Main Asteroid Belt

(Between Mars and Jupiter)

Uncountable numbers of rocks were making their circular path through space; it was an eternal dance that had begun when the Solar System was still young. For all those billions of years, they were left undisturbed, except by physical laws that governed space itself.

Now, something was happening in one small corner of the belt; an external force was changing those natural objects into something else… something greater than the sum of its parts. Asteroids were harvested for their materials, and some of them disappeared in entirety while others lost so much of their mass, only fragments remained where these giants used to soar the heavens.

At one specific point, a structure was being assembled; small at the beginning but exponentially growing larger each day. All the while, millions of new constructs were moving through the belt; searching and rearranging things. Their purpose was as mysterious as their mission. In a relatively short time, that structure had grown so much; it began asserting a gravity of its own. Until moved by forces that defied the natural order of things, it changed its trajectory and started its voyage towards the inner system.

***

The Outer Edges of the Solar System

The ancient probe stood its vigil for thousands of years, not caring for the passage of time. It was not a sophisticated machine; at the time of its making, it was decided that giving it more processing power was unnecessary for the very simple mission it had to accomplish.

At the beginning of its surveillance, it scanned the Solar System constantly, trying to detect a particular energy signature. Decades went by without any success and its energy reserves got so low that the secondary protocols were activated. It created a stasis field around itself and stayed outside the influence of entropy. The field was deactivated from time to time, to perform its mandatory scans. Yet, each emergence used up additional power, so the checks were performed between longer periods of time.

The probe’s power was almost depleted; just a few more status activation and it would have stopped working. Then, a signal was detected, the same energy signature it was programmed to find. Finally, after almost 13,000 years of the vigil, its purpose could be fulfilled –enemy signals were detected.

Using all its remaining power in one last surge, it translated away from the Solar System.

The End Of Book 2