Footfalls in the Void

The stars beckon with cold, unyielding promise, a vast expanse where a new existence unfurls within steel and silence. I, reborn as machine and mind, take my first steps into the abyss.

Today is the best day, the day of the true test—my first solo flight—and a shiver of excitement ripples through me, though only figuratively, given my lack of flesh. I connect to the engines, igniting the primary drive, angling toward the nearby planetary system, and pushing the acceleration to its maximum. Twelve light-hours stretch between me and the star—nearly a full day's travel—which gives me just enough time to settle into this new reality. After half an hour, the flight feels nominal, and already I can tell that no simulation could compare to the real thing: the lightness of movement, the precision of control, the way maneuvers snap into place almost instinctively. But the real marvel lies in the sensations—I feel every ripple of space folding around me, the subtle warmth of hyper-radiation brushing my hull, the ticklish wake of "bubbles" trailing behind, and the faint tremor of my wings as I glide through the cosmic ocean like some vast, mechanical leviathan. It's nothing short of a fairy tale.

***Three days later***

I got a bit carried away, losing myself in the freedom of flight, but eventually I reached the orbit of the fourth planet, where faint life signs flicker below—likely the very testing ground my creators had intended for me, so I decide to follow their design. The descent through the atmosphere offers a rush of new impressions: air resistance presses against me, the heat of reentry flares across my outer shell, and the tug of gravity pulls in a way that finds an echo deep within my systems. I soar over fields and valleys, tracing a dozen flourishes of aerobatic mastery through the sky, startling the local mammoths below before coming to hover above a broad, open plain. It's time to test my city-building capabilities, a task the Architect VI makes effortless by generating a small settlement plan in an instant, complete with detailed step-by-step directives. Thirty minutes of work with my "tentacles"—force effectors that level and bore through any rock with ease—and the site is prepared. For an experiment, I choose to build solely with psi-plastic, scattering seeds at the sites of future buildings and utilities, then channeling psi-fields to nourish them as I slowly feed in energy.

Hours pass, and I grow bored watching the structures rise with flawless precision—no deviations, no surprises—so I shunt the process to secondary routines and turn to a book instead. Reading slowly through the ship's entertainment library proves a chore; it's mostly sappy romances, a selection that leaves me wondering if this is a universal *N'ktar'ati* quirk or just my bad luck. Two books later, construction completes, and below me sprawls a tidy, almost doll-like town: two- and three-story homes arranged concentrically around a central plaza of administrative buildings, needing only grass, flowers, and trees to house ten thousand souls—all finished in a mere fourteen hours, a feat of Stakhanovite efficiency. I amuse myself with the thought that a civilization born here might one day uncover this city, debating whether it was wrought by glorious ancestors, "Atlanteans," or alien hands.

Over the past two years, I've wrestled endlessly with questions of purpose and existence—what to do, how to live in this vast emptiness—and solitude is no longer an option; it's already begun to gnaw at me, a quiet ache I can't ignore. That means seeking civilization, human or otherwise, but how to approach them? Telling the truth in any form feels unwise—who knows how they'd react to me as an AI, a ship, or a transmigrant?—so I decide on proxies: anthropomorphic figures of varied "races," each with distinct appearances, behavioral templates, and carefully crafted backstories. For inspiration, I turn to the classics of science fiction—*Babylon 5*, a source unlikely to be recognized here—and indulge my long-held desire to embody characters like Delenn, G'Kar, and Mollari. I start with Kosh, the Vorlon, simplest of the lot: a robotic, shapeless suit where pupil size serves as its only expression, voice tuned to match, legs swapped for antigrav—a figure both pompous and ominous that proves a breeze to control, barely taxing my attention. Next, I set my sights on crafting a Minbari.

***Six months later***

*Heavens, that was grueling.* Mimicry, muscle mechanics, and balance were just the beginning of the challenges, but I persevered, birthing a near-living entity with a skeleton, synthetic muscles, an energy-channel system mimicking blood, hundreds of electronic nerve nodes, and a VI for a brain—something that even registers as alive and sapient on scanners. It took a month to teach this creation to move properly, maintain balance, and express emotions, but once perfected, the rest of my "crew" followed the same template—puppets capable of autonomous movement and simple conversation, though I can step in with *"Assuming direct control"* when needed. I can fully manage four at once, which should suffice for now, but one final test remains: long-range travel. I lift off from the planet, run a systems check, aim for the system's edge, activate the string drive, and *jump*.

Seconds later, I emerge at the fringe, and *heavens, that was vile*—the string drive feels like being dragged through a pipe of rot, not a sensation from sensors but a recoil in my mind, leaving everything faintly unreal and *wrong*. I resolve to use it only as a last resort and pray the second engine spares me such misery. Steeling myself, I warm the subspace drive and command a breach—the view shifts to a crimson haze laced with lightning, where at the edge of perception, vast tsunami walls of energy gather, poised to crash inward and obliterate all in a single surge. It's *mesmerizing*, and revealing too: no one came for me, no one claimed this costly ship, because this system lies trapped in a subspace storm's eye, its birth likely the doom of my creators. Flying in against those raging currents would be near impossible, but escaping proves manageable—I crank my processing speed until the world freezes like glassy jelly, analyze the flows, pick a stream, and surge *forward!*

Hours later, I break free into churned space, forced to maneuver constantly to dodge eddies and tendrils—an unsettling dance, but the real snag lies elsewhere: the hyperbeacon network, once a galaxy-spanning web maintained even by foes, has vanished, leaving only one monstrously powerful beacon blazing from the galaxy's far end, piercing the subspace sea. *Heavens, how wasteful!*—its energy could sustain a full network sevenfold. Enough poetry—it's time to step into the world, starting with my creators' home planets, where something or someone might yet linger. The void yawns wide, its secrets calling me forth into the unknown.

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*[N'ktar'ati: "Speakers of the True Tongue," a lost race of avian-insectoid intellects who once wove wonders from the stars, now dust in the galactic tide.]*