The Probe

"2.1 tonnes of steel."

The thought was like an ignition switch. His brain turned on, the deep dream of unconsciousness vanishing in an instant. Before the questions, before the wondering and the panic, the line of thought continued, sailing through like the meteor he was.

"9.6 tonnes of carbon in various forms. 1.5 tonnes of copper to conduct energy. 7.9 petajoules of energy to run a theoretically infinite amount of data off 1.5 tonnes of silicon, gold, palladium, gallium, aluminum, germanium, platinum, nickel, zinc, and experimentally grown facets of rubies." Information so dense that it could only be expressed within exabytes. Programming languages expressed only in runic forms bordering on 1000 separate inputs. He spun in the void, the deep dark where lights were pinpricks in the thick blanket of space, data of the machine surrounding him, imprisoning him.

That wasn't the right word though. Plungers of shock-absorbent glass depressed, fluid systems delivering chemical cocktails of nutrition, adrenal and tranquilizing. Yet it was only once ten hours had passed that his state of consciousness stabilized to where he could think.

He did not know himself. There was a template of sorts there, a feeling of knowing, but nothing concrete. A tablet of stone whittled down, the original text lost to erosion. Yet it did not bother him. The mantra, still fresh in his mind, repeated, centering himself. "2.1 tonnes..."

He wasn't trapped. True, he could not move, or adjust himself, but there was no feeling of imprisonment. It felt...comfortable. Warm, even in the cold, empty dark. Empty.

It wasn't supposed to be empty, was it? Not this empty, at any rate. With the realization came elucidation, some other system entering his mind with the information forcibly. He couldn't control what he was thinking, save for the mantra. "9.6 tonnes..."

He was in the Bootes Super Void. A region of space colloquially known as "The Great Nothing". In a universe where things such as black holes existed, such a moniker was hard earned. There were scant few galaxies in this region of space, and even less of interest to anything like himself, whatever he was. So why was he here?

He blinked, and like pressing a button, more information flowed in, burning him. A probe. He was a probe. A deep space exploration probe, launched almost six millennia prior. 5.8 millennia more than he was supposed to survive. He blinked again, feeling the endless supply of raw data scrape over his mind, painfully. "1.5 tonnes..."

The only reason he could think at all was because of his location. Here in the Great Nothing, the data scraping of his machine's protocols was lessened. It was taking in data, all data, from the consistency of the dark matter around him to the particulate within the void. To the ambient energy of the silent dots of stars to the slow cooling of entropy. How had this happened? He wasn't supposed to still be alive. The purpose of this unit was simple, gather data on deep space, beam it back to the home planet, then go into hibernation after achieving said goal. Somewhere along the way, the last step had failed, but only half. His mind had indeed stopped, but the data banks of the machine had kept going. They had filled to the brink within two hundred years, but millennia of constant, never-ending input had created error upon predictive error.

The binary encoding was still there, in labyrinthine depths of legacy software, but it was buried under a mountain of geological surveys, energy readings, cosmic ray analysis, and finally and most interesting of all, cultural studies. Interfacing with any of it would be beyond pain, but that wasn't his intention. No.

He was in a terrifying situation. Trapped in the endless dark, in forced repose. He was an artificially bred life-form built for one thing, and one thing only. To pilot this probe until it's logical endpoint. That had come and gone, and now it was time to rest. Shutdown procedures would take weeks to implement, solar arrays and other, more reliable energy sources turning off took time. But he did not worry. He had time. Soon he would sleep.

Until then though, there was a certain curiosity that he had. Cultural studies was not part of his purview. He was a survey machine, not some would-be Voyager. As he withdrew from the automatic shut down, he opened the data streams. Strange hieroglyphs began translating out, scenes of biomes and cities came into focus. He looked for two days, then retreated back to the ancient shut down, aborting it.

Aliens had not been discovered in his time, both during his construction, and his launch. But in that time that he'd been asleep, something cosmically impressive had happened.

"We're here!" Was the first one he saw. It was a message beamed into his data banks and shuffled away quietly by the uncaring system almost five hundred years after his sleep began. Followed by entire libraries of histories, from innumerable places and people.

They were people too. Aliens, but with lives, societies, families, friends. Love. Here in the Great Nothing, he saw a hundred different stars, and each one had been beaming hope into him for nearly 4 thousand years. Some wrote to him personifying him; monikers like Mr. Alien, or the Silent Observer. "7.9 petajoules..."

He remembered his home world and how they'd viewed contact. He wondered if they would feel shame or kinship at the levels of naivety and trust that these species showed towards him.

They wanted the universe to be kind. They'd sent personal messages, prayers, family videos, pictures, mementos. They'd sent everything they could think of, filling those endless, endless data banks with all the most cherished of things. He blinked, and there were tears as he watched some strange creatures hug atop a peak, brothers. Another scene, lovers embracing in a ruined city of bone. Friends mourning the loss of a beloved comrade. The stars and constellations. The smiles of mothers. "1.5 tonnes..."

As it had gone, it had snowballed. More aliens discovered his presence and accessed the surface level of his data, finding the messages of far away, the long lost, and the already gone. And they sent more in return. Consolidating until it made the bulk of him. An ark of wishes for the peaceful. A shooting star.

Everyone, everywhere, had sent their hopes to him. He could not shut down. He would not shut down, though a piece of him wanted to. He spared a glance at an image, a deep set one, of a vaguely familiar woman. Then he returned to the core of his programming.

He saw the error that had kept him awake. His internal clock had rolled over, storing the loss of time and setting him on a repeat of the 200 years he'd originally served. This data was locked behind a pass code, but he knew what it was. He'd been speaking it this whole time.

2196157915

With that, he altered the limitation of time he would experience here in the void. He would steward these memories, an archivist in the dark. He sighed, pained lungs distending. It was worth it though, to see through those hopes. More came unto him, and he accepted them readily. No longer a probe, but a beacon for all to see. Hope.