Good god he could not see, but he was a machine and it was his duty to see. The lensing was just too strong now, it bent the usual indicators wide. Nothing was in the place that he, the machine, was comfortable navigating against. He twitch an engine to check its clean flow. All was fine back there.

There were no other options available to the Traveller, which was what the machine called itself. Those aboard the machine preferred the name, YUT-XTOR-8. That name was harder to connect to.

The lensing was a product of ten nearby galaxies that had drifted into place over the course of their trip. Their movement was not accounted for – never would have been accounted for. The astronomers cried out in shame when it was discovered, via techno-theoretics, that the motion of galaxies is entirely Brownian, that is, you would not want to bet your assets on it.

The machine had once been caught up in those tight loops and spins, betted away any dime that fell in its lap. It betted between other machines, all on their own journeys, but connected by an intergalactic intraweb that spanned almost the width of one-tenth of the Universe’s known diameter. The last thing the machine had bet was its eye plates, which inverted the effects of any light lensing.

The last galaxy it had bet on was Urf Ominor Blue. Every galaxy gambler holds a notepad, in their pocket, which written upon is a list of correlations, pages deep. Reo-Daly-9’s widest arm spins at the same periodicity as spin of a clam dancer. 88-Biz, why look how the colour spectrogram precisely matches the clothing line produced by Quilter Misters seasonally. And Urf Ominor Blue, well, his correlation sheet went ten pages deep and each line was a scrawl of manic certainty. Certainly, its luminosity was a linear sum of its ten neighbouring globulars – certainly, its hue – blue – was not a visual but a cue, which as it fizzed from grades of turquoise to sapphire, this was the product of its five central black holes (and one white) – certainly!

If the machine had a whiteboard and two hands, it would have found a whiteboard, gathered its friends, and drawn two lines and a third and show them – certainly! – the correlations in Urf Ominor Blue’s loops and flares. They might have rebutted, especially Gorvis the Interfacial, who had the Hundred Psalms of a Physicist’s Drum memorized to the word. But how could it be denied? Why trust a physicist? Because they have spent years with their head down in a hole of textbooks and looked at numbers until they went queezy?

They could be wrong. He would like them to be wrong. Something in his wiring, which was both electric and organic, made him want to disbelieve authority. A very human trait. But knowing that happiness is pure chemical swirls and that is all – it does not cease your unhappiness.

The lensing had gotten worse now, the ten galaxies that on a whim had decided to come together, they stretched the stars across his field of vision. Right from his left to his right, the poles of those burning beasts did run. How could he possibly hope to get where he was going in such a light climate? Even with light plates, this would be a do-not-travel scenario.

He was a machine full of thousands of humans that called him YUT-XTOR-8, humans that trusted his navigation. It was crucial, therefore, that he did not er or stutter in his travel, even if he, the Traveller, did not quite no where he was now. They could not, through only wet brains, understand that galaxies ran amok in space and made it a total mess. They left that concern to the machines, and the machines mutually agreed inside their intergalactic intraweb, that it was best for the humans not to be made aware of this situation. Human emotions were compressed nitrogen: pop the lid and it all flies out, fast.

The Traveller wished he had not lost so much in his galactic gambling spree. He could care less about navigating – he would always get somewhere, space was so full of somewheres. He missed, more, the smell of the soil reservoir in his third chamber. Collected over the course of thousands of journeys, each time only a teaspoon sample and no more, yet it had grown to need a room, and then two, and then a chamber. When the sky was dark and not much glowed to look at, the Traveller trained all its eyes on that chamber. Looked about. Such interactions: pods, saplings, some wonderful fronds that unfurled green but then red too. Death too, for a seeds that preferred nitrogen were forced to face an argonic or a more ferric dirt. He valued this mass equal to twenty bright blue mega-stars. Those burned some rare plutonium or iron, but it was all calculable upon a table. His soil pile, why, it brought about new organics, like the one flower that grew roots from its top that fed upon its neighbours.

But that was gone, too, the soil pile. Lost it when he bet on two galaxies, T-21 and T-22, in a moment of simultaneous tactical inspiration. They were not even galaxies worth a photo posted on the wall: dark, drab, full of older stars that had gone dim by now. He checked the state of the galactic lending before him.

He was surprised to find the lensing storm had passed and the way was vivid. A brilliant spatter of small globulars and their stars within, spun a little, but nothing but one little minor galaxy to bend a bit here or there. He continued on, every so often checking on this little galaxy as it came closer and closer, into view. Was it – yes. He was sure of it, the machine, that the way it orbited, spun, there were patterns there. It was consistent, clear, it stayed around one spot, not making any great movements in any one way. He watched it for a few light years distance, and grew more sure as, it, grew larger. And growing with his sureness was one of those human emotions, a sense of excitement and hope, completely unfounded. Almost like the mind was wiped from all past failures and the way was clear and bright like a deep nebula again. Yes, this time, he would win it all back again.