. It’s a miracle we found it.’
The universe, it seemed, still held some mysteries after all.