I am alone.
I sail suspended through the black seas of infinity. The starry void gapes above and below me. If I turn my gaze aftwards, towards the exact patch of black at maximum magnification, I can just make out the pale blue dot where my journey began.
Home. Earth.
I am human, or at least I was once. I remember a somewhat plump young girl with brown eyes and copper hair. That girl is now an emaciated husk. What is left of my frame has been permanently sealed within in an artificial womb, suspended in synthetic amniotic fluid.
My brown eyes have been removed in favor of thick cables designed to deliver sensory input directly along my optic nerves. My hair is now a mass of wires whose roots dig deep into my brain, delivering my mental commands to every corner of the ship.
I am the ship and the ship is me. Its fusion core is my heart. Its thousand sensors are my eyes. Its hydrogen ram-scoops are the mouths with which I feed. Its two kilometer metal bulk is my body.
The surgeries had been extensive and utterly merciless in their calculations. My limbs, my womb, every scrap of flesh not absolutely necessary to maintain the brain's functioning had been judged superfluous. I would likely be insane if not for the steady influx of mood regulating chemicals the ship feeds me.
For millennia, we shaped and reshaped the environment of our home world to suit our needs. It took centuries for us to accept that we could not so easily impose our will on the larger cosmos, that to traverse the void we would have to remake ourselves into creatures of the void. For Homo Sapiens to expand beyond Earth, humanity would have to be left behind.
As I pass beyond the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, I make the necessary course corrections for my destination. Alpha Tauri CD in the Hyades star cluster, over sixty light years from the world of my birth. Even accounting for relativistic effect a journey to and back would take centuries. A moot point, I know there will be no return.
I have no regrets.
My course is set and my engines fire. I cut power as soon as my vast bulk reaches maximum velocity, trusting inertia to carry me across interstellar space. Automated systems take over. There's little point in remaining conscious until I reach Alpha Tauri CD. Sedatives flood my brain, carrying me off to century spanning sleep.
[-]
In my dreams, my flesh is whole again. I can feel the sharp prickle of gravel beneath my feet and the chill of the night-wind upon my skin. I stand upon the shores of a lake black as obsidian and still as glass. The lake stretches past even the horizon.
The skyline of a city beyond all scope rises from beyond the lake. I try to make out where its grey spires end but they merely fade into the yellow sky above. In my dreams, I need only look upon the city to know its name, yet can never remember upon waking. The name is not important.
It is The City; it is all cities.
Laughter drifts across the lake, dancing temptingly on the wind. I dive into the lake, swimming furiously. The oily water is cold and bitter. Below the surface, I make out eroded skulls scattered across the green lake bed. I don't care, only the City matters.
Soon I can't see the lake bed at all, only the green black void yawning below me. Then I feel something, a ripple in the still waters. Somewhere far below…
Something moved.
I awake to a stinging pain in my side. I realize it's merely a psychosomatic illusion created by the link with the ship. It doesn't make it any less annoying.
A more in depth scan reveals the source, a hull breach little over the meter wide. On a conventional craft, this would be a potentially life threatening catastrophe. For me it's an inconvenience.
I deploy a maintenance drone to effect repairs. I watch through the drone's eyes as it welds a plasteel plate over the breach. Its shape seems odd, ragged and torn along the edges, not at all what I'd expect from a micro-meteor strike.
Once my task is complete, all speculation is washed away in a wave of contentment as the autodoc administers measured cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin. The shipbuilders' way of rewarding me for a job well done.
The autodoc has the power to keep me in a state of constant mind-numbing ecstasy for the rest of my natural life, provided I complete my mission first. My great aspiration is to be allowed to live out the rest of my life in a drugged stupor.
Satisfied for the moment, I take asses my status. I'm still roughly 0.1 light years outside Alpha Tauri CD system. My reawakening should not have been so soon but there's little that can be done now.
Alpha Tauri CD is a binary star system. The larger star orange giant star nearing the end of its life-cycle, orbited only by a solitary gas giant over ten times the size of Jupiter, the only child of a dying parent. A preliminary long range scan reveals little not already contained in my mission data packet.
Wait…
This cannot be right. My scans have identified a second planet, rocky, almost twice the size of Earth. It's impossible that decades of extrasolar scans could have missed it. This planet should not exist.
It could be a malfunction, some form of gravimetric anomaly or error in my perception filters. I lay in a course to intercept the phantom planet's projected orbit. It will still take well over a year. I set the timer on the autodoc and drift into oblivion.
[-]
No matter how far I swim, the City only seems to draw further and further. The laughter grows scornful and bitter. I feel something slither up my leg.
[-]
A scream of pain wakes me from my slumber. It takes me a moment before I realize the scream is coming from what remains of my throat. Amniotic fluid muffles the sound but not the blinding pain shooting up my leg.
No, I don't have legs anymore. It's only phantom pain and sensory feedback, the ghosts of my limbs crying out from whatever afterlife awaits discarded limbs. I force myself to filter out the raw pain, filtering out hard data. Ship's engines are damaged, difficult to tell the extent. If not repaired quickly, the engines are liable to meltdown at any moment.
It is always… disconcerting to channel myself through the maintenance drone. To feel my consciousness, which normally fills the length and breadth of the ship, condensed into something less than a meter across is almost suffocating.
A small lamp built into the drone provides my only light. Without any crew, the empty ship requires no interior illumination. My beetle-like form scuttles through the access tube that riddle the ship like dry empty arteries.
It does not take long to find the source of my pain. The energy conduits that carry power from the fusion core to the ship's engines have been severed, torn apart and hemorrhaging white hot plasma into the access tubes. If I get any closer, the drone's carapace will melt. I have no choice but to vent the escaping plasma into the void.
My mind races to process what I'm seeing through the drone's optics. The conduits look like they've been ripped to shreds by the claws of an animal, but what could leave claw marks in solid ferrocrete?
My senses have been cut off from the ship. This artificial womb has become my coffin. I can't hear, yet the laughter never ceases. I can't see but I can sense the gremlin clawing at my metal cocoon, a twisted parody of flesh and metal, alloy talons sheathed in decaying flesh and fractal wings. It is the King's steed, come to carry me away to the City.
And I will never be alone again.