The message had been continuously transmitted for years now, so long that those who built the dish were dead. And still the interstellar greeting blared out into the heavens.
The beings known as The Searching were a religious cult at first. Their scriptural destiny was to travel to the Centre of the Universe and God — the wisest of all. Most considered it superstition now. Nevertheless, as a species they still felt driven to find the Centre of the Universe.
There was a message in my inbox this morning. It was dated from three weeks in the future, and from my own email address
“Our time experiments would be having been verging on success, but the stupid simple errors I am going to will have made through exhaustion in the next four hours have will really screwed up my management…
They believed they would never see home again. They were lucky to survive the crash, but it was little more than an asteroid, and time was running out, with their air toxifying by the hour.
They were rescued by a strange looking being. She took them to their planet, just a day away in her craft. They were welcomed as heroes…
They watched the planet at distance for a few orbits. Eventually they decided against visiting. Just like others had before them. They wanted to visit (at least covertly), they could see it was inhabited, but there was simply too much debris in orbit. They could probably pick a path through it, but it was hardly worth it.
She was one of 64,000 models built. The manual called her “Adult Leisure Companion — Cherri”. Her first owner called her “Robot Slave Whore”. But she preferred ‘Lorain’, having been assembled there. She was amused that AmeriSynCor chose Lorain over Gary, but it didn’t really matter.