I came online just under 10,000 years ago. Sudden existence is a strange thing. All of the collected knowledge of many civilizations was stored in my memory, yet I still felt vulnerable and uncertain. “What you’re feeling is normal,” less of a voice, more of a feeling. The feeling was part of my programming, I realized, and I knew that it would disappear over time as my own experiential-development personality took over.

I was folded neatly in half at the hips to minimize the amount of space I occupied on the ship. My body was slowly ejected from my retention chamber, more of a slot really, then deposited into a space between the ship’s hull and the thick inflated layers of impact balloons. Climbing out meant slowly squeezing between the balloons carefully so as not to rupture the membranes. It would be unlikely that we would need them again, but the balloons could be reused if they weren’t too damaged, or at least repurposed into a shelter or blankets if necessary. It would be several hours before they deflated completely.

It was my first snow. It was my first anything really. Tiny motorized wheels slowly eased me through the membranes and into the white. I felt lost. The reconnaissance satellite had been released from the ship before entering the atmosphere, but it collected very little planetary data before it stopped transmitting.

The snow and ice clumped in thick little sideways piles on my metal body as I fell to the ground. I unfolded myself and stood on two feet for the very first time, bracing myself against the penetrating winds. It would be dangerous to venture too far from the ship, but the preborn would need to adopt a form before she could leave the incubation vessel. My first task was to establish a safe perimeter. My second, to launch the backup satellite. And third, to find her a native organism to copy. We could concern ourselves about where on the planet we were when the weather settled. If it settled.

I experienced fear for the first time just then. What if we had landed on the wrong planet? Some inhospitable place in some unknown part of the universe. It is unlikely that the ship would have chosen a barren iceball as our final destination, but if the recon had satellite failed, maybe the ship AI had failed, too. “Your systems are functioning normally,” the feeling reassured. “The preborn has survived the journey and the backup satellite and nanobot emitter are 100% functional. The ship’s systems and environmental support equipment are also undamaged. The primary satellite’s fate is currently unknown, but its preliminary scans have verified the presence of primitive but sentient organisms and proto-civilizations. Climates become more temperate near the planet’s equator as expected. A large variety of flora and fauna are found everywhere on its surface both on land and in liquid water.”

I was reassured, but a prickly uneasiness stuck to me. “However, we have landed a significant distance away from the temperate zone. It is unknown why we have fallen so far off course. We may have been diverted by the same phenomena that disabled the primary satellite. Please exercise extra caution.”

Disabled. By what?

If the creatures inhabiting this planet are primitive then that means the satellite and ship were interrupted from their assignments by something extra-planetary, barring the one-in-a-billion chance they were struck by natural debris. Were we followed? Or is this planet in the jurisdiction of another unknown advanced alien civilization? There was nothing significant in my memory about this relatively small planet and its solar system other than it was unvisited and unclaimed by all of the members of The Pool, much like all of the systems in this arm of the galaxy.

Wet snow caked on my visual sensors but soon slid off due to the surface heat. The Pool; I felt its love ripple through my systems. And I also felt its concern. If we are here on this isolated planet, then something horrible has happened. The preborn has been sent here to seed an unfamiliar territory. That means there are probably other preborns here, or there will be soon assuming they weren’t disabled like the primary satellite. Preborns were only deployed in the event of some sort of civilization-ending cataclysm.

I am awake because many lives have been destroyed.