Pandemic

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For a hundred thousand years, the machine traveled in a straight line.

The Creators had launched it into space along with many others, countless others. The others also traveled in a straight line, but each one in a different direction. It wasn’t long, relatively speaking, before the machine could no longer detect the others, before it could no longer detect the place from which it had come, before it could no longer detect the Creators themselves.

Alone, the machine traveled through the void.

It would have flown in that same straight line for all eternity were it not for a faint trace of electromagnetic radiation known as a radio wave.

Analysis was instant and definitive: the radio wave was not naturally occurring. It was artificial, proof of existence of a sentient race other than the Creators.

For the first time, the machine changed direction.

It moved toward the source of this signal so it could fulfill its sole purpose: find the species that generated the signal, then assist the Creators in wiping that species from the face of existence.

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