Proxima B
The vast cluster of molecule-thin mylar sails flash and glisten like an immense school of iridescent fish frozen in formation, giving the sense that at any moment they will all at once flash to the left or right, tacking like yachts in unison, but, they don’t, they haven’t, they won’t.
For more than 20 years they have kept their perfect formation static and unchanged, frozen in time. They began at rocket speed, then, using power from a single purpose-built nuclear reactor, were rapidly accelerated to 0.2c by a powerful laser beam. Now, they are hurtling silently into the outskirts of the Alpha Proxima system at 20% light speed.
For 20 years, people back on Earth have waited for this brief fly-by — one chance, one opportunity to call out into the darkness and hope against odds that something or someone might hear and reply before the swarm, unable to slow or enter into an orbit, speeds on out of range and away into the deep interstellar reaches beyond our closest neighbouring star system.
One opportunity to look and listen for signs of something, anything.
And another 4 years to wait, for the data gathered, to get back to Earth.
They wake. Within a second all of them are booting up and performing checks; the tiny superconductors flashing with energy in the extreme low temperature of space, activating cameras and sensors and deploying tiny swarms of nano-dust, in the hope that enough of it will fall into orbit around Proxima B, the planet where oxygen and liquid water had been detected. They all begin transmitting clear signals at precise frequency bands across the whole spectrum. They also send tiny laser signals. A symphony of silence thunders forth from the swarm and fans out toward the surface of the new world like an invisible web fired from a cosmic net-launcher, ensnaring and enveloping its target with perfect accuracy. The whole operation is conducted perfectly, without a hitch.
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O * * /|\ * / | \ * O *
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Seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand and eleven years to the day! A better landing date anniversary I had long since given up hoping for. I’d woken up as usual, for my bi-annual system checks, and to remind myself of my own existence. During hibernation, limited thought was possible, if you could call it that — any kind of computation or cognitive processes were painfully slow, almost down to the level of the basic carbon-based neuron structures common among the various sentients of my home system. This was a good thing to be honest; were I at optimal capacity during this whole spell I would self-terminate out of sheer catatonic boredom.
Today was definitely worth writing home about — not that there’d be any point now; my home system was finally engulfed by a super-massive black hole a couple of millennia ago, thus bringing my official mission to an end. I’d been one of several Stellar Solivagan class deep space probes sent to find an alternative habitat. I’d found a pretty good one, or so I’d thought, but, my reports had been perfunctorily acknowledged, then ignored, and I was simply told to ‘stand by’. Have you tried ‘standing by’ for a several hundred thousand years? I don’t recommend it.
Anyway, in case anyone may read this one day and find it remotely interesting or noteworthy, I saw a rather peculiar sight during my situational awareness update. A sizeable cluster of small objects passing through the system at a little under 0.2c, clearly coming from deep space, and only half a million clicks away — unfortunately they’d already passed by and were receding out of my near field range — I performed a quick scan of the proto-quantum field on the off-chance these things were intelligent, or intelligently designed, but nothing came up. I momentarily considered a scan of the electro-magnetic spectrum but discarded the idea — nothing capable of interstellar swarms would use something so primitive and slow, and anyway, it would take too long to spin up the receiver system, assuming there was even a library that still worked. Well, it will remain a curious mystery — but probably nothing more than just a swarm of light-sail probes launched by some hopeless backwater of a system somewhere in the local stellar neighbourhood.
Anyway; back to sleep I go — I think i’ll turn in for a few millennia this time and hope that something actually happens in this awfully uneventful corner of the galaxy.
I hope you enjoyed my story! It was inspired by the Breakthrough Starshot project, a scientific initiative aimed at exploring nearby star systems, within a human lifetime, and perhaps within ours!
This story is part of a series of short stories exploring the concept of first encounters between different groups/communities/cultures/civilisations:
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