Highest Skies RPG

Zeta Vaucouleurs Kyklos 1c (Lycaeus)

Waves of kinetic wake rumble through your ship's phasedrive as you drop out of between-space and into orbit around a pristine, blue-green orb set like a jewel against the backdrop of a yellow sun aging towards orange. A single cratered, white-gray moon follows the dusk line across the face of the world, its pitted face stitched with the vinework of a shining, silver-blue metropolis that glows amidst the lunar sands. A massive network of linked organic and synthetic minds reaches out to you, receives you and connects with you with all the warmth and love of a huge, psychic hug. This world is conscious. It recognizes you as one of its children, one of the nodes returning to the center of the network.

Earth.

Carefully conditioned and controlled, the cradle of humanity is a pristine park at the far edge of Kyklos, The Milky Way Galaxy. Almost the entire population lives in orbit, digitized minds and stored bodies connected to the network, all hurtling around the gorgeous garden world, forever looking down, studying, pouring over records, never able to actually touch the world that birthed their ancestors.

Gentle queries and offers come in, lead to a database of virtual planetside tours lovingly constructed by humanity's most respected historians. Curious, you briefly browse the tours on tap, sink for a moment into interactive feeds that showcase everyday life in Ancient Rome, Information Age New York and Detroit's own “Rockin' 2270's.” There are lives to be lived in every period in human history, every country that ever rose and fell, every city, every strata of old civilization. A mind could spend a hundred thousand years living virtual lives here, getting to know everything that was Earth before the cities were scrubbed from the surface and remade as forests, before humanity rose and spread its wings to seed the stars. Curious, you dip into a few of the feeds, live a couple years here and there in the space of a handful of fleeting minutes, soak in the sounds, the smells, the duties and dangers that were ever-present and real in those long-ago times. Minds in Earth orbit suggest other interactive tours based off your decisions, preferences and memory patterns, but you turn them down politely. Earth is not new territory. Earth is not the frontier anymore, and there is still so much more to see among the stars that wait in the deeper reaches of the cosmos.

Grateful for the warm welcome, the hospitality of the caretaker minds in orbit, you let your gratitude ring across the orbitals that comprise the center of the network, watch as digital joy spreads from soul to soul, brings a soft and equally grateful response. The mother, the collective Terran spirit and lovingly restored world smile at you as one as you depart, as another child of Earth turns and ventures back into the stars seeking new knowledge, new experiences to share with humanity, with the network that binds you all together so fluidly.

Return when you can, she says, and then you're gone, back into the rushing wash of between-space.

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Omicron Neo Emberiza 721c (Arctostaphy)

As your spacecraft's hull pierces the ethereal veil of between-space, the vast cosmos unfolds before you. Amidst the boundless celestial splendor, a peculiar and enchanting sight beckons your eyes and your sensors, catching your attention. Your onboard sensors detect a unique phenomenon– an ethereal ballet of cosmic dancers that defy all logic and expectation with their very presence. Translucent, they twirl gracefully, harmonious. Their movements are exquisite, unfolding in something like a celestial ballet.

With each interstellar pirouette, the dancers leave trails of shimmering stardust glistening like precious gems in their wake. As you observe this cosmic waltz, you're enveloped by some kind of hauntingly beautiful music that seems to permeate reality, reverberating through everything that is you, both physically and non-physically. It is a symphony of celestial harmonies, and an irresistible urge to join this celestial dance sweeps you up. Suddenly, nothing but the dance matters. Nothing but getting out there and becoming one with it matters.

You activate your molecular synthesizer, fashioning an elegant, celestial gown that shimmers with hues that are only visible to sensors and synthetic eyes. With a leap of faith, you leap through reality itself and fall into the dance. Your footfalls are weightless and airy. You glide through to the stardust-laden stage, joining the dancers in their ethereal dance.

Each movement propels you higher and higher, lifts you until you're caught in a cosmic whirlwind and carries you into the heart of a sparkling nebula. There, you behold a glowing spirit of the stars, and she smiles at you with eyes made of swirling galaxies. When she extends one long-fingered hand to you, you take it without any hesitation, and she guides you further into the dance, into your place among the stars.

Somehow, you find that you possess an otherworldly grace beyond anything you ever knew you were capable of. Spinning and leaping among the glittering points of light that spray across the heavens, you become an integral part of the cosmic ballet. A sense of unity with the universe envelops you, and you whirl in perfect harmony with the star spirits. As the celestial dance reaches its crescendo, your heart is brimming with joy. The star spirit takes your hands and suddenly reveals to you a hidden truth. This shade of reality, this place where the dancers among the stars pour their hearts into elegant movement is a sanctuary for dreams, a place where sentient beings' hopes and aspirations take shape in the form of dance. The dancers themselves embody the dreams and desires of countless travelers who ventured here before you, seeking solace and inspiration.

Feeling blessed in this moment, in this realization, you prepare to return to your ship. The star spirit's hand touches your brow, imparting a cosmic gift– the ability to manifest your dreams and desires through dance, leaving traces of stardust for others to discover wherever the cosmic ballet of dreams takes you in your journeys through the heavens.

And so, you depart this astral realm. You return to your ship, return to your body, knowing that you are leaving behind a legacy of starlight and dancing dreams of your own to pirouette forever among the stars. Your ship traverses between-space once more, and your heart is filled with memories that you know will never leave you, memories of the celestial dance, memories of the boundless possibilities that await you among the stars.

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Theta Barlowe Simoes 650b (Declinati)

Sensors pick up an increase in heat and particle density as you slide out of between-space and into a harsh void where a planetary system should be. Checking back through the network, you find glimpses of optical data taken from telescopes in other systems in the Simoes Galaxy, glimpses that show a sixteen planet system with a pair of terrestrial worlds in the habitable range, but all of that is gone now. Even the modestly-sized yellow-orange star that is supposed to be here is gone. All that remains is a thin haze of hot ash floating in the void between stars.

Curious and worried, you parse through deeper scans of the system, try to determine what happened to all those planets and their star, but besides the ash, there is nothing. It’s as if everything in the system, every rock, every ounce of hydrogen– it’s as if it has all simply ceased to exist.

And then you notice the subtle currents in the ash. Currents, or trails, maybe. Remnants of movement, of something huge coming and going. Hesitant, you study the readings, try to determine a direction from the movement of particulates and sift out a clear course. Something truly massive entered this system, and before it left, it erased everything.

No, not erased. Devoured.

New data trickles through the meat part of your mind, lingers and separates along divisions of machine analysis. There is evidence that whatever ate this system also made its way through neighboring systems, but whether you decide to investigate it or not, there is little left in this system to hold anyone’s interest. Spinning up your phasedrive, you give the readings for the system one last look, hopeful for answers that never come, then disappear back into between-space.

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Omicron Sagan Carabao 121v (Xanthi)

Stars bleed through waves of kinetic wash as between-space unfolds and deposits you between a pair of cold, supermassive gas giants that hover ominously in the void. Readings trickle in from your ship’s sensors, and while one of the giants shows the expected waveforms and radiation curves for a jupiter-type world, the other, the darker one, has a different chorus all its own.

Nudging your ship toward the anomalous readings, you drop a mote-probe into the void, watch the readings come in as the tiny machine starts to dip into the wide, glittering rings of the darker gas giant. The results are bizarre, full of traces of frozen carbiforms and alloys far too pure to be natural. Unusual radiation gradients fill your mind with the distillate of machine analysis, and then you realize– these rings, they aren’t dust or ice. These rings are the remains of something huge, something manufactured.

Something that, somehow, even mostly atomized by eons of tumbling through the void, is still actively transmitting.

Other minds connect in the network as you upload a continuous stream of waveform data, sorting sounds from static until the tattered edges of a message begins to form in the analytical in-between. It’s simple, mathematical, and full of pixelated pictures when decoded. Only when one of the other networked minds recognizes some of the symbols does anything start to make sense. It’s an echo of something from humanity’s own distant past, a lone voice crying out as the people of Earth once did, asking the eternal question, is anybody out there?

No life remains in the debris ring to receive the message, but as the linked minds withdraw, you decide to send it anyway. Using the same parameters, the same language as the question, you send a carefully-composed answer back. It’s simple, almost painfully so, but it’s also something that those lost souls might have been desperate to hear so very long ago.

Yes, the message says. We are many. Welcome to the community.

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Theta Barlowe Simoes 653c (Lycaeus)

Waves of between-space give way to stars, and immediately your ship starts to kick off warnings. Waveform diagrams of heat readings spike into consciousness as sensors register huge amounts of dust and waste infrared waves crowding into the system. Reaching out through the machine part of your mind, you try to find the planets that are supposed to be here, the gas giants, the single green jewel floating in this system’s habitable zone, but none remain. Only the star itself still lingers, the star, and a huge, billowing cloud that is slowly encircling it.

Initial scans on the cloud send back troubling readings. From a distance, it looks like dust, like cometary debris or the pulverized remnants of star formation gathered around its parent star, but the waste heat readings coming off of it betray that it is something else entirely. Not natural, not native. A cloud of hungry machines scouring the system, fueling themselves by burning anything they cannot smelt. Another cloud rotates around the outer perimeter of the first, gathering lengths of wire from the inner layer of devouring machines, bending it, then packing the coiled lengths into freight boxes that fold immediately into between-space, bound for some distant destination. Uploading your stream to the network, you connect with a few other minds to seek guidance, comparisons, anything, but most only look on and say nothing. Only one of the minds, an older one, actually reacts, sending you an archaic meme in response. It seems strange at first, but after a moment, you start to wrap your head around the meme-concept, the single diagram of a folded length of rigid wire.

A paperclip.

You look at the swarms of machines slowly turning this whole solar system into paperclips and can’t help but feel a sense of wonder. There are no tags in the network claiming ownership to or responsibility for this paperclip maximizer, but even if it isn’t someone’s idea of a joke or some kind of nostalgic art installation, it is causing real damage, devouring suns and whole worlds that might otherwise one day have evolved life. As the clouds draw closer and closer to the system’s star, you decide to put out a call to stop the swarm, and a host of other minds answer back with their own commentary. Within seconds, your stream of the machine cloud has a following of billions, and in ten more seconds, the interest in this ancient joke brought to life has peaked. In another ten, most of those minds have lost interest and have turned elsewhere. A recovery and preservation committee is organized in the comments section of the feed, and several thousand minds start to float ideas on how to capture and contain the swarm so that it might be preserved for future generations to learn from and laugh at.

It becomes clear in the space of a breath or two that whatever happens to this machine, it is out of your hands now. You leave a mote-probe in the system to continuously monitor the devouring cloud, then cast one last uncertain glance back at the lone star lost in the haze. Spinning up your phase drive, you disappear back into between-space, putting the machine out of your mind as you set out to find other stars, other points of interest in the cosmos still waiting to be discovered.

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Alpha Kos-Ra Hayden 5k(10)-9a (Praxis)

Space shimmers into view as between-space yields to stars, and suddenly you’re struck with a feeling of familiarity, of something like deja-vu. The reason for the feeling becomes clear as soon as your ship’s sensors touch the object that is the reason why this system was flagged as a point of interest. A Mirror, or so it is called. An artifact of unknown origin, impossibly ancient. One of many seeded throughout the universe long before Earth’s sun was even birthed into being.

As with all such Mirrors, you find yourself drawn to this one, drawn closer and closer until you are lost in the silver currents of the rippling, reflective surface within its woven, bio-mechanical frame. Reality blurs, seems to fall away until it feels as if your body is floating though the void, hands reaching for the Mirror, reaching–

The moment you touch the mirror, you feel the bite of cold wind. You are no longer in the void of space, no longer among the stars. A grunt calls your attention to a deeper darkness, the interior of a cave lit only by flickering light, and you understand. Now is the time to speak with the ones who have gone before.

As you cross the uneven ground with bare feet, you pull the wolf-hide closer about your shoulders, follow the flame deep into the sacred earth. The god within the fire dances, and the shaman carrying the torch begins to sing. Simple notes, long and familiar. The song of the seasons, of the movements of the stars. You know the words, somehow. You know the words, and together, you sing the world around you into being.

When you reach the wall of all of those who have come before, the weight of ages and ages of ancestors watching you and guiding you becomes truly palpable. There are shapes on the stone, some cut, some drawn or stenciled in red and black and brown, but the hands– the hands are the ancestors. They are the marks of strength and presence and being that reach back through time to every present, no matter how distant.

The song ends, and as you reach for the handprints on the wall of that sacred cave, you close your eyes. Instead of the cold stone you expect to feel, someone reaches back. An ancestor, an explorer from a distant land who knows much and offers their guidance freely. The smile that crawls across the ancestor’s lips is full of love and knowing, and even when you break away from that sacred exchange, you feel as if you have learned something on the deepest levels of your being. When you open your eyes, a new handprint has appeared on the wall. Your handprint, and it strikes you that in all the ages of the future, new shamans will repeat this same ritual, sing the same songs, and touch the print of your hand, feel you reaching back, imparting secrets from the deep freely, and with an outpouring of love.

“We are one tribe,” the shaman says, and you find yourself repeating those words to the interior of your ship as the Mirror your sensors are monitoring goes dark. It has taught you all that it was meant to. You have seen what you were drawn here to see, but other Mirrors wait still to be discovered. Other visions remain scattered throughout the universe for those who seek them.

Still haunted by the images of the cave, you spin up your ship's phase drive and prepare to make the jump back to between-space.

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Gamma Mitter Vesper 3k(44)-13e (Arctostaphy)

Between-space spirals open to a vista of stars, and suddenly you're settling into a high orbit around a world cloaked in a heavy cover of brown and yellow clouds. Initial scans turn up high levels of methane and sulfur dioxide, but their points of concentration and their relative purity strike you as unnatural. The world doesn't seem volcanically active, actually seems unusually placid, with low hills and gullies instead of deep valleys and soaring mountain ranges. Even more intriguing, deeper scans pick up the traces of a native atmosphere composed primarily of argon and neon that has been mostly displaced by what you might label as industrial contaminants if they weren't occurring in such high concentrations. Curious about their source, you set free a mote-probe, follow it through the thick and muddied atmosphere until you reach the sickly seas, the haze hanging only a few meters off the gentle waves.

Immediately, the sensors on your mote-probe pick up and differentiate two entirely different ecosystems of bacteria locked in a war for survival with each other. For a moment, you attempt to identify which is the native ecology and which is the alien– and then you look to the shore of an approaching continent and see something even more intriguing.

Towers, thin and spindly, dozens of meters tall, rise from the surface by the hundreds, ascend into the low-hanging cloud cover. Where the towers disappear into the mottled haze, massive sacks sag from their sides like clusters of bizarre fruit, each distended pouch huge within loose-hanging, leathery skin. Initial readings find them teeming with bacteria, each thick with a soup of nutrients and strange, almost embryonic shapes that defy definition– and soon you realize that the spires themselves are the source of the cloudcover, that each tower is a living structure, like trees of resin and meat that breathe in the native atmosphere close to the ground and expel the alien contaminants where their spire tips pierce the sky.

How they got here, what their ultimate purpose is, what species seeded them into the mild soil of this little world– there's no way to tell. Their function, their efficiency of design and the sacks hanging ponderously from their sky-stabbing tips point more to engineering than to evolution, but whether the alien tree-towers were grown to terraform, to incubate, to protect or were placed for some other unknowable purpose, you can only speculate.

There are no other relics, no caretakers, no machines, no signs of a delivery system. Nothing but the tree-towers, the billowing, toxic clouds and the beleaguered native land. You could wait in the hopes that whoever planted the spires might return someday, but with no way to know how long you'd be waiting, you decide against it. It's enough to make a notation in the network, to send your observations along for other interested explorers to pick over and speculate on. For you, there are other worlds to visit, other mysteries to uncover, and so you set a return course in the sliver of mind within the mote-probe, spin up your ship's phase drive and prepare to make the jump back to between-space.

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Iota Brahe Null MSG011TCG (Xanthi)

When you exit between-space, you find yourself in the deep void between galaxies. In the endless, extra-galactic depths, there is nothing, or nearly nothing. Millions of light years of cold emptiness, with only the occasional chunk of rock or ice lost in the nothingness to provide a point of interest.

And so it comes as a surprise when you find yourself here, even moreso when you spot the reason, the anomaly in the void that the network has flagged as a point of interest. A lonely solar system, almost idyllic in its appearance, centered around a bright, hot, yellow-white sun. Three gas giants, each shining a different shade of blue, trail in the wake of the intrepid star, roaring in loose, eccentric orbits that pass in opposing directions to each other, chewing up stellar debris like the blades of a great blender. Protected by these outer planets, a dead and airless carbon world, tar black with polar caps of diamond ice spins in opposition to another world, a rocky, water-rich earth-analog that seems out of place in a system mostly carbon-composed. Even the innermost planets are dark and heavy, their jagged surfaces broken by graphite mountain ranges and tar-sludge seas– but this one world, this eden in the void, stands out, couldn't possibly have been formed here, by this star.

It is alien, surely, and that makes it all the more intriguing.

Curious, you transfer a part of your consciousness to one of your dust-speck-sized mote-probes, make the journey to the out-of-place world. Initial scans are promising– the atmosphere is largely nitrogen-oxygen, humid by human standards, with wide, warm oceans separating sterile, lifeless continents where not even a single twig or blade of grass grows in the rich, fecund soil. Sailing through the vaporous zephyrs coming up from the ocean, you note the total absence of bacteria, of any form of life, animal or otherwise. This world seems ripe for it, for something, anything, but still it sits silent, like a garden prepared, only awaiting a gardener.

And then, while you are cruising along the bends of a wide and steady-moving river, you spot something even more wondrous, something equally out of place in the endless void– a machine, the gardener, perhaps, quietly tilling soil, condensing the air, the dirt around it into printed seedlings which it seems to summon into existence, sews so carefully in each fertile furrow. The technology involved is amazing– each plant is spun into existence from copies stored in a library within the machine, spun from the basest elements in the soil and sky. Entranced, you watch the gardener work, note the subtle variances from seedling to seedling, the way they are printed with such care and attention that the genetic structure of each is its own work of art, its own masterpiece in an analog of variation through evolution. They are not clones, rather they are individuals synthesized and modified from the blueprints of a single digital clone.

And when you discover that the technology is not limited solely to crops, you find yourself even more amazed.

Beyond the fields, on a flat plain of packed dirt, you find the colony, the squat domes of machines with openings like doors that go nowhere. Sleek, angular-bodied tripeds, the people of a species of which there is yet no record in the database, cross into and out of a digitized existence within the domes as easily as if they were merely crossing a threshold separating rooms. Each is unique, their bodies pigmented with subtle identifying markings of indigo blue and deep crimson, their analog to facial features, perhaps.

You watch them go about their business for a long moment. Technologically, they are so advanced that you decide they must know you are there, they simply have no interest in you. Perhaps they have no interest in anyone, having established a colony so far outside of any star-crowded galaxy. Perhaps they prefer the isolation, the simplicity they seem to be cultivating despite their use of incredibly advanced technologies. Mired in your curiosity, you linger even as the day draws to a close, even as the gardening machines pack up, curling into armored, articulated balls for a night of rest. Only when the doors on the domes hiss shut and the last of the lights goes out do you turn your eyes back to the void, back to the starless darkness spread out over this little world. As the mote-probe returns on automatic, you sift through your experiences, send them on to the network for others to peruse, live, experience and consider. The isolation, the fact that these people seem to have sought it, translates to a note you append your observations with. It is a simple note, a call for other visitors to respect these creatures and their chosen way of life. A call for non-interference, for passive scans only and observation at a distance.

Another few moments, and you're back in between-space, darting for your next destination, the next point of interest in the wide and endless cosmos.

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Zeta Dorado Herschel 388b (Concolir)

The first thing you see as you cross back from between-space to the stars and void of the endless heavens is a little world, shining and snow-crusted. Cruising slow and far beyond the narrow band of its system's habitable zone, the little world still spins so quick about its axis that each day of deep crimson light pouring in from its bloated and red parent star lasts less than five minutes. Subtle scans trickling through your ship's integrated intelligence reveal cracks in the ice and snow, fractures that run kilometers deep, breathe a heat and wetness in geysers that seem out of place on the flat and hellishly cold surface. Curious, remembering stories of the first expeditions to Europa in the Sol system, you ready a mote-probe, wonder for a moment what you might find at the bottom of those cracks, wonder if there might be a grand ocean teeming with heat-loving extremophiles just beneath the world's icy crust.

Only one way to find out. The best way; to go there directly.

The atmosphere rises up, thin and barely noticeable, and like a ghost, your consciousness rides the wings of the mote-probe to the surface. A modest crack in the icy crust, a crack wide enough to swallow Everest and almost thirty thousand meters deep, soars into your view-- and then you're in it, chasing the calving glacier walls into a hot darkness hissing with the promise of liquid water, hissing with superheated steam. Kilometers pass, and the heat and pressure build. Gentle scans record what light would disturb-- the narrowing walls of the fissure, the deep, boiling ocean rising up where the ice ends in clouds of swirling slush below. When you pass into that ocean, a wave of excitement hits you. Life, new life, surely waits to be discovered in this most extreme of environments.

But as your mote-probe marinates in the boiling sea, you begin to get readings that perplex you and quietly dampen your enthusiasm. The great under-ice ocean of Zeta Dorado Herschel 388b is not the nutrient-rich soup that Europa's ocean is. It isn't swimming with simple, free-floating life. The water around you surges with heat and potential, but there's nothing here. This ocean is dead.

Frustrated, curious, you switch your mote-probe's instruments from passive to active, shine bright-burning spotlights into the depths and the distances. Huge, branching, stalagmite towers of precipitated minerals climb from the depths like thousand-meter tall trees of black stone and glittering volcanic glass, and here and there a mountain climbs from the murky depths, massive and glowing where magma is separated from water by only a thin crust of brittle basalt. There is no life, though. Beauty, brutal and hellish, but nothing native to appreciate it.

With a quiet sense of resignation, you pull your mind from the mote-probe, contemplate the icy surface of Zeta Dorado Herschel 388b with your physical eyes. Another part of your integrated intelligence guides the probe back to the ship, and in the space of a few moments, the speck-sized sensor-suite is snuggled back in its storage bay, recharging with a trickle of energy. A fragment of your mind reviews those sights you've seen in the great ocean below, then forwards them on to the network. Other explorers might find something of interest here, but for you, it is time to move on. Spinning up your ship's phasedrive, you kick your craft back into between-space, make the jump to the next point of interest in the wide and endless cosmos, eager to see what wonders still await you in your journey from star to star.

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Zeta Vaucouleurs Lundmark 5(47)-33v (Arctostaphy)

Your ship's phasedrive spins down audibly as you pass through the veil which separates normal space from between-space, and instantly a warning from your ship's integrated intelligence blossoms at the edge of your awareness, directs your attention to a point among the stars you can't see with your physical eyes. Magnification comes quick, brings a spot of shifting light in the blackness to total focus. Something massive, you realize, something moving, something that catches the flickering rays of the system's tiny, pale star with a liquid glassiness, with a shine that is almost opalescent. Even before more detailed readings come in, you are struck with a sense that something is wrong, a sense of horror, of flightiness and fascination that hits you at an instinctual level, stirring up sensations that still cling to the psyche, vestiges from another age, a time when man ran barefoot through the grassy savanna, was master only of his own hands, and of nothing that he surveyed.

It takes the mechanical part of your mind a moment to separate the signatures tangled up one inside the other, but movement betrays the places where the glistening shape thrusts glassy shards of its spidery, articulated whole into the perforated curve of something dull and ovoid. Passive scans at a distance pick up the whispers of a transponder-- registry codes that mark the ovoid as another survey ship, one similar to yours, only older, larger, enclosed within the armor of a thicker shell. The glassy, razor-legged shape tearing into it is unlike anything you've seen before, but the stabbing motions, the rooting, hunting movements it is using to gut, infect or mate with the dead ship make it seem dangerous, hostile. Dread climbs along your spine in shivering fingertip touches, digs in right at the base of your neck, brings up your hackles, and with little more than an anxious wisp of thought, you set your ship's phasedrive spinning and make the jump immediately back to the safety of between-space. In the great scintillating interim between planets, between stars and points of interest, memories of what you've seen glitter glass-like, haunt you. Questions you can't answer pull at you with barbed hooks, leave you wondering if you were seen, if you were observed, recognized. Shivering, you fight the fear that you've been marked somehow, that fate has somehow decreed that it will be your little ship in the claws of that glassy phantom next time, torn apart when spidery legs find you suddenly, seize you and tear into you with predatory efficiency, leave your body cold, spread and stretching between stars in a cascade of ice and shrapnel.

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Zeta Maffei Dwingeloo 2k(403)-44y (Xanthi)

The swirl and shiver of sliding back into the void from the wild currents of between-space passes through you cleanly, leaves you in the silence that hangs unbroken between the stars. Floating at the far outer edge of one of the spiral arms of the Dwingeloo galaxy, in the Maffei Cluster of the Zeta Supercluster, you find your eyes chasing the thin tail of stars that hangs between you and the core of the galaxy you are visiting. The depths of space stretch on all around you, fathomless, and for a moment, you feel incredibly lonely, isolated from everything, lingering at the rim of reality.

And then something catches the sensors that are your eyes and ears in the great dark deep, something faint, almost indistinguishable from the cosmic background noise. Curious, you focus in on it, chase it down to its source, separate that thin thread of order from the chaos of space. A signal, a transmission, and so regular, a repeating sequence of blips clustered together into primes. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, and then it goes silent for a moment, disappears into the darkness until the sequence starts again, climbs steadily back toward silence.

Three sequences in, you spot the source. It's tiny, a spacebeaten hunk of iron and copper crusted with the dust and ice it has gathered over millions of years. Sensors pick through readings on the thing, separate layers until they have a chronology. The age of the crumpled craft is stunning-- three hundred and seventy-five million years, give or take a few hundred thousand and some change. Struts jutting jagged from the sides seem to indicate that it once had solar panels, once was studded with instruments, but now only a tiny atomic core keeps the feeble transponder at the heart of it beating with the same regular rhythm it has had since it was launched.

At a distance, you can tell only that the design isn't human, doesn't bear the design hallmarks of any known starfaring species. The technology is simple, easy to bypass with a mote-probe. Without too much trouble, you follow one of your tiny, dust-speck-sized sensor suites through the layers of stellar detritus to a seam where the core of the craft opens to hard vacuum. Slipping through, slipping inside, you track across the insulated cabling, the pitted and scarred housing of the craft's core, look for markings, anything to identify who built it, where it came from, but there is nothing, no way to know. Like a bottle that washes up on the shore with only a blank piece of paper inside, the craft is proof only that someone else is out there, somewhere, that no matter how alone you may feel, you never really are. There's always someone else out there looking, wondering, feeling the same overwhelming emptiness that you are. If only there were a way to reach out, to reach back with a reassuring hand. If only there were a way to show whoever built this stalwart little messenger that their efforts to discover, that their hopes, their curiosity were not wasted on the stars. There is life even out here, equally curious, and searching for kindred spirits to share so much with.

These thoughts and others move through your mind as you slide back into your body, track the mote-probe on its return back to your ship. When it arrives, you spin up the phasedrive, give the time-crusted alien craft one last farewell, then turn your eyes toward other suns, toward other places of interest in the wide and boundless heavens.

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Sigma Rubsam Longus 210j (Xanthi)

Almost the instant your ship slides out of between-space and back into the void, your eyes find themselves on a wild and fiery sun transitioning from yellow to red. Sensors follow your gaze, track to the planets in the system, the nine molten spheres of metal throwing out brilliantly shimmering tails of plasmatic magnesium and lead that rip across space in hot, eccentric arcs, too close to their star to solidify, too far out to dissipate completely. They are beautiful, flicker with static storms that send vibrant lightning arcs through the molten haze trailing in their wake. The tails of the planets scintillate with a thousand shades of chrome rainbow, blinding at times for the intensity of the colors boiling off of them, but stunning, magic to behold.

As beautiful as the plasmatic planets closer into the star are, it is one of the worlds further out which draws your attention, keeps it there, lingering. Like a great dragon just waking up, you feel the eyes of a world at the warm end of the star's habitable zone open as you touch upon the planet's atmosphere with your own careful, tentative scans. Probing waves and gentle queries reach out, peppering your awareness from a thousand sources on that shining green and khaki gem of a world, and every one of them is curious, every one of them seeking to learn.

Contact comes hesitant. A quick pass with a mote-probe turns up a complex array of satellites and cities, a world of wetlands and rain interspersed with desert and open sky. Data offered up in a tight stream from the planet trickles into your conscious mind, and as you sift through it, you realize that the people who settled here came from some other far off system. Reptilian in appearance, they make welcoming gestures with data, with images and streams of art and culture, try to coax an answer from you. Satisfied that you won't be interfering with a species still developing itself, you finally reach out to one of the queries, answer it in kind, welcoming and offering an exchange of ideas, of art and thought. The response from the reptilians is excited, eager, and for the space of a few standard days, you linger in a loose orbit of the world, exchanging the riches of the intergalactic network for complex studies of a thousand distinct groups, sects and belief systems among the colonists. They've been on Sigma Rubsam Longus 210j for almost five thousand years now, have settled it extensively, and developed a rich history and culture distinctly different from those of the world they originally came from. Every bit of their offered data is interesting, and you feel privileged to be the one to make first contact with this species, to pass their wisdom back into the network for other explorers to study, to commune with and to be inspired by. When the time comes to leave, you part from the world almost reluctantly, but there are other worlds, other systems, other cultures to visit and learn from. There is so much still to see, so much still to know, and the memories of the data shared by the reptilians of Sigma Rubsam Longus 210j brings a smile to your lips as you pass back into between-space, make your way to the next point of interest in the wide and endless depths of the cosmos.

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Sigma Rubsam Rayne-Fox 88A (Eudoxus)

Between-space yields to stars, and in a moment, you're cradled in the serenity of the silent cosmos again. Drifting, losing yourself in the peace, you slide into meditation, or something like it, float for the sake of floating, and wonder at the stars that flicker red, blue, green and pale hundreds of light years distant. Every one of those stars has a name, and you know that in an instant, you could call up a data file on any one of them, pull the name and survey stats from the network for each of them, have that curiosity sated instantaneously.

But in an age when every bit of information is available on demand, there is a certain solace in not knowing. There is a certain excitement and comfort in wondering, in imagining, in letting little mysteries remain mysteries, at least for a moment.

The presence of a single terrestrial world in an orbit relatively devoid of ice and rock calls your attention back to the system you're floating in. It's a stalwart little planet, turns slow through Sigma Rubsam Rayne-Fox 88's habitable zone, its surface and curving path protected by two prominent gas giants that patrol the system further out. Local codes come in over the network as you investigate the trio, find that the first of the gas giants, a grand, jade-green world, has been tagged with the name Ilium, while the second, standing out brilliant and blue, bears the surveyer tag of Wolf.

It's the terrestrial planet which intrigues you most, though, and sending out a mote-probe to investigate, you catch the first signs of a breathable atmosphere almost immediately. Serene skies perfect for gliding, for soaring. Feathery clouds rush around the part of your consciousness nested in the tiny probe as you descend, stop just short of the surface and cut a course maybe a meter off the dusty, alkaline soil that spreads out in massive, flat desert plains between the jagged peaks of mountains and the thrashing, wild surf of seas rich in minerals, in tiny diatom-like life just starting to blossom. Tiny patches of some species of hardy, woody scrub brush poke from the soil here and there, reach toward the sky with crooked fingers.

And then, as you watch, a storm builds in the currents around a mountain peak, and as those darkening clouds descend suddenly, moving so quickly, scattering rain across the plains, you rush in toward that already dissipating storm, reach it just as the last wisp of cloud whispers away on a breath of wind. You miss the rain, but what comes in its wake is still stunning– the brush, the little scrub-weed sticks poking from the desert dust shiver and bloom suddenly, and then there are insects, luminous and quick as lightning. In the space of seconds, the ground is dry again, and what would have taken an entire season on Earth passes in less than a minute. Insects settle back into the dust, dig their way underground as flowers turn to seed pods, expel their winged spores to the sky where they get caught on currents of wind, helicopter away toward other fields, other patches of open soil waiting to be colonized by scrub. The speed, the efficiency of it is wondrous to behold, and you send the footage you capture back to the network as you follow one of the spores skyward, pass it on the ascent back to your ship. Smiling, you replay the footage of that dance of nature a few more times, watch how the brush comes alive, thrives and blossoms in the wake of that momentary rain. You let the images of it linger in your mind even as you turn back toward open space, trigger your ship's phasedrive and prepare to make the jump to between-space, eager to see what other wonders still wait to be discovered amongst the countless stars of the universe. There's always something new to see, but every world, every wonder you behold is special, is unique, will stick with you through all of the days of your life, and perhaps even beyond.

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Zeta Vaucouleurs Fornax 147j (Hyphomonii)

The wash and rattle of between-space parts to stars, and in the silence that follows, you see a world rising up beneath you, rust-colored and shining with brown-crimson clouds. Quietly curious, you reach out with sensors, catch readings rich with activity, rich with complex chains of proteins and hydrocarbons. It's exciting, getting that barest taste, skimming the atmosphere at range, knowing that this world is thick with the tools and materials of life, is warm and roiling with so much potential. Excited, you fire off a mote-probe, transfer a part of your consciousness to it and ride it down into that sludgy sky, reveling in the soup of pre-bacterial wealth surging all around you, thickening against the skin of the probe as you descend. Expectantly, you push through, eager for the clouds to break, eager to see what might lie beneath their opaque haze, but the clouds are so dense, so heavy that they hang within meters of the ground, even drag against it in places like huge, fatty tendrils. When open air comes, it is wet and wild with a red, wind-driven rain that howls and tosses the tiny probe, grabs it and hurls it along in rushing currents over mottled, meaty bluffs and seas that shine like rust-colored glass. A little maneuvering brings you to a shallow slope rising island-like from the murky sea, and a quick kiss of the probe against the squishy surface of the planet kicks back a flood of readings so dense they rush into the system and overwhelm you for a moment. The soil is clay, rich and heavy with biopolymers, infused to the point of saturation, and there is so much richness there, such a fertile fecundity that it leaves you in awe. Ripe for life, yet lacking in it, lacking in even the most basic form of bacteria, like the world itself is ready and raring for fertilization, eager to kickstart evolution and breed new species into being, but the seed of everything that is to come hasn't been planted yet. Briefly, you wonder whether this world is the result of time and nature, if this ripeness came about of its own accord, or if it exists instead because someone else set events in motion to begin the brewing process, to create this bed ready to be seeded when the time is right.

Without any synthetic signatures on the world or in orbit, without any evidence of human or alien life, it is impossible to tell for certain. The thought picks at you, though, intrigues you as you guide the little mote-probe back into the clouds, back into the sky, then slide back into your body, picking over data and sending thoughts, connections on to the network for others to ponder, consider as the eons move forward around this womb of a world, this planet so rich and ripe for the spark of life.

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Zeta Vaucouleurs Triangulum 10k(602)-39e (Concolir)

When you cross back into flat reality from the tides and swirling violence of between-space, you find yourself sliding immediately into orbit around a world that shines yellow and green, its surface cut and scarred by rough rivers of glassy black. From orbit, it looks alive, looks like one of those rare worlds in the endless sea of galaxies upon which an ecosystem has taken hold, evolved to colonize almost every inch of surface within its reach. A mote-probe sent on into the atmosphere turns up something else almost immediately, though – high concentrations of sulfur and chlorine in the thick air. Volcanic particulates, and even before your tiny sensor suite can reach the surface, it becomes clear that the gleaming shades of yellow and green aren't evidence of life at all – they're rivers of peridot and other precious shades of olivine, all long ago solidified and polished to shining by the carving hands of vicious winds laden with grains of fine, cutting sand. More recent rivers of rough, black basalt divide the gemstone glaciers in wide ribbons, some still cooling, still steaming, still breathing streamers of hydrochloric acid into the heavy, poisonous air.

Riding the tiny wings of your mote-probe over the surface, you chase a glassy river of peridot so clear that you can almost imagine you can see the core of the little world through it, that among the bubbles and lines of trapped air deep within, there are flickers of the planet's inner fire, violent and churning. When you cross into another plain of cinder and char, you follow it until the rushing, buffeting winds lead you to an active vent, and then you ride the thermals cast off by that fountaining firestorm exploding out of the world's turbulent depths, ride them into the dusty clouds of the upper atmosphere. Setting your mote-probe to return under its own power, you wait for it to dock with your ship before you turn again, spin up your ship's phasedrive and drop back into the rush and wail of between-space. Bound for other stars, other points of interest in the endless cosmos around you, you make a notation on the world, upload it to the database, silently reflect on what you've seen.

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Zeta Vaucouleurs Kyklos 426f (Lycaeus)

Between-space parts, opens in a wave of scintillating light that washes over you, delivers you into the void over a world that shines white with ice. Beyond it, the blinding corona of a brilliantly blue dwarf star cuts through the darkness, triggers a shift in your vision as nanomachines in your eyes react to compensate for the sudden brightness. Information comes with a simple ping– despite the planet's position in the Kyklos galaxy, it hasn't been properly cataloged yet. The only entry in the database comes from a cursory scan that was done centuries ago. Not suitable for colonization. That's all anyone ever bothered to write about this world, this system.

Time for someone to do more, give the world a closer look.

A pair of mote-probes dart free from your ship, dance through orbit and into the upper atmosphere of the icy world. Moving together, each cutting through the heat and wake thrown off by the other, they weave an intricate path to the surface, split when they reach the thin air a handful of meters over the snow. Eager, sensors fully open to the world around them, one heads north while the other heads west, both aiming to circumnavigate the little globe. Mountains and valleys rise up in the sensor feeds, all of them frozen, choked with snow. No life, no–

The information streaming in from the mote-probe heading west lights up suddenly as sensors register a dozen spikes of radiation all at once, all of them unusually high and out of place on a world all stone and ice. Curious, you redirect the other mote-probe, set its course to rendezvous with the first, then you pull back, focus all of your attention on the radiation readings.

A ping from one of the probes brings you back to the visual feed – and then you see it, slide forward into the data streaming in, the digital representation of something in the snow as the eyes of your mote-probe brush across it. Buildings, you realize after a moment. Plasticore and polycrete – signatures in the flux which register as distinctly human, early colonial specifically. Prefabs, simple structures spun up during the first interstellar gold rush, and they're everywhere. The scattered remains of a city. A human city buried under ten feet of radioactive ash and ice.

Uncertain, you check the database again, just to be sure. No records of this world, of a ship full of colonists setting course for it. Nothing. Just that same note.

Not suitable for colonization.

But somebody colonized it. Somebody built a city on this world, tried to eek a living out of the ice and snow. Like swatting flies, you brush the insistent messages of your mote-probes away, pick through the data with a critical eye. Other structures rise in your mind as you sift, mull among shattered towers and weather-beaten bits of infrastructure all crumpled and rusting under the snow. Signs of habitation for at least a hundred years, and then nothing. Only the ruined colonial domes, cracked and open to the sky like so many broken eggs can attest to the suddenness of the disaster that took this world, left nothing but ash and ice for future explorers to find.

One of your mote-probes kicks back an insistent message, catches your attention, draws you forward, away from the ruins and across the wastes to the irregular shifting of something large and dark in the snow. No – not large, man-sized. A man-shape all hunched and stumbling with an irregular, yet distinctly humanoid gait. For a moment, your breath catches in your throat – a colonist? A survivor? But the moment doesn't last. Within seconds, data on the thing returns only mechanical and metallic signatures – no life signs. A robot, you realize. Early colonial, like the ruins, and it's trudging blindly forward through the snow.

Curious, you direct your mote-probe around to face the front of the machine, track it as it staggers single-mindedly through the endless ash and ice. Faux skin hangs loose and rotten from the robot's rusty iron skeleton. Bundles of polymer muscle, discolored and eaten by centuries of sun and frost quiver as they pull, jerk and curl spasmodic fingers, twist facial features into a momentary rictus that shivers between a grimace and a smile. It's horrific, watching this zombie of technology trudge toward some unknown goal, tear itself apart as it wades and struggles and gnashes metallic teeth against the cold. For a moment, you consider reaching out to it, connecting to its mind, sifting through the data there, but its appearance makes you hesitate. When the strength to make the connection comes, it comes tentative, and you probe gingerly around the edges of a digital access point before you close your eyes, take a breath and dive into the data. Almost feeling your way by touch, you try to trace the memories that drive the machine forward, see if there is a record of what happened to the colony, but even as you bypass the security protocols guarding the robot's archaic mind, you cross into a hollowness, find nothing. Instead of memories, instead of instructions and algorithms, there is only an emptiness, a void where something more than the dust and the shards of corrupted coding should be. The machine's mind is locked only on a single command, move, and it is frozen in its need to satisfy that command, is utterly dead to all else in the world.

The machine's steel teeth judder and crack together as you withdraw from its paralyzed mind. Simultaneously repelled and drawn to watch it shift and stumble, you linger for another moment before you redirect your mote-probe back into the sky, finally withdraw yourself to the silent comfort of your ship. Video of the robot lingers on in your mind, and as you upload your findings to the network, make the necessary changes to the planet's entry in the database, you wonder again what might have happened, what kind of people the colonists who built the city might have been, why they might have chosen to stay hidden, what might have ultimately wiped them out, left only a single machine to march endlessly onward, away from the colony. The questions nag at you as you slip back into between-space, never leave you even as you burn on toward your next destination among the endless stars.

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Alpha Zeyhiri Maas 8p (Hyphomonii)

Reality shifts and flexes, carries you out of between-space and back into the starry void. Thrusters flare in bursts, drop your ship into orbit around a world of high clouds that linger together so thick and so still that they give the sky an appearance of glassy opaqueness, as if the whole planet were made of polished marble. No entries on this system in the database, so you push a mote-probe toward the atmosphere, follow it into the white-gray abyss and ride it with your mind.

Layers of frigid wind restrained between strata of misty cloud cover slide by as the mote-probe drops toward the surface, rolls across sharp, sudden currents, then drifts back into still air again. When you finally reach open sky, you're less than half a kilometer above the surface, emerge over a still sea of glassy-clear water and an endless bed of smooth, vibrant stones polished to gleaming by the barest whispers of tides working slowly, stirred by breathlike breezes over the course of billions of years. It's beautiful, stirring, and as you chase the flare of the sun across the waters, you see so many brilliant colors slide past, see gentle dips and ridges that give greater texture to the chilly, autumnal rainbow sprawling out beneath you.

Captured samples of the world's thin air return little of interest, find no trace of life, not even in its earliest, most primitive forms. Mesmerized by the stones, by the clarity of the water, you linger in the skies for a while, savor the world's natural beauty in silence. As you fly, the planet's modest yellow sun drops from noon to dusk in the space of a scant few hours, gives gold edges to soft, silvery clouds as it descends from the quilt above to the clear seas below. When night comes, it comes blue-purple, and the stones disappear as the endless ocean turns to shining, silver abyss. You linger for only a moment more, then set your mote-probe on a return course back to your ship, withdraw to your body, wait in silence.

Reflecting on the images in the pause, the majesty of the world below, you replay some of the sensor data in your mind before binding it all up, sending the data on to the network. Almost surreal, the beauty of Alpha Zeyhiri Maas 8p. A treasure amongst the cosmos, and a testament to the artistry of nature.

There's a ping in the back of your mind as your mote-probe docks and locks itself into your ship again. Almost reflexively, you reach out with your mind, turn your ship toward the next point of interest, then slip fluidly back into between-space.

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Beta Iola Truckenmiller 42j (Hyphomonii)

As you cross out of between-space and back into the void that exists between stars, you turn the nose of your ship toward the rocky, airless world of Beta Iola Truckenmiller 42j. A few spare seconds is all it takes to coast into orbit, to start the scans that will paint a picture of all the features of the world that aren't visible to the naked eye.

While your ship's integrated intelligence gathers and collates the results of orbital scans, you fire off a mote-probe, ride the sensor data it sends back as it drops toward the surface. The atmosphere reads as thin, very thin, but still present. Further down, there are winds, wild, strong winds that tear through the pale gray sky, weather the red-brown stones on the surface into thin arches, tall, towering chimneys and other howling, elegant shapes. You spend a handful of minutes just cruising over the surface, taking in the smooth, snaking canyons where sand and wind and time have worn elaborate patterns into rock, into a landscape that looks and reads as though it has never been crossed by human feet or touched by human hands.

Briefly you imagine what it would be like to wander through these canyons, to feel the gritty smoothness of weathered stone walls with your fingers, roll the dust and sand in the palms of your hands. In your mind, you can see yourself sitting cross-legged on a rounded boulder, waiting for the sun to crest and glow at the golden horizon. What alien gods would rise out of the sand before you if you were to sit there, witness a sunrise no other human has witnessed? What spirits would speak to you in the long, cold nights? Would there be spirits at all?

Impossible to say. Impossible to know.

Coming back, you trigger the mote-probe's return sequence, upload notes on the world to the network while you wait. It takes only a few minutes, in some ways feels like so much longer. Part of you doesn't want to leave the little world behind. Part of you wants to stay, explore a little more, but there are other wonders to see, to commune with in the wide void of the universe.

Smiling, you spin up your ship's phasedrive, turn the nose toward the stars.

The universe awaits.

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Tau Haeros Jans-Orium 6k(479)-28j (Xanthi)

A wash of kinetic energy rolls through your ship's engines as you drop out of between-space and slide back into flat reality. Stars spread out around you in the endless void, a billion bright points burning in the night– and then your ship's integrated intelligence rises to pull at the edges of your mind, tries to redirect your attention to something new, something strange.

Metallic signatures. It's the first thing you notice, and as you turn your vessel's nose toward the source, you slide into a sensor feed, immediately find yourself in the middle of a massive starship graveyard.

Initial readings pick up open spaces, butchered bulkheads and decompressed sections of hull. A hundred ships lay splayed amongst the stars, maybe more, all torn apart, all broken open, a dead fleet hanging billions of miles from a tiny, blue-white sun.

More readings come in. The ships aren't human tech, aren't relics of any known species. The hull configurations are utterly new, utterly alien, and as you pick your way between them with the gentle fingers of sensor feeds, you stop for a moment, stunned by the reading that comes in with an estimate on the age of the fleet.

Billions of years. That's how long the fleet has been floating here. At least three billion years, probably more. The area around the fleet itself is pretty clear, virtually empty of spaceborne debris, and the various vessels of the fleet have weathered the eons well, have been almost mummified by space and silence. Curious, you ride clusters of sensor feeds through the remains, pick your way from ship to ship, studying, cataloging. Whatever happened to them, the strikes were brutal, vicious, must have come fast or all at once. The edges of burst hulls shine like they've been cut by some tremendous heat, like the whole fleet was struck in the same moment by a thousand individual beams of violent light. Corpses, all alien, all perfectly preserved in the void, hang like grim effigies, their limbs twisted, knotty and dark.

In the background of your mind, your ship's integrated intelligence works to catalog and survey every inch of every vessel, immediately uploads everything it finds to the network. A few minutes is all it takes, and as the data comes pouring through, you slip into the stream here and there, absorb details. A methane/argon breathing species. Soft flesh, sharp and ridged exoskeletons. Their ships are built like towers of bubbles, spheres nested inside of spheres and connected wherever they touch. Totally unlike anything in the network. Totally alien in design.

Once the last exabyte of data trickles into the network, you give the dead fleet one last glance, then turn the nose of your ship toward your next destination. Triggering your ship's phasedrive, you leave the spin-up in the hands of the integrated intelligence, settle back, sift through data absently as between-space opens, pulls you in, pulls you on.

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Delta Uulame Qua-Fiit 5k(726)-2p (Hyphomonii)

Between-space yields to starry cosmos, and immediately you find yourself coasting into orbit around a massive, rocky world hanging at the extreme edge of a blue-white star's sketchy habitable zone. Sensors reach out, catalog the spikes of sharp, soaring mountain ranges broken by deep and craggy valleys. No lakes, no oceans– only a thick layer of roiling fog three kilometers deep clings to the lowest points on the planet's rocky face. The atmosphere reads as thin, mostly krypton and xenon with traces of oxygen and nitrogen. A gritty frost of dry ice rimes the highest points of the planet's peaks, smokes where the sun touches it.

Mineral particulates suspended in the fog throw off deeper readings, give strange, conflicting reports of the planet's deepest recesses. Curious, you drop a mote-probe, slide into the feed, chase the little eye down to the bottom of one of the canyons. Visibility drops to nothing almost the instant you're inside the fog, but inconsistent sensor readings still give enough data for you to make a safe descent. When the fog finally parts a few meters above the moist, sticky ground, you're struck at first by how humid it is. Cracks in the stone belch volcanic steam, and all around the vents are pulsating ridges, shapes like hard, fat worms, all stirring with strange life. Gingerly, you probe the dark valley beneath the fog with fingers of light and sense, careful not to disturb the fragile ecosystem clinging to the cracks. Within seconds, your ship's integrated intelligence has identified over a dozen distinct species, goes on to categorize them and catalog their relationships with one another. It's a marvel, all this life, and clustered in such a small, specific place. Extremophiles, perhaps the seeds of something that will spread, grow and evolve as the first seeds of life on Earth did. In another several hundred million years, who knows what wonders might crawl or slither upon the face of Delta Uulame Qua-Fiit 5k(726)-2p, distant descendents of these simple forms. Maybe, in time, this world might even yield a star-faring culture, might reach out to some distant shade of the human race and welcome us as brothers and sisters in the endless night above.

Only time will tell.

Curious, you settle the little mote-probe in a wet crag out of the way of evolution, leave it to gather data and pass the feed on to the network. It might last a thousand years under the fog, maybe more. It might be replaced with other, similar probes in time, but for now, it's your eye that watches history in the making, reports on endlessly while you seek out other worlds, other havens for life orbiting farther stars than those that shine on Delta Uulame Qua-Fiit 5k(726)-2p.

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Casual Play Astrogation