Jack of Harts

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.