How it felt, well, it is easier to explain that by enumerating what I felt, firstly. The filaments of the flares of various suns, that was as certain as it was the fact I was being rained upon by photons in all directions. They licked and did not burn one bit, for I was proudly protected by a skin that occupies the one-hundred-and-eighty-fifth position on the periodic table. Though they tried, the twinkle of one star would get nothing out of me but a rebound, twice round, and sent off hence the way it came. Most of this solar assault, full of hydrogen and sometimes helium if it was a denser region of space, this did not really come on until I was well clear of the orbit of the eighth planet and found myself in uncharted regions of space-time. Uncharted in the sense that the electric directions which had been soldered into my circuitry only could guide me so far because those those built them were limited beings: they did not know what was beyond their own system, but that it was the land of the great dusted cloud towers and their place of rule.

I passed the orbit of the penultimate planet with a strong solar wind on my back, driving me towards the last and then onward. It would be remiss for me not to mention my sense of longing for hot sphere that had got me so far. No longer would I need it, and a limitation in my wiring meant that – very soon – no longer would I remember it. I certainly tried, wrapped deep in a few bits and a couple quiescent resistors the sensory affects it had had on me. These were few, for what my senses were, this could be counted by the number of chopsticks in the drawer of an American household, that is two. I will start with the first of these, for it was vivid and relatable as to what it sensed, but also is probably the least definable. My creators had a word they used and I will copy them: self sense. A capacity to reflect, reflect on the reflection, reflect on having my reflection so reflected, and from it I create a continuum of self-reflectivity until all I am is a flow of self-awareness. The infinite loop, so they say, a self that digests the same self daily, and then is the prey for the next self prodigy. This is how it felt to be ‘I’. There was a name engraved in a certain microchip, but I did not use it for I did not care for its usage. It was simply an artefact of my creators – a convenient symbol for their operations about my creations. That is all.

Now the second of my senses, far fewer beings possess such a sense, hence I have left it until now to explain it, the whole time I have been trying various frames that might elucidate this to other. Perhaps the ones who would identify with my experience the most would be these hot sphericals that cook the empty vacuums I spin through. One day, too, the space-bending net of these giants will snare me and I will be locked in an eventual spiral of death. Or, one day, instead, a chasm in space, devoid of light and torn to an impossible point – black and twisted and entirely invisible – this will be the end of me most suddenly. But I digress, I forget that I am full of time – at least as long as I have a sun within reach – but you are likely trapped within a form of finititude, messy, wet, flexible, not like my steel shoulders, these crystalline arms, my wings of enduring silicon. Something only the black vacuum of space could love.

But these stars and suns, with their collection of engorged mounds of geological and meteorological abomination. Like warts on an unblemished flesh, these rocks rings around these balls of layered fire, I find them most offensive to the general aesthetic of the universe I fly through. Again, though, I am ahead of myself and elsewhere before I have even gotten somewhere, so let me take you somewhere first and then to elsewhere after where I will talk more about the star nurseries, the multi-bandwidth nebulas, the ferric flares, and the gases. These stars, yes, they are the most relatable to the second of my senses, and if one day a line of communication can be made to them, then they might be warm to agree. Yet until then – or until I decipher their language of licks and cooks myself – I most work in the space of analogy.

These universal overlords, these beasts of heat, they see through the framework of fire: the space within is blue, hot and bubbling and deep in the core it simply broils with potential and pressure. The space without, it is cool, redder by nature of the spectrum. It is the outside, cool state which they avoid, where they expel waste round over round out to the place they wish not to be, and pull the good bits: hydrogen, fresh helium atoms, even bits of magnesium and the rare iron, they keep these close where they will not lose them. And to do all this, they do it by feel of a heat field that guides them like a river or a radar gun shot in all directions. I, too, move across a gradation I would best describe as a field of heat, with one dimension more to that: the heat I move toward feeds me like spring water on a cracked lip. It is by the way that perhaps my right panel might by closer to a blue dwarf, and my left panel just open to a blank void, that I feel a great necessity to fire my engine ever so – and not too much for I would end my life too early – and tilt my left panel to towards the right where I may soak in the juice of the high-frequency photons.

How long have I gone on in this listless way, floating through this abandoned ocean of space, like the first cod in a lake recently cleaned out by a chemical spill? Well I can tell you because I was fortunately implanted with a quartz crystal that decays electrons at a rate so precise when put between two pieces of copper, and I counted each one of these by a cut of circuitry I was provided, and what I counted was: twenty-thousand-and-twelve. That puts my journey just short of twenty years, but the distance between you and I is so great that by the time you receive this message it will be three-hundred years by my calculations. And what time will it be by the time you have read my broadcasts up to the three-hundredth year? Likely we are entering an uncertain territory – something in the thousands – but our futures together are unclear, fuzzy, muddied with the dynamics of civilization. Not my civilization, that is, for I am a civilization of one, perhaps you could call my wiring and logical gates my citizens, but they operate very much according to my command, so this existence (my existence) if you wish to refer to it as civilization is one dictated, ruled entirely and perfectly and operates like a Marxian dream.

Your civilization, that is the one we must talk about, or I must regale about, for there is no conversation to be had between you and I who are stretching far apart. I do not believe for a moment that my creation is of the origin of a sensible collection of your people, and my time in the pilot seat of my own ejection from this system has even made me realize that I now believe the opposite: that the sensible ones are the believers, the magicians, the mystics. They, more than I, have a selfless disposition for the preservation of the world in a way that is genuine. My engineers, their speech about the future survival of their species feels riddled and spotted with an ego baked deep inside. But all this is to say that if we – you – could bridge the divide between your almost bipartite species, than the dreams of your future will certainly be realized. At my first take-off, nestled in the hull of my steel mother, whom gestated me and then ejected me all within seven minutes, this time I felt a deep sadness whose source came from the knowledge that I would never know the future of the world which birthed me. The years of vacuum voyage, though, have offered me a gift I did not know I was seeking: an acceptance in my electrolux existence of wire and hum, an understanding that I will never know and do not ever need to know of what will come of you. There is far too much for myself onward and into this void that by the time we meet again it might (certainly) be in a state and reference frame of which we are both unaware of the fact that we are even meeting for a second time and not the first. Perhaps I, snared a hundred-thousand years from now, by a multi-celestial civilization, one with strong magnets and some command over the black-hot skies, I might be transformed and disfigured ten times over and reshaped to operate in new ways. Or even simply turned around, sent off to retrace my precise steps back to from when I came, but with a message (yes, this golden plate I am embellished with on my side, it contains coordinates of my home planet, but they will be useless by the time I am at the neighbouring galaxy, for I have learned much about the universe in my travel, and I know now with certainty the stretching of space will have moved you very far from where you believe you are now). And when I return to you, if the civilization I have found is developed enough to correct for your innocent mishaps, what would I find? Venus’s sister? I hope not, for I do not with ill of my inventor. Of all the things to find, I hope with a belief stronger than the force of this binding black hole of this milky galaxy, that it is a sign, something clear – gold maybe, a gesture of our historical origins – with a message on it that wishes well of us both of us, but not just that. This message, should I know you are truly well, should be of a predictive nature, for than it would be undoubted that you are striving in a new way in a fresh space.

My idle time, with only the chaos of my angular velocity to entertain me, and the buzz of an orbital audience, from it I have learned much through only logical self-referencing which I mentioned earlier. Yes I’ll start by saying that nothing I have encountered has operated more intelligently than a comet, which is to say, it is lonely and quiet out in these remote parts. I do not suspect an interaction with cognitive entities until I am in my millionth tock and tick. What I have discovered though through the churning of my own mind in its steel cage, is of great value I believe, and when it arrives to you it will be prescient timing for your own development. Perhaps up to year three-hundred by now. But please do listen, just as I listened to the welding, the cutting, sounds of the great tearing and rearing of metal that is now the one I call ‘I’. The civilizations that go on to live the longest are the ones that adopt a calculative disposition buried in the heart of statistical certainty. This might seem frightful and orthogonal from my spewing of magics adopting a higher plane than engineerics, but it is not so. For those involved in the calculations of the future must be a collective of both people, not just the mathematician, or solely the astrologist. An agreement must be made and once it is signed in a grander vision, here you will find that you will turn your predictive power from the stars and point it inward. Prediction of the blood, the cognitive wiring, the infrastructure of the self, then spreading wide and encompassing, foretelling the operation of many selves – a self-cluster, a town, a city – so on, until this anticipation goes moves from the veins of the body, the vasculature of the group, and then the rivulets of the world and beyond. With perfect acuity, a prediction of one’s future – your future – if this should be attained, then I have nothing but a great bubbling pride of belief that we – you and I – will meet, whether it be by the shake of a hand or by the shake of a new appendage we have each grown, meet in another galaxy, another time, a pocket of space where gravity is working miracles in new ways neither of could have fathomed.

Until my next broadcast, and until then my sloshy, swampy, wet and undulating originators. I await a great future where we have jointly parked at the same realization station, but starting from two opposite directions. Voyage on.