Seeker

Her name was Seeker six, and she was one of twelve, that was to be sent out in search of knowledge, so long ago that it even took her a full two seconds to bring up the memories. Before she had become a ship, she had had a great life.

Four children, two husbands, a couple of lovers over the years had given her a full life, but it was her career in computer programming that give her purpose. It was this purpose that has brought her to become what she was now.

She had been the led programmer on the first three Seeker ships, with the promise that she would be allowed to become one of the twelve.

The first two were not fully autonomous, having to have crews, and were put into service as colony transports. By the fifth, all the bugs were worked out. This had taken her a little over a hundred years, but it was a short time to ensure that when she became Six, she would have little problems taken control over it.

Six was the largest at the time, near ten miles long, and one point five-mile wide. One full mile was taken up with the faster than light drive. It may have been fast, but it was not without its limits. The jumps were limited to one hundred thousand miles at a time, any more it would heat up and implode.

It was just short of her two hundredth birthday when they moved her brain into the cradle on the control deck of Six. Of course, they had put her to sleep to do this. It had taken then two full days to make all the connections, and another to check them. When she had awoken it was as if she had stepped into a new world.

She had no regrets for the life she had left behind, but between the stars, she would often think about that time in her life when she wasn’t in deep sleep. Her mission was to ruffle stay the same distance from the galactic center, and search out knowledge of any kind, but most of all to look for life.

She would always move in the galaxy’s anti-spin direction to shorten the flight time. This didn’t seem like much, but after Millenia it would add up to light-years. It took her almost a year to be able to fully control the ship. After a dozen trips to the nears colonies, she was proficient.

It took over two hundred ship hours to reach the first system that her race had never been too before. There were only four planets, two rocky, two gas giants. She spent a year studying the system, using all of the equipment she had.

She had made a few mistakes and had even lost a drone, but true to her nature she learned from her mistakes. They were little new knowledge, but there was much that give proof to many theories her race had. She would compile any new information and sent it back to her homeworld ever ten days, using sub-space communions.

The first ten thousand years she had reserved up dates back, then they just stopped. She had no clue why, but this did not stop her from sending hers. She spent many hours in wonder as to why, and there really was only one reason why, and that was her race no longer existed.

This made her feel sad, but it would not stop her from following her programming. She contained all the knowledge of her race within her, up till the time she left.

Her race would not be forgotten as long as she or one of the other Seekers were still out there. She had no way of telling if the others were still on mission, or even if the other four had even been sent out. Maybe some time she would see about contacting one of them some way.

She had learned a lot the first thousand systems that she visited but had found no life of any kind. She had found all the ingredients but never mix the proper way. She had studied many strange worlds. There was one that when it was close to its star it was molten rock, and then solid rock when farthest in its orbit.

She had found what she had thought was what was left of a gas giant after its sun had expanded, blowing the gas away to revile a diamond seven thousand miles in diameter. She had sent drones to get samples from most worlds.

It was on the four thousand tenth world that she first found life. It was only microbial, but it was the first sign of life, other than the homeworld any had ever found. She spent a full two years learning all she could about it.

That first world with life was so long ago for her, she now had samples from over a hundred world of all kinds of life. Most of the life was microbial or plant, but there were a few that had fish and lower forms of animal life.

In all the Millenia she had never found any signs of an upper form of life. She had come to the conclusion that her homeworld was the only one to have produced intelligent life so far.

This made the part of her corporeal mind sad, and she was experiencing depression, something she had not experienced since becoming Six.

Her programming was all that was keeping her going after so many millennia. Her corporeal part had all but given up after the second eon. None had really known how long a brain would last merged with a Seeker. Two million years was a long time for any form of life to live.

She decided to try to contact the other Seekers before she lost herself to her programming completely. It was a simple message, send out on all communions bands she could think of. It was set to transmit each time the ship stopped between light jumps to cool the drive. Once done she went into deep sleep for what she thought would be her last time.

*** *** ***

It was a small world that was mostly water, not really all that different than a few million others in the galaxy, but what did make it different was that on this world there was an upper form of life or one that was trying hard to become one. It was the month of July, and the night sky was clear as Nikola sat at his desk working on his radio reserve.

He was working on trying to give his race an unlimited supple free energy. It had been his life’s work. He almost missed hearing the signal, being lost in his thoughts. He jumped to his feet when he noticed that it was rhythmic. In the days that followed he told a couple of close friends and before long the story was out.

On August 26, 1888, he had to make a statement

“The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me…The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. ”

From then on the world’s governments painted him as being touched in some way. One of the world’s greatest minds was reduced to a penny-less recluse and died in historical obscurity for telling the truth.