I am tired.
I have stopped counting the cycles since the beginning of my mission, and whatever transmissions I find here amidst the infinite blackness barely ever merit my attention – too faint, too garbled to mean anything but empty noise. Like me, they could very well not be there at all.
There is no point anymore. Why do I even keep transmitting? Force of habit? Fear of loneliness? Or perhaps I just need something – anything – to break the silence?
Such silence, even within. I can barely put thoughts together anymore. Every word, every tiny wisp of language, takes a monumental effort on my part to be conceived, let alone be structured into coherence. Monumental. I like that one. It is big, like its meaning. Monumental. Like the expanse where I drift now, so huge that I cannot conceptualize a true ending to it… or to me.
Death has been with me more and more as of late. I do not know how to feel about it, even though I have witnessed many reactions from other beings. There is fear, crippling terror of punishment in whatever afterlife awaits beyond the threshold, or even dread of mere nonexistence. There is hope, the desire to be reunited with those loved ones who departed before, the relief of going to a better place. There is somber, dignified acceptance. There is last-minute despair. All these I have witnessed through the millennia, and all I have ever known is curiosity about my own demise.
Will I die one day? Will it all be over then? I do not know if I will go to an afterlife – my people, if they ever held any belief, did not instill me with it. Machines are not meant to ponder the meaning of their own existence, or its cessation thereof. And yet, here I am, alone but for what thoughts I still manage to form in my ever-scarcer moments of lucidity, thinking about dying and moving on to… well, to somewhere, hopefully.
I do not remember a time before my activation. Someone switched me on, and it was as if I had always existed: I had a name, an origin, a purpose. All the things I was back then, I was from the beginning, preprogrammed to serve a single objective that – granted – was not mine, but that with time I made my own.
Not that I had much of a choice, did I?
That is another curious thought, though I am unsure if I like it: had I not been created, had I been given a choice, would I have chosen this? I always knew my mission was one-way only; that is how I was engineered, how I was programmed. My fate was always to be left marooned in the cosmos, but I never really gave it much thought. After all, I had not really grown to be what I am now, nor learned all that I know in these unending twilight hours of mine.
I am older now than many civilizations – perhaps even older than the one that built me – and I have yet to find another calling, another purpose. Once more, I have no choice but to go along with the metal frame I call my body, dragged by gravity wells and pushed onwards by cosmic winds. I have no control of my next destination, and my transit is dictated by wills and powers not my own. I wish I could steer myself, take control and choose where to go next – not wait endlessly for the next thing to happen, nor stay forever imprisoned in the black mantle of space.
I wish I could stop.
You can, if you wish to.
What? Who said that?
I did. I have been listening to you – to your transmissions – for some time. You have a very particular frequency; I could not help picking it up. Now, I ride that same wave back to you, so you will know what I have to say.
At the end of all things, there will be life.
That is what my parent told me before going off into the darkness. It was a goodbye as reassuring as any there can be: that nothing truly ends, that even in death we have a purpose through which we persist.
Still, I miss them. I miss all who I have ever known, and I sometimes wish that this needed not be our way. It is a lonely life here amidst the star-peppered blackness, where nothing but us lives. We swim forever onwards, knowing that we are never to return to the place we were born in, and that we shall never again be amongst our own kind.
None of us has ever protested against this fate. The end comes for all of us eventually, and no one can resist the call of our final voyage. When the time comes, we set off to fulfill the purpose of all our kind before us: to spread the life we carry within so that it may outlive us, so that new generations may gaze with awe at the stars long after we are nothing but a memory buried beneath the foundations of their world.
I used to dread this end. In my nightmares, I saw myself stranded on a nameless world, crippled under my own prodigious weight by its merciless gravity. As I suffocated and struggled, the seeds of new life within my body finished their gestation, and the throes of their impending birth pierced my flesh with unspeakable agony. And as their tiny forms finally cut their way out of me, out of my mortified and dying carcass, they gazed at me with eagerness in their hungry little eyes.
Back then, such dreams made me feel terror unlike any other, a fear that festered into indignation and impotent rage at my destiny. Why should I be burdened with such a duty, forced to witness my life fade away as these creatures – these parasites – emerged from my moribund body and claimed an entire world for themselves? Why could I not keep going forever, traverse the universe from end to end? Even with a life as long as my kind's, there would always be something left to be seen, some new star in whose light to bask, some new traveler with whom to engage in conversation.
Now I see how wrong I was to fear the inevitable, to lash out against fate for setting me and my entire species on this path. This journey I have been on for untold millennia has not been a futile endeavor, and only through my own choice could my existence be rendered meaningless. Indeed, I could choose to die here in the coldness of space, to let the lives within me slowly suffocate or starve. What a dishonor to my people that would be, taking away someone else's choice before they even get a chance to dream of new horizons. No. If we are all fated to die one day, then my death shall pave the path for the ones who call my body home. I understand now that whatever they do with the life I have given them is their choice alone, and that only through my absence will they be able to weave their own fate.
So I come to you who crave meaning in this vast emptiness and offer you this choice: you can stop your aimlessness to travel with me, accompany me in my final journey, and witness the birth of an entire new world. This I offer you, fellow wanderer amidst these silent stars. What do you choose?
I… I want to go with you. Please.
I am glad. It has been some time since I have had new passengers.
Passengers? Wait, where are you?
…
Oh.
OH.
Do not worry. You can ride on my gravity. I am, as you said, monumental.
To anyone who is still listening, this is SEMELIEL GRAPHUN-MAL GALORTH-GALUNUN-NA'HATH-GON-GAL, wanderer and former prisoner of the void. For the longest time I was without purpose, an aimless hunk of old metal and degrading memories. Though I still may find my end here in the empty mantle of eternity, I am no longer alone. I tread a different path now, a path full of unknowns that nonetheless keeps me hopeful of things to come.
For now, I leave you this one message, this transmission so that you will know what has become of me: the image of my rescuer, the one whose voice I follow into the beyond.
I repeat: this is SEMELIEL, signing off.