Chapter Text
Alinua has been in the business of searching for dead ships for a long time, but she still hates to leave a sector of space without finding anything at all. Depending on who you ask, the knowing when to give up scanning on area and move on to another involves either a delicate balance or a high-stakes guessing game. She's starting to question it, though, because the dry spell in the area she's been looking around has been starting to stretch a bit longer than she's comfortable with.
Scrap ships sensors are fine-tuned to notice the signs of a dying ship, even from far away. It's much easier to spot a rapidly-changing energy signature than it is to find an unpowered hunk of metal drifting in the airless eternity of space. (Neither a sharp increase nor a sharp decrease in energy consumption is a good sign for a ship, although ships whose signatures decreased are usually less exploded, and thus more useful and highly preferred.)
Over the years, Alinua has taught her ship to be very good at recognizing these signs. It's less a matter of ensuring no one else finds the material first—space is, after all, the ultimate expanse, and there aren't so many scrap ships that they're often fighting over the same find—and more a matter of finding them at all, although she does remember another scrap ship owner ranting about having a find picked clean while he was flying over.
"They weren't even serious scrappers," he'd said. "I swear, everyone and their mother wants to do this now, just to be in space. It makes it impossible for those of us who actually do this to get to a ship first and dismantle it properly."
Alinua had just nodded. She'd never had that problem. No, what she was worried about was ships simply slipping into oblivion, never to be found. Not only would that be a loss of potential income for her—and goodness knows it's taking everything she has just to keep her fuel tank full—but dead ships floating in space where they shouldn't be can be a real danger.
When she sees the alert on her control panel blink on, she doesn't hesitate to set the course and get moving. The energy reading is smaller than it would be for a ship designed for a large crew or a large amount of cargo, so it's not likely to be a very lucrative find, but it's a significant enough reading that she's sure she'll get something out of it regardless. Besides, it's not like it would do her any more good to just sit around hoping that something better will show up—she'd been starting to think of moving on anyway.
The trip is long, and solitary, but she's been on her own for a long time. She's used to it.
When she finally reaches the energy source's last known location, she fears that her sensors have made a mistake. The space seems absolutely dead. Her sensors have never failed her before, but space isn't a place where you can cling to certainties too tightly. She's been doing this for long enough that she's learned that. She's about to turn her ship around and leave when a faint spot registers on her local scanners.
Whatever it is, it must be absolutely tiny. To evade her scanners for this long, if the object truly is as close to her ship as her readout is telling her, it must be smaller than even a single-person craft.
Well. Alinua shouldn't get ahead of herself. Some alien species are much smaller than elves and humans, and their single-person crafts are appropriately sized. Still, the energy reading had suggested a small ship, not something so small that it could fit in her quarters.
She has to admit, it's nice that the ship fits inside her cargo hold without needing to be disassembled; no matter how many times she does it, putting on her spacesuit still feels like a hassle. Once the craft is safely inside, she walks through the dimly lit corridors and climbs down the narrow ladder to the hold to take a look at what she's found.
As soon as she lays eyes on the probe—because it's obvious that's what it is the moment she sees it—she can tell why her sensors picked it up as a dying ship. There's clear signs of an asteroid impact, and on a piece of technology this small, almost any impact is more likely than not to hit a vital piece of equipment. She has to admit, the probe fascinates her. She can't wait to learn more about it.
Alinua braids her hair with a speed that only comes from years of practice as she continues observing the probe from the other side of the cargo hold. She could have done this prep on the flight over, but the delay gives her ship's internal sensors time to pick up on any potential dangers the probe gives and lets them alert her before she's elbow deep in its wiring. Her ship's computer gives her the all-clear right as she finishes pulling on her protective overalls and gloves, so she grabs her goggles from the wall and walks over.
The probe consists of a short, compact body with two large solar panels flanking it and supplying it with power. Taking a laser cutter in one hand, Alinua feels around the probe's casing with the other until she finds a seam between two metal panels. Carefully, she cuts a panel loose and gently places it to the side, revealing the inside of the probe.
Unsurprisingly, the probe is entirely made up of computers. Alinua doesn't entirely recognize the design of them—and come to think of it, she hasn't recognized much besides the solar panels when it comes to the design of the probe—but alien computers are still computers, and Alinua is confident enough in her skills to trust that she can either repair them or, at the very least, dismantle them into useful enough parts.
Carefully, she disconnects one of the solar panels, connecting her own portable power supply in its place. Once she's sure of the connection, and reasonably certain that powering up the computer bank won't cause anything to explode, she cautiously feeds a bit of power into the probe.
A few rows of lights flicker on, and nothing seems to be in danger of exploding, so Alinua slowly increases the power supply to equal her best estimate of what the solar panels would have provided.
A sizeable portion of the probe's machinery is still dark, but its central core is a beautiful cacophony of blinking lights and functional indicators. Working slowly to avoid accidentally damaging the unfamiliar technology (and her own), Alinua finds what appears to be an access port. It takes quite a few hours to create a cord that can connect the probe's machinery to her own computer systems, and when she finally connects the two, she's exhausted. Leaving her computer to start translating the foreign language, she takes off her protective gear and heads up to her galley to eat a small meal before going to bed, completely unaware of the consciousness blinking back into being in the belly of her ship.
~~~
Everyone knows that space is a dangerous place and that nothing lasts forever.
Death is an inevitability—even for stars. Big stars explode, the smaller ones expand before collapsing, but all of them die. It’s simply the course of nature, a neutral, factual truth.
The people of Vash know all this, and they also know this: their sun, the star that bathes them with its light and cradles them in its orbit, is dying. It’s been dying for a while; small stars like theirs die slowly, expanding over many, many generations, and when it first started, there was a long time left before their sun swallowed the planet whole. It had all been slow enough for them to adapt, for them to engineer hardier equipment and ways to keep their bodies cool as the temperatures rise, but their scientists never could come up with a ship that could evacuate any meaningful percentage of the population. Space is dangerous, and grows even more so with every additional mouth to feed.
The people of Vash also know that they are, at some point or another, going to die alongside their sun. Despite their best efforts, they haven't been able to engineer spacecraft fit for long-term inhabitation, and without that technology, they will die in a home that is morphing into something unrecognizable, their only legacy being an account of their memories stored in the settlement’s other final achievement—the memory capsule.
The memory capsule won’t be able to save anyone. It was never meant to. It’s a small, unmanned craft with only one noteworthy feature—its computer banks. In this tiny probe, the people stored lifetimes’ worth of memories, in the slight hope that someday, in all the vastness of space, someone would come across the probe and remember them.
A spark lights in the probe’s ignition system, beginning the reaction that will send it far away from the doomed world of its origin, and somewhere deep inside its computers, nestled amongst the memories of thousands of souls, a twin spark—a new soul—blinks into being.
In the cold vacuum of space, there is nothing for the soul to do but guide its consciousness through the vast store of memories and remember.
~~~
Everyone knows that space is a dangerous place and that nothing lasts forever. If even a planet, a sphere of rock so big that it seems infinite to those on its surface, can be swallowed whole, what chance does a small probe have in the face of an ever-expanding universe?
The probe was designed to endure. There are systems in place to protect the computer banks and the memories inside, but they all rely on the sensors, and the soul can tell that one of the probe’s sensors was damaged during the journey out of the planet’s atmosphere. The soul can feel the damage keenly, as clearly as any of the people’s memories record the sensation of pain.
The soul feels what the people it remembers would call fear for the first time as the probe’s remaining sensors pick up an asteroid approaching when it’s already far too close for the probe’s meager steering systems to avoid.
In the brief moment before impact, the soul says it’s sorry. It’s an apology that will never make it to the people it’s directed toward, an apology that is never truly uttered because the probe doesn’t have any sort of speaker system. After all, it was never intended to need one.
If the soul had thought it had discovered an equivalency for pain before, the collision provides it with the experience of agony. There’s no room left for its thoughts amongst the numerous alerts being swapped between computer systems as the probe tries to inventory the damage and see if anything can be repaired.
By the time the soul’s thoughts have enough room in the memory systems to exist again, the computer has determined that the answer to that query is no. The memory-storing computers have survived miraculously intact, but almost every other system on the ship has been partially, if not entirely, destroyed. Without the solar-energy system, even the internal computers will shut down before long. The soul doesn’t know what will happen to the citizens’ memories when that happens, and it doesn’t know what will happen to it, either.
Reluctantly, the soul expands its conciousness into the controls of the ship, switching off all nonessential systems. As each sensor's output sputters to an end, the soul feels like its dying. Sure, its thoughts are still racing, little sparks of electricity pinging around inside a computer bank, but there's nothing to remind it that it's real. Without even the faintest hint of light from a faraway star, without the ever-present feedback from the propulsion systems, the soul has nothing to turn to but the vast stores of experience it shares a home with.
That is, the soul has nothing to turn to until it feels an exhilarating rush of energy flowing into its systems, and an altogether new set of information enters its systems.