For the Love of Proxima
Underneath a falling sky, two lovers ponder life beyond their invaded planet.
Our world, Proxima, was tranquil, spinning around a complex quaternary star system, watching patiently for eons, as cosmic fields flowed like molasses across spacetime.
Stars came and went. Galaxies spun out of the web of gas and dust, fluttering through the dance of galactic mergers — as stars and gas were rearranged in accordance with gravity’s mighty hands. And all the while, we sent signals for the hope that they were not alone amongst that eternal night. Signals that never came.
But Proxima waited as if it were a homesick child. Such preparing for a voice amidst silent pulsars brought with it life and death and panspermia dreams. But all they received was the lifeless messages of quasars and Brownian noise. A few times, they thought they received a message composed of prime numbers from a faraway spiral galaxy, but it turned out only to be static. The waiting continued.
We sent self-assembled nanobots to other nearby planets in the year of 2,200 SE. The Discoverers sailed the solar winds, pushed by great lasers from the Pyramid of Hope. A trillion little Darwin’s relaying bits of information from a lost world. But by 2000 SE, a thousand years passed in a blink of an eye, and two new kingdoms…
