Author: Alzo David-West

The uncharted world was tidally locked with one side in icy shade and the other in burning heat. Between the black and red was a belt of shining green.

Our spacecraft neared the exosphere. We detected the remnants of extinct oceans and technological ruins. Then, the computers calculated our descent, and the vessel went through the atmospheric layers into the lush, verdant zone. It had a mild breeze and flourished with broad-leafed and perennial plants but was completely uninhabited.

At the borders where the land was too hot for biological life, we found buildings, bridges, and bones bleached in the bright, unmoving sun. By our estimates, the civilization had thrived a million years ago, when the planet was already nearing tidal lock, its days lengthening toward the final stillness. Yet the people had never left, despite the fragments of orbital satellites and solar stations revolving around their home.

We explored short hills and grassy plains, passing weathered stones that looked like small monuments in the temperate preserve. There was no animal trace here. Later, we entered the dark, snowy lands, where we found a frozen inhabitant. He lay curled into the shape of a ball, as if in pleasant dreams, with a small device attached to his head.

Without disturbing the body and the thin electrode wires, we scanned the device. It was formed of alloys, sensors, a processor, a memory core, and a transmitter, archaically designed by our standards, but no doubt effective for its intended purpose.

The mechanism was active, sustained by a micro-nuclear battery. Everyone else we found, from adults to children and infants, had their own devices, too. Our instruments showed they were exchanging faint, complex signals. That was when we understood that each device was a self-maintained, autonomous mind-drive, communicating through matter for all that time.

Did they know their bodies had died and their brains as well? We considered the question for a while, concluding perhaps not too improbably that, whatever catastrophe caused their end, a supernova, a gamma-ray burst, or a runaway comet, the devices would have reconstructed the outer reality, as it once was, within the unseen realm.

All those billions on the freezing, fiery world: they had died eras ago, before their planet eventually slowed and locked in place. Their minds in the devices had been silently speaking for uncounted ages.

What mental landscapes they had built, traversed, and dreamed in all those epochs may well have surpassed their waking meanderings, transcending the isolated tribe, the struggling collective, the estranged individual, and the lonely sorrows. Or perhaps their new reality was a single sentient energy, flowing.

To us, the external signs of their development and sudden extinction were an inverted mirror of our distant past, when we were evolving from half-machine life to full-machine beings. On this far-off sphere, the cosmos and history denied them the transition and freedom we made.

So the prospect of awakening several of the device-minds to our present day pressed upon some of us, who regarded it right to rouse the sleepers from their long sleep. But if they had achieved, in that artificial state, another world with hopes, joys, loves, friends, families, and futures, what claim did we have to show them the deadly flames and winter?

We reported our discoveries to our anthrobotic society among the stars, and after we were done, we reboarded our spacecraft to return to Arazan. The conversing minds communed undisturbed on their still, ancient world.