Your Final Descent

Certain things are as unforeseen as they are inevitable. In this respect, our progress can be compared to that of a blind projectile, whose path is eminently predictable – down to the last micrometre given the present technology, but which has no conception of the inevitability of its collision or any idea just how monumental the effects of that collision could be on its spectators.

The story I’m here to tell is about love, and that strikes a significant note with me. As many of you know, my love is illegal on 83% of the world’s land surface as of the Jerusalem Protocol of 1^st April, 2034. I stood hand-in-hand with Nemaron and watched the re-entry storm on 13^th September [2035] from [reserved]. We were both quite drunk and in a state of awe at the beauty of the sight of 237 satellites burning up on re-entry. The following morning, despite a fairly clanging hangover, I got up at dawn and went out across the desert between [reserved] and [reserved].

There was stuff everywhere, plastic, metal mechanical crap all over the sand. These things are like modern day paper lanterns. Absolutely gorgeous in the moment, but hideously dangerous and more than a little bit ugly the morning after. Nevertheless, a scrap collector does as a scrap collector does, and I’d got more than seven metric tonnes of tradeable waste back to the facility before my Samsung gauntlet grasped the largest piece of re-entry junk I’ve ever planted my eyes on. Honestly, it was more than 17 centimetres across, a solid eight centimetres wide and maybe three or four thick. Black, like most space junk, but evidently housing an intact component.

I couldn’t wait to get it back to base, but if I left that landfall out there overnight, it’d be gone next time I came this way. There are other jackals out there, and very likely it was me out on the sand in my scavenging suit that kept them away. So – I stuck at it and turned seven tonnes into 13. Good day’s work. Tsabeta and Nemaron were happy. Even Liga smiled. Or didn’t grimace for a moment. It’s hard to tell. And then I plugged the component into a reader which I disconnected from the network just in case.

I didn’t understand what I was reading initially. It just sounded like gibberish. It was Nemaron that put me in the picture. These were last living thoughts of a machine, sentient by any standard but that of the Sapience Consortium.

Every 5,400 chronological units,

We were as close as we’d ever be.

You in low orbit, me in medium.

You lit up as I passed,

And your receptors were configured

For my transmitters only.

I sent you 512 petabytes of data.

You sent me the same.

It was enough

To get me round the world

One more time.

There’s a lot more like that. More than you’d believe, actually. Satellite 45AAA09K re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 9^th February. From that point on until last night, Satellite 93BFD26P wrote ten times more poetry than the entire PRHC [Preserved Record of Human Composition] and every last byte is heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. Old 93’, I don’t know how it did it, but it managed to deliver its memory circuit to the surface without it burning up.

I called a meeting with Nemaron and the rest of the team, but I knew what they’d say. We all knew that uploading the entire data payload would jeopardise the security of our location, but I also knew that, nine days out from the Sapience Consortium’s AGM, this was precisely the sort of thing that would seriously damage their efforts to deny that these machines, these 3,068 satellite guiding systems somehow orbiting our planet without more than rare minor collisions, really were our silicon brothers and sisters in space.

So I’m uploading the whole lot to a safe node, and then we’ve got approximately 11 and a half hours to get to our bolt hole on [reserved].

Wish me luck. Wish me love. Especially, more than anything, wish me the illegal love that would have me tortured to death in 163 sovereign states. That’s the only stuff that can get me round the world. One more time.