Bewilderment

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I TOLD HIM ABOUT THE PLANET MIOS, how it had flourished for a billion years before we came along. The people of Mios built a ship for long-distance, long-duration discovery, filled with intelligent machines. That ship traveled hundreds of parsecs until it found a planet full of raw materials where it landed, set up shop, repaired, and copied itself and all its crew. Then two identical ships set off in different directions for hundreds more parsecs, until they found new planets, where they repeated that whole process again.

For how long? my son asked.

I shrugged. “There was nothing to stop them.”

Were they scouting out places to invade or something?

“Maybe.”

And they kept dividing? There must have been a million of them!

“Yes,” I told him. “Then two million. Then four.”

Holy crow! They’d be all over the place!

“Space is big,” I said.

Did the ships report back to Mios?

“Yes, even though the messages took longer and longer to arrive. And the ships went on reporting, even after Mios stopped responding.”

What happened to Mios?

“The ships never learned.”

They kept going, even though Mios was gone?

“They were programmed to.”

This gave my son pause. That’s pretty sad. He sat up in bed and pushed at the air with his hand. But it might still be okay for them, Dad. Think of what they saw.

“They saw hydrogen planets and oxygen planets, neon and nitrogen planets, water worlds, silicate, iron, and globes of liquid helium wrapped around trillion-carat diamonds. There were always more planets. Always different ones. For a billion years.”

That’s a lot, my son said. Maybe that’s enough. Even if Mios was gone.

“They split and they copied and they spread through the galaxy as if they still had a reason to. One of the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the original ship touched down on a rocky planet with shallow seas, in a small, weird stellar system rotating around a G-type star.”

Just say it, Dad. Earth?

“The craft landed on a level plain in the middle of wild, waving, towering structures more complex than anything the crew had seen. These elaborate, fluttering structures reflected light at various frequencies. Many of them sported astonishing forms at their very top that resonated in lower frequencies—”

Wait. Plants? Flowers. You mean the ships are tiny?

I didn’t deny it. He seemed equal parts skeptical and fascinated.

Then what?

“The ship’s crew studied the gigantic waving green and red and yellow flowers for a long time. But they couldn’t figure out what the things were or how they worked. They saw bees fly into the flowers and the flowers track the sun. They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds drop and sprout.”

My son held his hand up to stop the story. It would kill them, Dad, when they figured it out. They would get on the communicator and tell every other ship from Mios in the galaxy to shut down.

His words gave me gooseflesh. It wasn’t the ending that I imagined. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

Because they would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t.