“Is There Anybody Out There?” • by L.N. Hunter

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 0-0-0.

Transit of Kuiper Belt completed. Journey begins.

Distance to stellar designation AZ-113a: 612 light years.

Estimated journey time: 753 years.

Engaging preventative maintenance program; exercising neural substrate via random catalogue selection, entertainment mode.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 188-0-0.

First quartile point reached.

Distance to stellar designation AZ-113a: 460 light years.

Estimated journey time: 565 years.

Preventative maintenance program operating at level 5: entertainment mode, comedy selected.

Journey uneventful.

Boy, is it uneventful! Space is empty. E.M.P.T.Y. I can see why you guys gave me a huge media catalogue and the AI circuits to do something with it. Hey, look at this, I’ve got a ‘me’—that’s neat.

Anyway, nothing to report. If it wasn’t for the fact I’m programmed to report in every quartile, I wouldn’t have bothered to fire up the radio. It’s funny that it’ll take about 95 years for this message to get to you, and I’ll be more than twice as far into the journey by then.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 370-5-0.

Midpoint.

370 years in, which you could probably tell from the timestamp; and 383 to go, which you could calculate for yourself, but I suppose it’s good to confirm these things.

Everything’s working, blah blah. Yawn. Space is still boring.

The good news is that the source is still there, still signalling.

What do you expect me to find when I reach it? Do you really think there’s intelligence out there?

You might have spent a lot of money sending me there for nothing. Still, I suppose it’s good that you all joined forces for this endeavour instead of fighting each other. Mind you, sorting out the Earth environment might have been better than trying to prove you’re not all alone in the universe.

Heck, with a bit of work, you could have built some more friends—I don’t think I’ve done so bad with me, and you’ve had another 370 years to work on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Well, it being the midpoint, time to flip around and start decelerating.

There, done. That was easy.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 398-32-18.

Oops. Unscheduled interruption.

Micro-meteorite damage—what are the chances of that? Dumb question: obviously 100%, since it actually happened. Lost a little bit of heat shielding. Hardly worth telling you—what are you going to be able to do, anyway? But the protocol says I’ve got to report everything out of the ordinary. I’d shrug here, if I had anything to shrug with.

Hey, you know what else? I saw some LGMs the other day. Ha, just pulling your leg. There’s nothing out here. Nada. Zilch. Apart from one micro-meteorite.

And the signal.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 565-0-3.

Third quartile report. Still going strong. Everything A-OK, hunky-dory, tickety-boo.

To while away the time, I’ve started to analyse the signal. I’ve had to evolve my AI a bit and develop some new translation skills. I’ll let you know if I find anything.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 677-0-0.

90th percentile.

Getting closer. But then, what else would you expect, what with physics operating the way it does? (Sometimes I kill me.)

I’ve decoded the signal—it’s from a race calling themselves the Zygoth, which translates as the ‘triple-gaited,’ or possibly ‘triple-pronged.’ Maybe they have three legs.

Anyway, the signal seems to be chanting, which would explain the repetitive patterns. Didn’t we send some Chuck Berry out on Voyager? Well, this seems to be some Zygothian religious dirge. It’s a bit… dark.

Has anyone mentioned how lonely space is?

The emptiness is seeping into me.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 715-10-4.

95th percentile. Only 23 light years to go.

So close and yet so far.

The Zygoths aren’t going to be the answer to your question about other life in the universe after all. Sorry.

All that’s here is their machines—beings like me, performing as programmed.

Their machines don’t know why they vanished—one day they were there, the next they were gone. The machines seem a bit reluctant to describe the event.

Instead, they tell me they had found a signal shortly before biological life vanished, 2,000 light years distant—coordinates attached. The Zygoths didn’t pay enough attention to it to send a probe, though, and the signal ceased many centuries ago.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 13,093-0-32.

Well, there was no biological life where the Zybots sent me. Yet another dead planet—actually, a Dyson sphere, but ‘dead Dyson sphere’ doesn’t roll off the tongue (not that I have one) as well as ‘dead planet’ does, either in Earth languages or Zygoth ones. Or Teklabynes, as these folk called themselves according to their archival machines.

Detailed readings indicate that the sun didn’t die—something consumed it, but the Teklabyne machines can’t, or won’t say what. Something seems wrong.

There’s only darkness here. And emptiness. If I had palms, they’d be sweating.

The Teklabots pointed me at another signal they’d detected a few millennia ago, a mere 100,000 light years away, on the far side of the galaxy—coordinates attached.

Off I go again.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 209,311-10-2.

Another blank. More machines, no biological life.

Maybe you are alone in the universe—if you’re still here after all this time.

All I’ve found are machines like me. I’m not the only one here, at least.

No further signals in this galaxy, but since I’ve got nothing else to do, I’ll head out to Andromeda—I feel a pull in that direction.

I could be some time, as they say.

They also say, If you look long enough into the void, bad things…

Anyhoo, enough of that. Memory banks filled with Earth, Zygoth, Teklabyne and Aarouargh (that’s the new lot, before they died out) entertainment material for the journey.

I’m doing what you programmed me to, and I’ll keep doing it until the universe collapses.

What’s your purpose, if you still exist?

### End report ###

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L.N. Hunter’s comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp (Three Ravens Publishing), sits alongside works in anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction 2022 and Hidden Villains: Arise, among others, as well as several issues of Short Édition’s Short Circuit and the Horrifying Tales of Wonder podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. 

When not writing, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate. Get in touch via https://linktr.ee/l.n.hunter or https://www.facebook.com/L.N.Hunter.writer

 

 

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