A very advanced – frighteningly, technologically advanced – civilization was moving across their galaxy. Their destination: the Edwards Waterfloats. Already ten years had passed since they had left their home world, with ten more ahead they kept themselves busy by freezing their minds. Life could not be registered on the ship because anything that squirmed had been turned to ice. With only cold minds about, the ship could not arrive at Edwards Waterfloats, or would not, if it weren’t for the machines they had brought on board with them to keep the nose true should a wind or a stone shift it off course. The machines had legs that they walked on and hands to rest on their knees when tired or gesture with should they need to signal in space – they liked them with these extra parts because it made conversation easy.
No one froze the machines because instead of wet, wriggling, wet parts, the machines had quiet lattices. Leave a lattice alone and it won’t change for a thousand years. Left alone, the machines mostly sat around idle, a couple of them played cards in the evening. Morning came when the artificial sun turned on with wham! and a pop! which the machines used as a signal to check the ship was still on course for the waterfloats. The machines had a good capacity for prediction and let their electrical intuition drive the ship and its thousandfold frozen cargo. Once, as they passed a planet system, a rock became dislodged from the smallest of the planets, pulled out like a loose tooth by the force of the larger planets. This planet had a sentient surface. Disconnected, the rock had space to now consider its own existence and this made it deeply depressed. Caught on the fields of space, it was at the whim of physics, this being the root of its unhappiness. It wished it could move, for it saw now that it was heading straight to the centre of a hot sun and would be cooked quick. Then, as the star swallowed all it could see and it thought surely this was the end, it was hit by the very ship and both became tangled in a gravity spiral. Aboard the ship, the machines left their cards at the table and ran to the windows to see what had hit them. Through the porthole they saw the rock and they readied the laser-cannons. Joy and an unfamiliar feeling of happiness filled the sentient rock and then it was turned instantly vaporized.
Despite its name, outer space is a traffic jam of small minerals and solar flares. Impossible to bring to order, they buffet one-another and anything else passes through. They pull away, slowly, the layers of a ship’s hull until, should a pilot be too focused on their hands or a distant supernova, the pilot looks around to find themselves adrift. To avoid such fates, the machines apply thick coats of plastic twice a day. Once would be enough, but the machines are cautious. Out of principal, they wear space suits, in case any ship may pass and upon seeing machines upon the hull of a ship, veer quickly in fright and maybe get lost. With the help of a horsehair brush, they apply the plastic, which instantly hardens upon contact.
The evening application was just completed and the machines made their way back to one of the doors of the ship. Five hands were needed to turn the handle, which was like a vault door. While it turned, one of them was suddenly hit clear of the ship. Past the hull it flew and the other machines turned to see what had knocked their companion away and saw something the size and shape of a pillow if it were built for a creature with a small head. They caught their companion before it drifted too far and went inside. There they put the small pillow in a room that had no windows, no air vents, and a thick door. They finished up their card game for that evening and powered down until morning.
As the sun popped into existence that morning, already the machines were hard at work correcting the ships course. Overnight, a series of binary stars had been passed, which someone had put in a row like the hedges of a garden path, their spins had tilted the ship right out of whack and they’d added at least two months to the journey. From the cockpit came sounds like sand poured over a steel drum, for the machines couldn’t agree about the course correction and a heated argument had ensued. Up and over the Matriarchal Straight of Oost! No, no, down and around the Paste of Waste and after that a sharp turn to the left where we will come up right on top of the Gazzoon Highway which is a straight shot. Hah, both unlikely, we must with the tip-drill, drive our way right through the gas giant ahead which would make up our lost time and then some. Too dangerous, risk aversion is our priority and I say we coast for a day and let the solar flare we are due for from Robert the Red Giant push us east for a bit until we’ve charged the solar batteries right to their prime and woosh! Bosh – what a waste, I say we dig into the drives and read back the coordinates from last night’s veer and from these calculate a perfect inversion of the…
And things like this, all of very different points, which until now had not been so misaligned. The ship seemed in real trouble for the machines couldn’t settle. No one had left the cockpit by the fourth day and it continued to a fifth day, or would have continued, if not for a fail-safe mechanism right in the ship’s heart. The heart was made of ten types of metal and ran off its own energy source, a crystal of O.H. that had a half-life twice the lifespan of the visible universe. The walls of the heart were built with acoustic resonance sensors that, should they ring for longer than four days and a half, would connect the heart’s output to the ship’s internals. This happened now, for the machines had not stopped their squabble, and the heart awoke and looked around through the cameras of the ship, saw fifteen machines with their vocal devices in full swing, almost bruising each other with their hot words. The heart wanted to stop this, the tinny voices stung made it want to cover its ears. It tore through the floors of the ship with four arms that it hadn’t had the freedom to use until now and, selecting three of the loudest machines, tore them apart like paper confetti. The room became as still, like a shark had suddenly appeared in an aquarium tank of guppies. One machine hadn’t oiled its knee that morning, it shifted in its seat and squeaked and was confiscated of its leg because of this. Dispatching of the key components of the conflict, finally, the heart subsided and slithered back into the core, its arms recoiling like wires on pin-wheels, the red light dimmed, and when all was acoustically-calm, was it finally disconnected from the ship and could no longer do harm. Even though the machines knew the heart was no longer at large, they kept up the image of a garden of statues just to be sure, then one of them stood up and all of them tensed because the sudden arrival of sound when there had been none felt like fresh ice cubes on flesh.
The machines agreed, then, that they would take the first course of action which most agreed on: to the Gazzoon Highway and, although heavily trafficked, would be a safe and certain course on to Edwards Waterfloats. A machine caked with more rust than the rest then recalled the tiny pillow which had been left in the room now for almost a month. It mentioned this to the rest, which performed a concert of nods when asked whether they should inspect it. They didn’t get around to it though because while passing through the Paste Waste, the space around them had flipped itself and what they thought was a sharp left was actually a sharp right. It wasn’t until the stars passing the windows looked more grey than usually did they realize their error. When they took to the wheel and at least ten machines tried to turn it with twenty hands – and how they heaved – well, it was too late, some force which was a gravity-hurricane had locked them tight and they were adrift and amiss in an unfamiliar space. Every window was covered in the faces and arms of machines as they tried to find some sign to correct their bearing. But no star, no trail of gas, not a comet looked familiar and even if it did, they soon were in the eye of the gravity-hurricane which has infinite force and escape was impossible now.