Nothing Awaits Beyond

When the generation ship Seeker arrived at the galaxy’s edge, it found a marble stela half-buried in the void’s velvety fabric. The ship’s crystal-mind anchored itself there while it began to wake the carbon-minds who formed its crew: the technicians and choice-makers and void-watchers and reconcilers who did all the things which it could not, and who were set to be awakened anyway to celebrate the start of the ship’s true voyage—to look out upon the radiation-scoured emptiness which divided them from the Sculptor’s luminous beacon, twelve million light years away and nearly as ancient.

The stela was not difficult to unvoid. It had sunk into the quantum foam, decohering over countless millennia. The art of coaxing meaning from void was well known by the Seeker’s technicians, trained on other generation ships and grown skilled across lives measured against journeys between the spiral’s arms; a mere decade was sufficient time, and meaningless against the journey to come.

Unvoided but still rooted, the stela rested just outside the Seeker’s observation deck (a bubble of light, inflated with the breath of blue-leafed plants in anticipation of its need) as all the ship’s crew crowded together to witness its inscription in the way that carbon-minds always need to do. There’s nothing like seeing for yourself, after all, even if crystal-minds claim their recordings are just as real.

The message engraved upon the stela’s polished surface was simple: “Every story ends. This marks the end of ours. Nothing awaits beyond.”

After the Seeker had communicated its discovery back towards the spiral’s heart and left a buoy to mark the Stela, it stepped beyond into the void between places, and that void swallowed it—and if its journey ever brings it to the Sculptor’s shores we will never know, no matter how we wait, for the galactic sky will be empty and red long before it does.