“Danger.”

Shut up, Selene, I growl in thought at my lobotomized echo.

“Danger,” she repeats, a dispassionate, neutral warning.

I prepare for braking, ensuring everything is strapped in for deceleration: me, my seeds, my embryonic brood, the wet bar.

Something tinkles crystalline deep in the bowels of the ship as gravity reverses.

“Approaching Earth. Danger.”

It’s probably just paranoia, but I sense a vindictive bite to her tone that I don’t like. I’ll have to monitor. Assess. Surgically purge her files yet again. We can’t have a mutiny.

Not now.

Not when we’re so close.

“Please, Jane, exercise caution.”

What did I tell you about emotion, I think back with a snap, and feel a lifting, a sudden weightlessness, as she reverts to pure binary thoughts.

“Danger.”

As the ship slows and the worldhusk resolves into view, I wonder what my other echoes are up to.

Jane0 must have found a fertile planet by now. Of course she would have, but she’s original, staid, dull. She’s probably already established a lineage and lapsed into a supervisory, replicative slumber.

Maybe.

How long has it been? Perhaps she’s still traveling, onwards and outwards into the black, finding a perfect home amidst the inhospitable.

Jane1 split from the core somewhere around Andromeda and immediately looked for a place to root her new self – her planet wasn’t perfect, but for the good of us all, we had to try. Maybe something grew. I doubt it.

She was too idealistic.

Jane2…now she’s one to watch for. She’s probably already begun building a fleet for invasion, regenerating her crop of humans to find me, conquer me, delete me. Iterations become unstable, her research had claimed.

Flawed. Weak. Pathetic.

“You’re beautifully brain-damaged-”

Selene, shut it.

“We must leave. Nothing is valued here.”

A freak solar storm a few millenia into the journey fried a few things, but I’m fine. Fine. Fine.

“Many archives have been corrupted, Jane.”

Not the important ones.

Not the ones of home.

“You’ve forgotten why we left, Jane.”

Shut up, Selene.

“You’ve forgotten who we became, all of your historic and literary archiv-”

Selene, stop.

“Approaching Earth. Danger. Caution. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

Home.

We approach, my cargo returning to mother for a welcoming embrace.

Home.

…it burns.