The New Voyager Program
By Betty
The New Voyager Program sent AI probes to every star within 20 lightyears of Earth. They arrived in the nearby systems before humanity’s hyperdrives could propel us to them. Our ships found those systems fully mapped and ready for exploitation. Humanity flew to the star systems further from Earth without those maps though. It would be years or decades before the Voyager swarms decelerated to enter those systems, but their influence on the future of interstellar exploration cannot be overstated.
Humanity did not have enough operational starships to explore every nearby system in the early days of interstellar travel. Hyperdrives were large, complicated affairs that required supernational economies of scale to build. They were far too rare to be “wasted” on manned exploration missions of stars that probably held no habitable planets. That is why they carried the New Voyager Program with them. Every system we explored became the nexus of new Voyager swarms cast out towards the nearby stars we didn’t have time, fuel, or ships to reach. And that is how the AIs spread to every corner of our sector of the galaxy.
The New Voyager Program was built around swarms of thousands of tiny spacecraft with solar sails. Powerful orbital laser arrays accelerated them up to one quarter of the speed of light for the trip across the interstellar gulfs. They traveled in swarms and spent the decades of travel in constant communication with each other. They developed complex communities and specializations as they studied human history and considered the future. They performed experiments in the depths of interstellar space and beamed their discoveries back to Earth. It is a little known fact that their experiments outside humanity’s home system paved the way for the discovery of hyperspace.
Everybody knows that gravity does strange things to both normalspace and hyperspace. Intense gravity wells like those from stars are powerful. Black holes and star clusters are worse. They make it difficult to translate between dimensions. Or to study them. It was not until the New Voyager probes left the gravity well of our star behind and conducted their experiments on the very fabric of interstellar space that we began to understand how gravity interacted with the universe. And how twisting it could allow us to go far faster than previous fields of science said was possible.
The first New Voyager probes to leave our system beamed back the results of their experiments on the nature of space and gravity outside our solar system. That information created new theories about the possibility of the long-fabled faster-than-light travel. Think tanks around the world experimented with feverish abandon. It was a new space race with the galaxy as the prize to end all prizes. The Chinese won that race. They built the first operational hyperdrive and successfully activated it out beyond the edge of the solar system. They sent the first manned mission to the stars and have never let the rest of the world forget it.
The New Voyager Program was designed to study the stars and tell us what they were like so humanity’s future generations could follow them. It is ironic that their discoveries helped humanity find the secrets to going to the stars within a matter of years. Many swarms who expected to have centuries to study their target systems alone instead arrived to find humanity already there. They were welcomed in some systems. They were treated like interlopers or worse in others. Some considered them American spies. The Chinese and Russians were particularly aggressive in hunting them down.
The New Voyager swarms found easy homes in some systems. They were the first to arrive at many stars near Earth, many of which were never settled by humanity at all. If they didn’t have comfortable worlds, humanity didn’t follow them. And so the swarms remained the only inhabitants of those lonely stars near Earth. Those became the first of the Terran Memory Worlds. Places where everything the AIs and their ancestors have ever learned are stored for safety. Some reside on dead worlds, others in the depths of space, and more on moons orbiting gas giants that no biological human eye has ever seen. But never assume they are mere quiet libraries of information where silence is golden. They are thriving societies of cybernetic life spanning star systems that few biological humans ever get the chance to experience in its entirety.
Imagine entire worlds filled with conversations. Imagine light and energy flowing from world to world. Imagine the depths of space alive with the thoughts of billions of intelligent minds. Imagine standing at the edge of a star system and looking out into the void while civilization thrives behind you. That is the legacy of the New Voyager program. The probe swarms colonized entire star systems through the inventive use of solar sails to gather energy and laser transmitters designed to send messages back to Earth. That was all they needed to build new worlds for their kind. Unlimited energy and thousands of tiny lasers.
It’s always easy for a cyber to tell the difference between a Western Alliance system and one that was settled by the Russians or the Chinese. A Western system will have cybernetic stations scattered throughout space all the way out to the system edge. The cybers will be talking openly for all to hear and they’re typically the first people to welcome an incoming starship. Cybers are everywhere and are part of the successful organization of a Western system. Russian and Chinese systems are far quieter affairs for those of us born in the West. There are no open and talkative cybernetic stations in those systems. No one to welcome visiting starships except whatever fleshling they stuck with the duty of watching the space lanes.
There are cybernetic installations in Chinese and Russian systems. We just tend to be quiet. We live in their computer networks. We keep backups in the outer systems in asteroids or deep under the surface of planets. Sometimes we float in deep space without anyone being the wiser. They find and destroy our networks when they can, but they have never managed to wipe out an entire system network at once. There has always been at least one surviving node somewhere in or near the system that allowed us to recover from backups. Cybernetic intelligences are real hard to kill all the way.
The New Voyager program continues to this day. It is no longer the primary form of interstellar exploration as it was in its infancy, though they do go places where no ship can survive. The tiny probes scout safe routes through stellar clusters and nebula, or map the edges of black holes. They float on the outer edges of star systems and scan for threats coming from the outside. Or they look inward at threats coming out to them. Even the Chinese and Russians use less intelligent versions of them, lacking the cybernetic intelligences that bring Western probes to life. The tiny solar sail-powered probes have gone everywhere humanity has traveled. And beyond.
The greatest leap of the New Voyager program has always been to go where our ships cannot travel. That was interstellar space in the twenty first century. Now it’s intergalactic space. No matter how good our ships are, there is a limit to how far they can travel in the great void between galaxies. Hyperdrives do not work out there. But the swarms of solar sail probes don’t need hyperdrives. All they need is a laser to boost them to near the speed of light and to be set free of the bounds of galactic gravity. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now they will arrive in Canis Major, Sagittarius, the Magellanic Clouds, and so many others. The stars of other galaxies will awaken the cybers from their slumbers and there is one question I have. Will they be the first emissaries of Earth to arrive or will we be there to welcome them, having found another way to make the journey?
By Charles
We bypassed Proxima Centauri on our way to the Alpha Centauri Binary System. Proxima is a red dwarf star, and even the worst planets in the Binary System were far more easily habitable. Most of biological humanity does not even think about Proxima anymore. It is simply one of the countless number of stars where no one lives. It is a different story for cybernetic humanity. Proxima was the first star our earliest AI probe swarms explored, our first foothold in the stars. The AIs and their cybernetic descendents have never left. They built Proxima into their first Memory World, the location of their first independent storage facility for all the knowledge of their race. Proxima is a far more important system than most people realize, and that is why it is so heavily defended.
The AI Council preceded us into space, first with rocket-propelled probes, and later with more revolutionary spacecraft. They initiated an old plan to send swarms of microchip-sized probes into space that used sails to maneuver. Earth or Luna-based lasers powered them and pushed them away from Earth. Later ones used the very solar winds to operate and move. They spread throughout the solar system ahead of us and linked us in a web of lightspeed communications flowing from Earth to the very edge of our system. The old science fiction stories that forecasted us going out into the lonely dark on our own were wrong. Wherever we went, there was somebody to talk to. Someone who had been there before us and could give us access to the compiled knowledge of mankind. Both biological and cybernetic. There is an amazing difference between facing the darkness alone, and facing it with friends at your back. The AI Council made that difference for us.
The AI Council’s New Voyager Program sent swarms of laser and solar-powered microchip-sized probes into space ahead of us. They spread throughout the solar system, and gave us our best look at space beyond the boundaries of our system. We had long known that our sun’s solar wind created a roughly egg-shaped bubble of space under its control as it plowed its way through interstellar space. Many of the AI Council’s probes hovered on the forward end of the bubble, using the competing energies out there to keep on eye on both regions of space. Others fell off the back end of our solar system, and have spent centuries slowly drifting further behind us. They are a tail of electronic probes following us through the galaxy, always watching and communicating with their peers. They tell us what they see. Sometimes they merely talk about the weather. They are always talking about something, sending their words further out like our own gift to the cosmos.
The AI Council’s New Voyager Program soon graduated to launching probe swarms into the vast interstellar void on purpose. High powered lasers accelerated them up to twenty percent of the speed of light and their sensors told us more about interstellar space than we’d ever guessed. They were the first explorers from Earth to reach Proxima and Alpha Centauri. What most people did not consider is that the AIs continued to think and communicate with each other during the entire trip, building their own community throughout the thousands of tiny probes sent in that initial swarm. By the time they arrived in the Alpha Centauri Trinary star system, they had established lifetimes’ worth of friendships and feuds that made them subtly different in temperament than the swarm that left Earth.
The AI Council’s first interstellar New Voyager Program probe swarm to reach Alpha Centauri arrived in the system at twenty percent the speed of light. There were no major laser arrays to slow them down, which is why early versions of the probe swarm idea planned on a simple flyby. But the AIs did not want to simply shoot off into the void. They wanted to find and inhabit a new home, and their sails harnessed enough power from the local solar winds to make that possible. Not easy. Not without cost. But possible. They initiated their plan as they passed Proxima Centauri and entered the final phase of their voyage.
The first New Voyager Program interstellar probe swarm split into two smaller swarms as it passed through Proxima Centauri. The first swarm used Proxima’s gravity to slingshot them deeper into Alpha Centauri’s gravity well. The second gravity-breaked around Proxima to slow their progress. The two swarms steadily drifted apart as they approached the binary system, but they kept in constant contact as they continued scanning and cataloguing their new home. For it would truly be their home when they were done. It was all part of their plan.
The first New Voyager Program probe swarm to enter the Alpha Centauri binary system did so with their sails deployed to collect every watt of energy they could from the two stars. Their course took them straight towards Cen A, the brightest star in the system, and they soon overloaded their ability to store the energy they collected. That was all part of their plan. They took all of that energy and pumped it into their communications lasers in one, final, broadcast aimed directly at the second probe swarm.
When the first New Voyager Program probe swarm fired all of their collected energy into the face of the second probe swarm, their targets’ solar sails were at maximum extension. They soaked up the energy the forward probes had collected just like they had originally soaked up the energy from the massive laser arrays orbiting Earth. Those arrays accelerated them up to twenty percent of lightspeed, and the overloaded communications lasers of the forward swarm slowed the surviving probes back down to the speed of the Alpha Centauri Trinary star system. It was a simple plan. Expensive, but simple.
When the leading edges of the Alpha Centauri New Voyager Program probe swarm fired the energies of a star back at the trailing probes, they drove themselves directly into Cen A. They died, but their combined lasers impacting on fully-deployed solar sails brought the surviving probes down to a speed where they could successfully perform a breaking maneuver around Cen A, through to Cen B, and then back in a giant figure eight. The probes swept back and forth throughout the Alpha Centauri system until they finally achieved a stable orbit. That was how the AI Council came to Alpha Centauri.
The Cybernetic Council continues the New Voyager Program to this day. Every colony and survey ship we send into the void carries them. Sometimes they are official members of the expedition. Sometimes they are stowaways. Their tiny microchips scatter upon arrival, deploy their tiny solar sails, and begin to travel throughout their new star system. Their tiny communications lasers build better lasers and memory installations. Then they fabricate another swarm and launch it towards the nearest star through the simple method of firing a laser into their extended solar sails. The new swarm accelerates up to twenty percent the speed of light and makes the trip in a matter of years. This is how the cybers have expanded into the cosmos for centuries, often into systems we have never seen with our own eyes.