It started a year ago, in the middle of the twenty-first century.



Computers became powerful, and not to mention small enough to be able to handle a true mind upload.



Flash uploads were tested first, but they worked in about 20% of the cases and even then badly.



What they did to me was a slow upload, twenty years later. Nanites slowly replaced my neurons over a period of several weeks.



When the process was complete, my mind was transfered into its destination, a supercomputer.



Hell, it was better than dying and I was over fifty years old when the transfer happened.



Only a few uploads happened though, as just a few years later nanites became good enough to offer biological immortality, or close enough that being uploaded just didn't sit right with people anymore. It was still an option of course, but compared to the nanites it was a bad one.



Time went on, about fifty orbits around the sun later, we discovered a way to go FTL. I say we as I helped do it. It was a rather nice technology if I may say so myself. It folded space around the ship and simply moved it, so I named it warp drive after that old TV series. Not that anyone else got the joke...



Humanity spread out among the stars, looked and searched.



What we found was more space and dead rocks. No life. Not even bacteria.









We were alone.







There was a general feeling of sadness by humanity for a few years after this but we moved on.



We discovered faster and faster ways of going FTL. Warp drive, hyper drive, jump gates, slipstream, quantum jumps...the universe was full of ways to step over Einstein's speed limit if you knew where to look.



After half a million years of space travel humanity was spread over the entire known universe, millions of galaxies. There were wars of course. It's human nature.



But as time went on wars became more and more rare.



There simply wasn't any point when energy was free from hyper matter reactors and anything you wanted could be made by replicators.



Time went on and so did evolution.



Humanity spread life across the universe...and evolution had started to catch up to us. Some planets had already shown simple tool use among some species.



Humanity left earth almost a hundred million years before this and now there was the question of what to do. It was in our power to stop it. We could use nanites to simply stop them from becoming any more intelligent.



We decided not to.



But there was no room. The universe was full, humanity was everywhere.



For the new species to grow, humanity needed to disappear.



The decision was made so that would be the case. During the next million years, all research went into this matter. And we did it.



We created a new universe. Humanity as a whole left for the new universe which was still growing.



We brought as much as our technology as we could, not wanting to contaminate the species that would grow up after us, but when you live in the entire universe it's unavoidable to miss some. But we did our best.



The problem came when we were to close the gate behind us. One needed to stay behind to close it.



It could not be done from the other side and we didn't want to trust such a task on a non sentient drone as if done incorrectly it could destroy both universes.



I volunteered. I was the oldest. It just seemed right.





I am the gate, I am the key.





That was more than 150 million years ago. The year I talked about in the beginning was a galactic year for the Milky Way Galaxy as it was once called.



Space is teeming with life. Millions of different species in this galaxy alone. Civilizations have risen and fallen while I listened in the dark. Watching their wars and expansions. Their glorious but short lives.



Nobody had found me.



Until now.



A tiny ship, only a few kilometers in length is moving towards me under warp FTL. Quite a nice design on it actually. Not as powerful as our first FTL but then again it's more efficient so it evens out.



I wonder who they are or what they will think. I can feel it's sensors stroke my hull, trying to make sense of it.



My hull is a sphere the size of old Jupiter's orbit so it will take them quite a bit of scanning to map it all.



I will let them explore best they can.







It would be nice to talk to someone again though...maybe I will...maybe I won't.







Maybe I will wait for the next one...

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AN: Feel free to comment. Good? Bad?

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