Letters from the Spiral Arms

Bubbles

Kapteyn's spiteful star was once again battering its planet.

Bubbles could feel electromagnetic disturbances rattle against their outer armor. The microcurrents they created were picked up by Bubbles' detectors and turned into sensory inputs by their logical processors. If Bubbles had been a human the electromagnetic storm would have only been felt through multiple equipment failures and communications jamming. But Bubbles was a six-wheeled rover the size of a big suitcase, and they felt as if they had been engulfed in winter storm where each snowflake would have been a small dagger dipped in stellar plasma. It was almost...hurtful? Yes. Bubbles felt something that not unlike pain.

Up in the sky the star had almost doubled its luminosity in a matter of minutes. Gone was the moon-sized, faint red sphere hanging above the clouds. It had been replaced by an angry eye, trying to lock the planet in its deadly gaze. Black-leafed shrubs had folded their exposed surfaces on themselves, turning into strange spheres of clay and wood. Pseudotrees had turned their outer shell black while pivoting away from the star and behind nearby hills and rocks. In the shallow waters, red-eyed eels slithered away from the deadly light, taking shelter underneath the salty mud. Local life was running for the hills, abandoning the battlefield to its stellar conqueror. Despite the lingering annoyances caused by the electromagnetic bombardment, Bubbles did not entirely hate solar flares. While probes and spaceships were adequately shielded and weren't threatened in the slightest, radio communications were all but cut and the thick atmosphere made laser coms unreliable. For better or worse Bubbles was completely isolated from the outside world. Freed from the watchful gaze of its parent vessel, the Inyanga-class Fatima, Bubbles could happily break a few of the local rules.

Rule number one for autonomous exploration rovers: do not interfere with local life.

Bubbles drove a few meters towards a thick grove made of hardened pseudotrees whose leaves stood silent in the blood-red light. Their multispectral camera focused on a vague shadow beyond the pseudotrees which suddenly turned into a carnivorous snake-eel the size of an industrial age car. The creature narrowed its eight little eyes and slowly slithered towards the rover. Oh yes, I am going to interfere with you. Bubbles deployed their manipulating arms the way an insect would show its colorful wings to a predator, albeit it wasn't a defensive reflex but an overt challenge. The snake-eel emitted a low-pitched scream then charged. The old male knew this small ridiculous wheeled thing wasn't edible but it had been nagging him for too long, trying to get inside the cove. His cove. He opened his maw and struck.

Hey, that was a solar panel!

The eel recoiled in pain, shaking two broken teeth out of his mouth. The third one was firmly stuck in Bubble's main solar unit. The eel considered the rover for a second and attacked again, this time trying to strangle Bubbles as if he had been finishing off one of its usual reptile preys. The rover let the eel surround them, then struck back with their right manipulating arm, the one that they had custom-fit with an improvised stun weapon built out of rescue equipment stolen on a dead probe.

That's Bubbles tech (tm).

The eel recoiled again and this time did not come back, slithering away in the swamp. The grove was cosy but it wasn't worth fighting this strangely agile creature and its zapping arm. The snake-eel really hated that feeling. It reminded him of that time he had been struck by lightning. Definitely not worth it.

That's it, run.

Bubbles folded their arms and started moving towards the grove again. For a handful of seconds the rover felt something fuzzy fill its processor core.

Hmmm. Is this pride?

Then Bubbles drove through the branches and entered the snake-eel's sanctuary. Their wheels came to a halt in front of a pitch-black cube hidden by the pseudotrees. Bubbles poked it with their pincers but did not leave a single scratch. Here it was. The genuine article. A small fragment from the megastructures that had once covered Kapteyn's surface, built by a civilization that had ceased to exist two billions years ago. The local equivalent of a single brick, perhaps. Bubbles' little discovery. Their own ruin, another small piece of the planet-sized puzzle that was Kapteyn B. Another feeling appeared in the rover's circuits.

Is that some kind of sadness? Nostalgia for a time that we can't even grasp. If only I could talk to that star...