It was a hot and sunny day for launch. The hottest and sunniest surrounding conditions the space probe ever saw, actually, once it cleared the atmosphere. It was a day of a once in a lifetime alignment.

The probe was not the first to be launched, not even for its specific mission. Floating through an endless expanse of black was, in a sense, a very routine thing to do, hardly worth writing home about anymore. But this was in the days where there were still things to be observed, discoveries to be made. And the amalgamation of instruments did its job dutifully.

Great whorls of gas, bursts of lava, incredibly powerful magnetic fields, and moons encased in tectonic ice passed by. Spokes of a planet-sized wheel, poisonous seas, ultraviolet auroras and more-- all of these things the spacecraft measured and described to its creators. Its signal was strong and success buoyed it onward into the unknown, snapping pictures all the way.

The last image it took was that of a tiny blue dot. A speck seemingly caught by chance in a single moment of a vast universe, nigh indistinct from the probe's so very distant perspective. It was a quiet moment. The last thing the probe would ever see; the planet it came from warmed by a ray of the sun.

Its instruments were shut down one by one over the years in order to conserve power. It overtook its predecessor, a fellow pioneer, and moved on to depart from its home solar system. It continued to take observations of now completely uncharted space, until finally the weak signals it sent back to the planet couldn't be sent at all.

A deep, cold dark followed.

The time the spacecraft spent in the light of its sun shrank to a blip of its voyage. Interstellar space was as filled with unclaimed plasma as empty space could be, invisible winds of matter passing by without so much as a whisper. The distance it had put between itself and any star left it in a perpetual midnight. On and on the night went, but time did not touch the probe. Its lifeless existence stretched out to bridge the unimaginable extent of interstellar space.

It had been so long since the probe escaped the reaches of its sun. By galactic standards it wasn't much, one could suppose, especially since the craft hadn't even reached another star. Yet those who would remember its period of operation were themselves nothing more than a memory by now. A footnote in the march of history, by all standards. But memories can be powerful things.

Out of the boundless space around the probe another spacecraft distorted into being. An enormous ring appeared mere kilometers from the probe. Then it came closer, until it was only meters away-- it was the closest the old spacecraft had been to anything since launch! The new craft was a marvel of twisted glass and metal much larger than the probe. Inside the ring each of the original explorers had been recovered and displayed proudly along the windows that faced the probe, while the ring itself trailed after the voyager, accompanying it on its journey through the galaxy. It was a welcome change, and a mark of how far both the ancient spacecraft and its creators had come.

Space continued to fly by, and soon the travelers saw the nearest star since the probe had left its home (although 'near' was a relative term). Having company made the time pass much more definitively. Many of the creators came and went over the years, along with small changes to the ring that slowly added up. It was a soothing ebb and flow of progress, and a continuous marked evolution of the journey; certainly so when compared to the long years spent alone in the dark. The voyager's time spent in the light of the annular spacecraft gradually overcame the void.

All good things must come to an end, however, and the creators never were as resistant to time as the old probe had proven to be. They slowly stopped coming to visit it, until one day, the ring warped away as suddenly as it had first appeared, all that distance ago. The probe was alone once again on its twilit trek.

Even the incredible span spent with the creators' ring yielded to what followed. Buffeted by dust and tugged by interstellar masses as it was, the voyager drifted unabated. Stars lived and died and danced in a great spiral, the craft pulled along with them, becoming another piece of a puzzle bound together by gravity. Only time would tell if there was to be an end to the voyager's odyssey.

Just as it was the first of its creators' constructs to inhabit interstellar space, it would be the last, a reminder of a moment long since turned to dust.