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Shot off into space, the message coasts on rays emitted from the sun, radiating out deep into the cosmos. Ones and zeros, carefully contained in individual photons, rising and falling in the waves of black.
The message dances through space, ducking and diving and swirling around. Jumping from place to place, shifting from wave to particle. Saying hello to every glint of light in its path. It slips into the tendrils reaching out from every star it glides past, Alpha Centauri and Antares and the Pistol Star, curling around and around, making its journey to the centre of the Milky Way.
The message continues it voyage, falling towards the void, towards Sagittarius A. The pull of the black hole captures it. Closer and closer it goes. It slips past the cosmic dust and the glittering atoms, stretching and lengthening, spanning thousands of kilometres in a single instant.
Into the abyss it went.
A galaxy and a half away, a hint of light peers out from the centre of Andromeda. It circles around and around, as if escaping a whirlpool, building momentum. It climbs the funnel and slips away, out past the event horizon and back into the vastness of space.
It continues its journey, still dancing its way through the universe. Soon, it comes upon its destination.
The metal hull gleams in the starlight, flashes of fire and plasma bursting from the engines, propelling the ship on its own travels through space. A human ship, far from home. Exploring the cosmos.
The message scatters in the starlight, each string in each photon hitting the ship simultaneously. The ship’s computer gathers up each speck of data, piecing together the puzzle of ones and zeros. Reconstructing the message come from oh so far away. Come from a small white room on a small blue and green planet, orbiting a small blazing yellow sun.
The message, now whole again, zaps its way through the computers of the ship, in search of one specific console. Through engineering and the science labs, through the living quarters and the cafeterias, round and round. Searching.
It finds its destination, a console in the large control room, bathed in the starlight. There sits the Captain, guiding her ship and her people on their journey through space.
The ping of a message successfully delivered rings out softly through the room.
The Captain twitches in her chair, turning her head towards the screen. She leaps up, faster than a rocket escaping orbit, and accepts the message. Her hands shake as it loads in.
On the screen pops a most beloved face, exhausted and tear stained, but smiling so brightly she outshines the light from thousands of stars. The Captain collapses back into her chair, releasing a breath so large it must have been trapped for years. The face gazes out of the screen, before dropping to wonder at the small bundle of blankets in her arms. She speaks, voice clogging from emotion and exhaustion in equal parts:
“She’s okay, she’s going to be okay! She’s a healthy little girl!”
Written by Artemis Orman
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