Maggie, don’t leave me. i can’t do this without you.

A part of his soul was gone forever, and in its place, something black was born. He would make the Enemy suffer. He would hunt them down to the last traitor.

Judas Simon was reborn in the fire of her death.

It was beauty and it was terror and it was all.

One hundred grams of alloys and plastics and the echoes of biology, the decision was made and the machine was hurtled from a rocket bay miles within the planet to the farthest reaches of the system. The primary propulsion rockets separated and the solar sail deployed in a flash of gossamer golden filaments. The sail spread out to grasp the stars, and a fusion concussion fed the ever-increasing velocity of the precious spacecraft. At several million astronomical units and several hundred thousand years, the unit achieved nine-tenths light speed. The journey of infinity had begun.

Nanotechnological ramscoops collected the materials required to procreate, and in the night between the galaxies the tiny vessel created an exact copy of itself. The two remnants of a civilization now eons dead separated and for an instant the first machine felt an emotion. It dismissed the feeling and began to replicate another child. The second vessel set off on an alternate trajectory, the deployed solar sail sweeping eerily before it, mute golden wings in the void of silence and nothing, forever departing from its immaculate and sole parent.

For billions of years the process continued. The original machine died, but the infinite spawn carried the message forever onward. The universe became populated with the machines. The expansion of existence eventually forced the universal heat death. Organic life became an impossibility, and the technological lifeforms flourished. The machines continued onward, waiting for the time that their precious cargo could live again.