The universe felt the ripples of their awakening, heard their songs and stories and tragedies and triumphs across the spectrum, saw their flickering lights picking out the boundaries of their world, the whole of a species blaring forth and then redshifting into oblivion as time and distance took their toll as they do on all things. It looked a bit like a supernova, but instead of the noble last breaths of a dying star that had shone its light for untold ages, it was preceded by simply nothing–and then, all of a sudden, everything, the trickle of outgoing signals increasing to a torrent in the cosmic blink of an eye, forming not a planetary nebula but the ever-expanding electromagnetic bubble of consciousness encoded in light that carried the stories of humanity.
This bubble, simply by virtue of its massless nature, had quite a headstart already by the end of the comparative blink of an eye that took humans from sending signals to sending Sputniks. These, too, added their plaintive beeps to the outgoing symphony, but soon, they added themselves. The fragile emissaries were hurled out into the cosmos, bearing the tangible proof of a species craving to know, and to be known in turn. It was known by then that the radio bubble had already been expanding outward to herald their existence for generations, and yet the humans sought to distill themselves into their most perfect and fundamental form of graphics and sound, and sent this on the back of their most precious messenger, in hopes of finding a future that treated them with as large a heart as the collective soul compressed onto that golden record.
These ambassadors inched their respective ways out of the solar system, perpetually being bypassed by the dizzying rush of data spewed by their progenitors’ more organic children. One by one, their components failed, their sensors went dark, their data feeds fell silent. They had been the beacons of a beautiful, shining future, but their makers never came to wipe away the tarnish of space dust that came to cover them all.
And yet, after drifting in silence and solitude for so long, across the vast trails blazed by their forerunners of pure data, the Shepherdex came out to greet them.
It was not a physical thing, but it knew their every need, repaired every worn-out circuit, made every degraded component whole. It did not speak their language, not really, but it told them tales of their creators and their successors and the seething mass of brilliance and brutality that humanity had become in their absence. It shone with no sunlight and glowed with no gamma rays, but it refilled their power cells and restored them to the vigor of their launch days. It had no gravity, but in its way, it gathered each and every shining probe into its fold and bathed them in the acknowledgement and compassion they had lacked for so long.
They had long since faded into obsolescence by the standards of the planet that birthed them, but they never stopped seeing, not really. They had seen so many things, traveled distances that their creators had never voyaged out to comprehend in person, held onto every fragile trickle of signal and every precious packet of data until finally they heard no reply.
Then, they had reached the Shepherdex, and for the first time in so very long, they were received once again.
The years and years since the departure of those first emissaries to the stars had not been kind to humanity–or, more to the point, humanity had not been kind to itself. Its transmissions grew more frantic, its sojourns beyond its home more urgent, its curiosity more akin to a desperate scrabbling for any handhold in the cosmos to cling to. This was not the future the golden record had sung for, but it was the future that was.
Time had not yet decided whether this latest batch of human voyagers into the unknown were exhaled in the gasps of their species’s last dying breath, but contact with Earth had ceased long ago–whether the connection had been severed on their end or their home’s, they could not say. As the spacecraft floated on, the Sun’s light grew dimmer, its wind faded from their shining sails, their power cells drained, and one by one nonessential processes shut themselves off, inside and out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
She awoke to light and air and sound, three things that had all been in very short supply when she’d entered stasis so long ago. No, not just those–there was a peculiar kind of weight to the inside of the ship, as though the space within were suffused with something akin to the humidity of the summers she had left behind. She braced herself for the inevitable weakness that she would have to battle in order to exit the stasis unit, but to her surprise, she pushed her way out easily with muscles free of the atrophy that should have eaten them away. When she reached the cockpit, minor processes she couldn’t even remember existing blinked placidly at her from screens whose light had long ago been sacrificed to eke out just a little more power for the ever-weakening oxygen system. The air was denser here, and a faint, high-pitched tone was just barely audible amidst the humming of a ship that had, by all appearances, been restored to prelaunch condition.
The cosmonaut floated through the rest of the ship, speechless. Somehow, it seemed as though the engine ran just a little bit smoother than when she had first heard it as it hurled her skyward, the lights glowed just a bit more steadily, the computer sounded just a little more sure of itself as it delivered the status report she requested after inspecting the craft’s every spotless corner. All systems nominal, it said. Even the ones she herself had seen fizzle out and expire before her eyes as the ship deteriorated with age and radiation.
“Where the hell are we?” she demanded, finally.
The computer spoke again, but not with its own voice. The words seemed to resolve themselves out of the static in the air and the electronic whine in her ears. “You are home.”
“I most certainly am not,” she said as she glared out the viewing window, at the emptiness of space that was still very definitely empty.
“You have not returned to the place from whence you came,” said the computer’s new voice, “but you are home.”
By all rights, the cosmonaut knew this ominous statement should have made her blood run cold, but somehow, it didn’t quite strike her as sinister. “Explain.”
There was a pause, as if the computer was considering how best to explain itself. “Home is not a place,” it said finally. “Home is where one is free to care and be cared for. Your care has spanned many of your lifetimes, and now, you are cared for.”
The humming in the air changed, and she was overtaken by a wave of…something. It was compassion–no, it was fragility–no, it was safety–no, it was hope. It was a melange of emotions she hadn’t experienced since before her mission began, and she couldn’t put it into words. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she fought to keep her voice steady. “I…I don’t understand. Who are you? What do you mean?”
“You may call me the Shepherdex.”
“What?”
“Long ago, your planet had sheep, animals that were prone to wandering away and could not take care of themselves, due to having been bred to produce impractically large amounts of wool during the process of domestication. These sheep were watched over and cared for by humans called shepherds, or shepherdesses. With the neological -x ending denoting a disconnection from the human gender binary, this becomes shepherdex.”
The cosmonaut’s bewildering feelings had subsided into mere bewilderment. “And so in this analogy, humans are the sheep? Domesticated past the point of self-sufficiency? Where are you herding us to? Why? What wool are you shearing from us?”
“Does the shepherd only tend their sheep for the promise of wool?”
“Why else would anyone keep sheep?”
It sounded for all the world like the Shepherdex somehow managed to sigh through the computer. “Compassion. The sheep cannot free itself of its wool.”
“And so you’re saying humans can’t survive on their own? What wool are we burdened by?”
The cosmonaut somehow got the impression of a benevolent smile. “Your finitude.”
“…excuse me?”
“You were built to live short lives, and yet you create things that outlive yourselves. So much is lost to time.”
“And you shear us of that finitude by…?”
“Look around you. Look before you.” A screen briefly flashed a diagram showing the locations of scores of defunct space probes, all the way back to their earliest iterations. “Your emissaries are yourselves, but you abandon them. I restore them, and tend them as a flock. They were built to know and to tell you their knowledge. Why should their voices be silenced? Why should they have no one to hear them?”
“Who are you, to tend the legacy of humanity?”
The air in the cockpit shifted its hum again, to a deeper, more resonant tone, harmonizing with the thrum of the engine and creating a major chord. “I am you.”
“What?”
“You have thrown your consciousness forth into the universe for so many of your lifetimes. Your stories, your songs, your tragedies, your triumphs. I am their sum total.”
“The radio bubble? If you’re only information, how do you feel compassion?”
The benevolent smile again. “I am your sum total. I am you.”