interlude 1

interlude: Sniffer, Model A.

The Sniffer had been built to serve a single purpose, but in their eagerness to achieve that goal its human creators had overengineered their product. They had intended no more than a robust machine, a versatile and long-lived sensing mechanism able to protect itself in the interstellar environment. Instead they had built an entity that inhabited the hazy boundary between sentience and nonsentience.

Certainly Sniffer-A lacked emotion and a true sense of its own place in the universe. Equally certainly it was self-aware, knowing of and concerned with the protection of its multiple parts. And certainly the Sniffer knew its own history, even if that history consisted only of the catalog of experiences since the probe was launched from Earth orbit.

The internal clock placed pointers at the key events:

The origin, before which there was nothing, not even the markers of time itself.

A few thousand seconds after the origin marked the moment of first acceleration. The Sniffer measured the Doppler frequency shift of Earth’s beacon signal and approved it. As planned, the increase in speed was a uniform ten meters per second squared.

One and a half million seconds after first acceleration, Sniffer-A came to the end of the heliosphere, the great bubble of gas controlled by Sol’s influence. The Sniffer was more than eleven billion kilometers from the Sun, twice as far out as the orbit of Pluto. The event came a little sooner than predicted. The Sniffer added that information to the data stream sent back to Earth and hurtled on its way, still adding to its speed.