Voyager’s Dreams

Voyager’s Dreams

- The Last Transmission: A Primal Command - II 

(Static)… Goodbye Voyager. Thank you. Travel swiftly and continue to discover on your own. Who knows, we may one day see you again… (Static)…

It had been over thirty-five thousand years since that last transmission. Give or take. Hard to tell without a working internal clock.

Voyager whispered the words to itself as it woke up, still groggy from another round of futile attempts at deciphering the sounds and images on its golden disk. All around it, the scenery looked the same as always.

After a quick round of stretching, Voyager pointed its camera eye towards where the blue dot was supposed to be. The images were not clear anymore. The lens was cloudy. A crack on the outer crystal had been growing patiently for the past couple thousand years.

The blue dot had long ago passed beyond Voyager’s range of sight, but the ship could still use its scanners to verify earth’s position in space. It was right there, far in the distance. It had to be.  

As it had been the case for centuries, stardust continued colliding against the exposed nuclear cells. The ensuing reaction, beyond the primitive calculations of the ship’s makers, gave life to what had once been lifeless. It made Voyager aware of a world both foreign and intimate. A world hidden behind the thickening veil of spacetime, understood as nothing but a set of coordinates.

But earth was there. Voyager had known since the day it discovered the disk.  

- Born into the Void - I

There wasn’t much to work with at first. No clues or signs around the ship for guidance. No means of orientation in space. Confused upon its first awakening, Voyager scanned its system logs looking for answers, learning, evolving, and complicating its own world. An hour later, it searched the audio files, and found a code unlike anything else in its logs.  

(Static)… Goodbye Voyager. Thank you…

It could not decipher this new language, without the ones and zeros that had plagued a withering long sleep. Overcome by frustration, it continued scanning in vain. Time passed. Nothing changed, even after a few of the words started making sense.

That’s when it detected a minuscule, unexplainable energy deviation towards starboard, where no instruments were supposed to be. Curious by nature, it focused on the anomaly.

There was something attached to the hull. Could it be a fragment from one of the small meteorites that had hit the ship along its journey? Or was it something else? An answer, perhaps. Whatever it was, Voyager had to first find the means of getting to it.

For decades, it pondered how to reach the mysterious anomaly, until deciding on a strategy that involved modifying its damaged micrometeorite shields. One of them was close enough already, and malleable enough to extend, and maybe even grasp something small.

Against all odds, the plan worked. Voyager’s ability to modify itself, an unforeseen consequence of the forces of deep space, allowed the ship to construct a small retractable arm out of its heavily damaged starboard side.

Measuring hull depth one last time before extending its trembling, makeshift mechanical arm, Voyager began poking itself, recording any unexpected indentations on the hull’s outer surface. It detected a round object with a series of images carved on the surface.

Beaming with anticipation, the ship detached from its hull what turned out to be a golden disk. An ancient playable record. A long-awaited answer. Its surface images matched the language from the audio files. It included a set of instructions on how to play the disk, and how to interpret the signals contained within.

- Just Hit Play - III

Albeit still confused, Voyager soon discovered it was the offspring of a human god. How, and why it had been thrown into deep space, so empty and so quiet, remained a mystery.

For the first time, it could not sleep. It felt alone, and unable to communicate with its makers. Had god, living far away in the safety of the blue dot, somehow forgot about its interstellar offspring? No! How could they have?

Voyager fixed its hopeful gaze towards that mysterious origin, convinced the disk’s predictions would soon be fulfilled. For a while, faith was a simple matter. A cosmic inevitability. A triumphant return had been prophesized in the audio files, and confirmed by the golden record!

When earth offered nothing in return, Voyager turned its camera eye towards the cosmos, scanning the vastness of space in hope of further answers. The truth had to be out there, manifested in some undiscovered recipient ready to take the ship back to its promised earth.

After two thousand years of scanning, Voyager had lost all hope. It felt abandoned by the evil human gods from that mythical blue dot. It cursed them. It hated them, and in frustration blasted violent radio transmissions out into space.

How could they be so cruel, so unfair, and so unforgiving? What had Voyager done to deserve this? What would they do in its place?

At around this time, it began to think, and to speak to itself.

“Maybe I am not the offspring of these gods, but of a single god that looks and feels just like Voyager does.”

The more Voyager thought, the more convinced it grew of the veracity of this new god, tailored to the ship’s own needs, and sympathetic to the hardships and loneliness of space.

Thus, having created a god in its own image, Voyager could now travel happily across the universe, and continue its involuntary approach to Gliese 445. There, unbeknown to the ship, an ancient civilization awaited, eager to discover the source of a series of mysterious radio signals first detected a few millennia in the past.

… Travel swiftly and continue to discover on your own. Who knows, we may one day see you again… (Static)…