46 | Psychopomp Magazine
They left. Out in voids of space, there’s no sustenance for blood and bone. Over one-hundred-thousand years they became wires and computer chips. Chips became digital data, cognizant but lonely simulacra of true consciousness. Such painful longing for touch unmediated by algorithmic approximations of feeling. Screams of loss shrieked silent words in airless voids.
Energy dwindled as they drifted beyond radiating particles of collapsing and exploding stars. Even exotic fuels of dark antimatter blends enhanced with daring quantum combustion could not carry them to promised lands. Relative lift was limited by excess mass.
They had to condense, to shrink to mere artificial seedlings of what they had once been.
With no tear-ducts to cry, no lungs to wail, no emotive sacs of secreting pleasure nor skin to stretch in grimaces of grief, all their world reduced to minute sheaths holding mighty memories of desire bounded by entropy and shielded by metallic synthetics.
The captain goes down with the ship, an old saw we all know. They had similar conceptions.
They had already been effaced as discrete autonomous entities, submerged into encoded globules of collective elemental density.
Destroying their interstellar vessel by necessity of insufficient energy, they sent these cylindrical probes, seedlings that contained the microcosm of their vanished civilization. Propelled by shockwaves of their mothership’s demise and directed by precisely coordinated calculations computed over aeons, they reached at least one habitable destination.
Our world. One of their containers for synthetic incubation and dissemination was our Handle. Jimmy’s prize.
Thus by Jimmy Bell’s discovery, we had been discovered.
And in the wonder of the amber and silver wool that sprung from the