The AI Council sent solar-powered microchip probe swarms into many star systems biological humanity could not follow. The early hyperspace drives were not very powerful and could only follow the hyperspace runs linking Sol with the more powerful nearby stars like the Alpha Centauri Trinary System. They couldn’t travel to all the tiny little dwarf stars bouncing around our region of space. But a probe swarm could travel there at twenty percent the speed of light in a matter of years or decades at most. That is how the AI Council explored space around humanity in an ever-expanding globe of probe swarms that forever kept watch on everything around us.