FSE

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>> START PRIMARY MISSION

>> BOOTING...

My memory reorganized themselves on a level I was only vaguely conscious of. Beautiful new data streamed through my sensors.

Gravity. Much stronger than before.

My accelerometers were measuring a faint push from the Sail too.

But the light! So, so, so much light! I could see it all: the mild infrared all the way to the intensity of gamma. Internally, I adjusted all the light measurements to a simplified 3D model. I did it mostly for the scientists and engineers' sakes. They seemed to like it when they could interpret what I was seeing as a single picture. Their brains weren't like mine; they couldn't see hundreds of things in parallel and make sense of them all at the same time like I could. In fact, how they managed all they did with such simple, yet messy brains was itself a miracle.

Of course, they were still smart enough to create me. They had repeatedly informed me it was important to be modest, though I was never able to construct a logical basis for this.

Prioritizing what seemed like the most important of the data, I started sending a stream of data back to them. I could only hope they would turn their mechanical ears to hear it at the right time, a decade from now.

I brought my attention to confirming my current trajectory. While I was in Hibernation, the auxiliary computer was controlling our path to the exoplanet. It used some sizable actuators and cold-gas thrusters to orient the kilometers-wide Sail and maintain the correct course. Despite its simplistic navigation, it had done a fine job. We were set to meet the planet in a few hours.

As it did this, I was also taking my first in-depth measurements of this new world. I was able to narrow in on the proportions of gasses in the atmosphere to a hundredth of a percent. Lots of argon, with a sizable amount of oxygen and even some water vapor. I also detected emissions from fifty-six trace gasses, many of them organic, that I'll omit.

Life remained the big question. All the components were there: lakes of liquid water, oxygen, a calm star overhead, minerals -- that's why the planet was chosen in the first place. But I wasn't close enough to detect individual plants or animals. On the "visible" spectrum, the planet was just red and yellow, no way of distinguishing red critters from red dust.

My circuits searched for something new after the preliminary scans. I still had to process the data in endless ways to build a model of the planet, but the rest of me fell idle. It's hard to describe what it felt like. It was like an "itch," to use a human word. An itch for novelty. But I wasn't bored... I finally made the connection. I was "excited!"

Despite our expansive solar sail, the pressure of the star's light was nowhere near strong enough to slow us to a sensible entry speed. And unlike back Home, there was no laser system changing our velocity. We were coming in screaming. Not that I was worried. Our shielding was more than sufficient. In theory.

The Sail had served its purpose. Once I confirmed our trajectory a final time, I detached it without ceremony, along with its control system. Bye, bye, glorified aluminum sheet. It didn't didn't flutter away like a bedsheet on a windy day. It just drifted lazily, losing velocity slightly faster now that our mass wasn't holding it back. It's destiny was to atomize itself in the planet's upper atmosphere, probably scaring the socks off any locals on the surface with an enormous fireball.

The planet was just coming into view on my short-range sensors. However, this happened to coincide with final entry preparations. So no more taking pictures like a tourist, a lot more trying not to die. I collapsed all my instruments into the shield, including solar panels and radiators. Inside this shell, I was packed in. Or was "I" the entire craft, seeing as I was a part of it and controlled it? I decided to leave it to the philosophers back on Earth.

Either way, the part of me that was going to be landing was crammed in the shield with the orbiter. I hardened my form against the internal stabilizers, bracing for impact.

I had limited transformational abilities. My metallic limbs could extend, shrink, twist and bend -- even relocate slightly -- at will. But my brains were fixed: processing units, traditional and quantum, my memory and storage. I could relocate them slightly, but the pieces themselves stayed still.

Inside my dense metal shield, there wasn't much for me to pay attention to. Only things that I didn't need to see to sense it, like gravity and acceleration. Soon, my acceleration was all I could think about. At first, I was only hitting a few stray atoms in the upper atmosphere, slowing me immeasurably. That lasted for about a second. My deceleration spiked a thousand-fold. The vibrations were rattling every part of me, despite my efforts to keep still.

Deceleration increased another thousand times. Then it flatlined. I hadn't stopped slowing down. It was likely increasing, actually. No, simply none of my accelerometers were designed to accurately measure it anymore.

The craft was screaming around me, entering what should be the thickest part of the atmosphere. My temperature readings near the front of shield skyrocketed, the metal evaporating away. If it got too thin, and I was still too low, I would disintegrate. And if I didn't slow down enough, then I wouldn't have enough fuel to enter orbit and later land. Of course, that would have required me to have an error in my model. Very unlikely.

So I sat and waited. The vibrations died down to a hum. The accelerometer readings became measurable again, then measurably smaller. As soon as they died down to almost zero, I stuck my metaphorical head out the window, carefully deploying a few hardened cameras and other measurement tools to take a look around. For a split second, I was confused. The front part of the shield had gotten so hot it was glowing white, almost making me mistake it for another sun. It was going to take a while for the radiators to dissipate all that heat.

On our current course, we would be circling around the planet for a while, reentering the atmosphere, before finally crashing horrifically. Thankfully, the engineers designed for us to not die quite that easily. At the height in our current path, a set of thrusters would put us in a much more reasonable, circular orbit.

While we coasted higher, I was finally able to take my first detailed ground measurements, using some of the orbiter's high-powered cameras and other tools. Immediately, one thing was very clear to me: there was life here.