There are places in space where the gunkholer has far more of an enjoyable time getting around. Here the nebulas ride rough and they swell in ways that almost tease the eyes. Such a plethora of nooks and nodules – the gas folding over on itself so many times like a cinnamon roll. Careful though, an unaccustomed travel could very easily ride this fractal space too deep and never come out again.

It was in a rather blue quarter of the Mewing Nebula, here the matter does not fold as much as it does ripple, which, from afar might appear like the affect that occurs when large groups of sand accumulate when bashed about by strong winds – it was tucked under the crest of one of these dunes, that Medley and Medley’s ship had settled for the night. Night? Yes, the Mewing Nebula, due to its large number of highly-dense argon particulate, has a white dwarf orbiting it.

The sound of the solar winds against the plates of his ship sung loud, like the echoes from a macrocosm reborn. The stars, far away, twinkled underneath a layer of purple Iodine above them. Medley looked up, sitting back in his chair, the one with the steep back. The top of his ship had a porthole, which he was glad for. He looked through these portholes always after landings because the atmosphere, he believed, was the most important and interesting part of any celestial. For this reason, he never found comets or asteroids of sizes smaller than a gwef width worth his time.

Sat, basking in the pink world above him, Medley accepted a thought: perhaps, he considered, such a coagulation of mass as this is – with such an investment in its own atomic diversity – why would a congestion as dense as this not be performing operations greater than the sum of its parts; that is: am I parked on a conscious being right now?

If this were the case, he thought, would communication ever be possible to bridge. Certainly these nebulic entities – if they existed – would not use anything like sound for communication. Space is lacking in air to send anything around. What else? Perhaps the light beams themselves, shot through thousands of years, yes, these they deflect and orient in patterns meant to bedazzle but also inform. What process, he thought, would be necessary for him to then try to rise to the level of these self-aware giants and send them a message? Certainly the construction of an impossible machine, he noted. Or at least, a machine yet to be made possible.

This machine: he considered it in his mind, drew it in his vision among the pink void above him. It has arms and appendages – hundreds! – all performing various operations, some charged with collecting materials for fuel, others involved in cleaning, but the majority there for the purpose of precise orientation. These precision arms would have mirrors on their ends, ones made of pure diamond and polished with a surface of bismuth. Incoming light would hit these crystalline surfaces and would lose only the pin of a percent of energy – almost perfect reflectivity. This would imbue the machine with the same power of photons that a whittler has over wood: carve, cut, bend, drive forth, yet all under decree and great consideration of the knots before them. Similarly, the photon whittler would have to deal with analogous things. The lensing of light around a particularly heavy galaxy or the very flight of photons and where they may be at at any one time (for there are many photons, for sure, but space is not infinitely dense with them).

But worse of all – and Medley digested this tricky problem for quite some time, for without a solution the Photon Whittler machine concept failed on the spot – to deal with the indecision of these photons, which sometimes came in waves, other times as particles. Upon deflection, yes, they would adopt a state of particulate certainty. But before that? To the machine, an incoming photon was like a blur before poor eyesight, where only in an approximate space would these photons be. And then multiply this by the millions, for the machine would be put right under a sun, which would be relentless in its photon firing. Any Photon Whittler, Medley considered, would be attempting to divert a sea with paddles.

He became upset after this, and a moment of depression overtook him. Imagine the stories these gaseous beasts would tell, stories he – and none of his kind – would ever be able to listen. And would they be even fit for comprehending them? A step in time for these megalithic wonders was equal to twenty spins of Medley’s home star. Creatures like these observed the deaths of stars in passing glance, like idle background noise during chatter with a companion. This put his own stories under the microscope of his mind, and he realized then that they were not stories, but microstories. Scenes. Page-one drafts. There was nothing to say at such a scale, for at such a scale nothing happened. His eyes told him it was relatively beautiful, his little existence, but it is hopeless to ignore a mile stretch when someone gives you a centimetre. What value is there in such tiny trash? Sure, we can talk about operation and function, and the fact that molecules have collaborated in intricate ways to make things slap and walk and eat each other. But this is no different from admiring the stalagmites for the cave. A cave is the womb of these structures, and in this view, those structures become obvious, almost irrelevant.

Comparing one ornament of the cave to another is a waste. Take in the walls, the floor, run a hand over the places where the surface takes on a form – and admire its geometry. This cave speaks! It transmits! “It speaks!,” and this time Medley said it aloud and startled himself from his daydream. He came to as the sky above adopted violet hues. Nitrogen was on its way, and soon the sky would be blue. Medley was still in a mood, this last thought he was now so sure it was more than theory, that he felt useless to the bone. To cheer himself up he decided to cook his dinner early, and got up from his lounge chair.

Medley’s ship is a machine as well as a rocket, that is, it owns a form of cognition, which it uses to perform most of its tasks asked of it. This cognition is unclear to its creators, but it operations are useful. Any debate about the ethical nature of embedding thought into steel was overruled when the Dr. Hemrald Lux devised a Cognitive Inspective Protocol, or CIP. In hindsight, the system is trivial, but the application still requires twelve engineers on hand. CIP involves asking of the machine which has been given a mind a series of questions. What questions and when is, of course, dependant on the machine’s function and what that machine has answered to previous questions. But the first question asked of the machine is usually the most insightful and is relatively similar among most machines, Medley’s spaceship included. That question is:

How are you feeling today?

Leaving the question open-ended is key, for it does not result in any suggestion by the questioneer. Biological – that is, cognitions born by molecular evolution – almost always reply with irrelevant statements. Perhaps a story from their day, a dialogue on the taste of cereal, or something philosophical and abstract in an attempt to trump up their perceived IQ. Machine, on the other hand, reply always reply the following, with a little variation: I am well, how are you?

Medley’s ship was one of the ships that replied this, which meant it was safe for flight. Any cognition that does not answer this is not a machine, but a consciousness. Only a fool would take to the atmosphere in a machine self-aware cannon – imagine! These flying steel barrels would take to discourse or self-analysis, question their purpose, even adopt a capacity for boredom perhaps. Totally useless and cruel for both minds involved.

With all this in mind, Medley went to the corner of his ship that had been put together like a kitchen. All he had to do was say the command and his ship would begin cooking him a meal. This process was only possible near a sun though, because it drew from the surface strings of any atom it required, which it ordered in certain ways to create molecules, these stacked so until they took the form of a plate, some potato mash, and a heap of solar-grown vegetation. Coincidentally, this was also hoe Medley was built, but this same process took place in a cavity in his mother, the assembly process harnessed over billions of years of trial and error.

Right now, though, Medley was not near enough to a sun, and his ship told him this. About one-thousand miles too far. Medley was about to ask if the ship could make use of the nebulic material around him, but then he redoubled on this thought, for he did not want to feed on a living, thinking being. Where to go then? He asked his ship about this, which was quick to provide two options. The first, would involve Medley providing some of his own atoms – only a few thousand – a harmless process, it assured him. The second option was to ask the ship nearby if it had any spare atoms in its atomic accumulator which Medley could borrow for the moment.

Medley was surprised at the second option, for he had felt certain he was alone in this gunkhole of the nebula. So vast is space, the likelihood was like to comets from the start of the universe meeting head on at the edge. He asked the ship for more information about his neighbour, and his ship was quick to provide it, but it did so in a long strip of receipt tape because it was saving fuel by not utilizing its voice. The printout ran for twenty reams and folded on the floor in a bundle. For a moment, Medley thought the machine of his ship had gone awry, and would print itself apart, but it soon let out a squeak and it was done. Medley read the sheet from the start, but became restless after a few minutes and skipped ahead a few folds. This part was interesting because it went into great detail about the way in which the neighbouring ship was assembled. Its organic steel, it said, was sourced from a different galaxy, which span counterclockwise, and for this reason, the orientation of this fluid material was in an inverted reference frame. Likewise, the windows of its ports were not of strong plastic, but made of glass. The glass was filled with vacuum bubbles, which balanced any external pressure by applying outward force. And finally, near the end of this particular ream, Medley read that this ship combusted anti-matter, which was the complement to matter. To combust this, it had to have an engine built of anti-matter, which was feasible, but to attach this anti-matter construction to a hull made of non-anti-matter, why that was the real question, and this the ship’s printout did not have an answer to.

What followed because of this matter, anti-matter conundrum, was then, a warning. For the ship was so uncertain about this assemblage that it could not predict how its own matter would behave when in proximity with this object. The ship wished it could have a conversation with Medley about this, because this would help both of them come up with some theories about this, but it spent a page apologizing about this because it did not have the fuel to run this. Instead, it said, it simulated a conversation with Medley, and that was what it had written on the next page. Medley read that part too, and was pleased to find that any parts where the ship asked questions, he would answer them in his head and then find the very answers written out write after that. Likewise, any inconsistencies in the ship’s reasoning, he would point out mid-sentence, and then discover the very points mentioned by himself in the next part.

Medley was so lost in this engagement between himself and the ship, that the he did not notice that the sky above had grown a dark green, for Iodine was on its way and the sun was also setting. Eventually, it grew dark, and Medley was finally at the end of the ship’s message.