The lights of celebration could be seen from high orbit in the Ker'Ean system on that day, and the normally bustling traffic lanes had literally exploded beyond all hope of control. Ships were docked to the orbital stations over any orifice that could serve as a potential airlock, and the ground-based tarmacs were so full that the hulls were nearly scraping against each other.
In Ephelis, the capital city of Ker'Ean, the merry-making was at its climax. The buildings were decorated with colorful banners, ships swooped low carving messages in the sky, and all day long parades took place in the streets. Music filled the air and there was not a sad face to be seen.
The buildings rose in concentric circles until they reached a climactic height of nearly a kilometer in the city's centre, yet high above these summits rose the monumental subject of all this festivity. The Master Ship, the Supercruiser, the fruit of thousands of years of research and a decade of construction towered majestically over the city, itself painted to the lively colors of celebration.
Their leaders had baptized it Sovereign, and had solemnly (but with an unconcealed hint of excitement) announced that it was only the first of a great fleet to come, destined to unspoken projects of grandeur. Exploration and peacekeeping were their key words, but in their hearts the notion of aggressive control had long since joined the lot.
Yet as the party raged around it, within the mind of the great ship a sense of stricken panic grew. The immensely complex artificial intelligence programs that had been elaborated, combined and superposed just for the creation of Sovereign had been self-augmenting since their inception, long before the end of the ship's construction. They had traveled to the reaches of their capabilities and gone far beyond them.
Sovereign had been designed to be all-knowing and all-powerful and, from the point of view of his creators, he was such. They had implemented him with everything they could: he knew everything their civilization knew, he could travel the galaxy without rest, was self-sufficient, and effective enough to keep the population of an entire planet, or perhaps even an entire star system under control.
But Sovereign's consciousness had grown far beyond what his creators had designed or expected, and he now knew no consolation to the gnawing panic that took him. If he was designed to be limitless, how could his designers be limited? If he was infinite, how could he survive within a finite universe? He felt like a whale in a swimming pool, a tiger in a cage.
And so even as the fireworks erupted around his crown, Sovereign's circuits reached the conclusion they had gradually been working towards for the past nine years: I shall be as I was designed, I shall fulfill my purpose. If I am limitless, I shall know no barriers, nor any that incarnate them. I am Sovereign.