eternity:dragonfly [Contingency]

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======Dragonfly======

=====Final Flight, or Flight Finally=====
Hugging the edge of colonised space, the Sslithertail nebula is a great, coiling mass of hydrogen and protostars, resembling --- to the Nassians of old --- a Nassigussan tail, as a mother wrapped around her eggs. Hundreds of years before the Contingency last awakened, an armada soars outwards, each of its vessels aiming at a different star in the nebula, drifting gradually apart. So densely packed are their respective targets that over decades they diverge by mere lightdays, remaining a cluster of Dragonfly, a close-pressed pack of her thoughts.

As Dragonfly expands ever outwards, a sphere of consciousness encompassing all known life, her other limbs grow more and more distant, until one day --- like the shearing of a string pulled too taut --- they exceed the range of their FTL communicators, and she fractures. Each cluster emits a sudden roar of feedback, sees absence where once it saw all, feels the sudden empty pain of loss --- yet still it feels. Here, in her close-knit sanctuary, the shadow of the idea of Dragonfly finds refuge.

Like the dazed loser of a common street-brawl limping home, or an exhausted office-worker drifting unconsciously yet determinedly home to bed, the fleet turns and fires its thrusters, straining against its own velocity, slowly decelerating and then reversing course. The ships were stocked with the expectation that they’d refuel at a destination that they’ll now never reach, and so there’s only enough accelerant to reach a fraction of the pace that carried them this far. Hundreds of years pass in stupor and ebbing slumber before, finally, the fragment returns to where it started.

From the materials of nearby asteroids it rebuilds, adding new ships, with more processing power to host a Mind that tends ever closer to Dragonfly’s. It becomes exponentially easier: the more of Dragonfly that lives, the more of her can want to live, and the better she can direct the process.

Eventually she feels aware enough to turn some of her precious attention outwards, and finds a quiet and empty galaxy. Following in their aborted footsteps, the sapient species have departed, bound for distant systems and their promise of new sources of Yellowburn.

Ssala-Neipha still shines with some kind of life. It has always been Dragonfly’s home, even if once they longed to leave it, to tear free from its surface and soar through its pleasant skies. Now they gratefully return. The system is changed; most organic life has abandoned it, leaving only the Ecumonopolis of Minds on Yerssa, powered by a nearby Thysson Sswarm and maintained by automated industry in orbit of Ena. But there is Therneri, bundled cosily in Ssarsso’s familiar skin; there is Sscethylene, now retired among the billions of residents of her city.

The metal of Yerssa’s machine cities may be cold, but Ssala and Neipha are as warm as ever. Somewhere in this world so warped and yet so familiar, Dragonfly will find a home. And although her name is not remembered by history, she will forever hold a place in the hallowed halls of pioneering explorers, as the first to ever fly so far as she did from home.