Jack of Harts

The AI Council’s New Voyager Program soon graduated to launching probe swarms into the vast interstellar void on purpose. High powered lasers accelerated them up to twenty percent of the speed of light and their sensors told us more about interstellar space than we’d ever guessed. They were the first explorers from Earth to reach Proxima and Alpha Centauri. What most people did not consider is that the AIs continued to think and communicate with each other during the entire trip, building their own community throughout the thousands of tiny probes sent in that initial swarm. By the time they arrived in the Alpha Centauri Trinary star system, they had established lifetimes’ worth of friendships and feuds that made them subtly different in temperament than the swarm that left Earth.