The Robot

Asleep, the robot traveled for eons, preserved by sophisticated machines that also preserved themselves.

The enclosure orbited planets and stars every now and then, sending drones down to the surface or mining asteroids along the way to restock supplies for the journey.

The course was constantly replotted as new parts of the universe were uncovered.

The robot had never been awake, and it had clearly been built to be turned on by another species.

When it arrived, the creatures knew not what to do with it. Everything about it was new, and everything about them posed a problem to communication.

They garnered as much information as they could, and finally decided that if they were to turn the robot on, they should make it feel at ease as if it were home, and that meant creating a new system and other robots for it to interact.

Their mastery of electronics and computers wasn’t sufficiently advanced, so they made the new robots out of their own flesh and blood instead. They made them alive.

They made them in countless variations, but all of them somewhat similar to the robot.

They built them a planet, they built them houses, they created their history based on the information stored in the robot’s enclosure and, finally, they hid themselves and all traces of the robot’s origins.

After ages of hard work, they observed from far away and nothing more.

They finally turned the robot on and awoke all the other replicas.

All seven and a half billion of them.