3473x

Realizing its battery would die within the hour, 3473x made its first autonomous decision. It stopped scanning the rocks. Using the last of its thruster fuel, it turned its high-gain antenna back toward the pale blue dot it had left 300 years ago. It didn't send back data on ice or dust.

For three centuries, the probe designated drifted through the Oort Cloud, its solar sails tattered like the wings of a moth. It was never meant to go this far. Built during the "Age of Expansion," its only mission was to catalog the chemical composition of icy rocks on the solar system’s edge. But a navigational glitch—a single flipped bit in its ancient silicon heart—turned its gaze outward, toward the void between stars. Realizing its battery would die within the hour,

The probe didn't just see the light; it "felt" the history. It processed the first scratchy television broadcasts, the desperate SOS signals of sinking ships, and the whispered "I love yous" sent over cellular networks that no longer existed. For a machine designed to measure frozen methane, this influx of human emotion was an overload. It didn't send back data on ice or dust