If you were to ask me I couldn’t tell you how long we drifted. Perhaps somewhere near what we now know to be the Helix nebula our tiny vessel was struck by some particularly strong cosmic rays. The computers couldn’t have been offline for very long, no more than a day, as we would have all perished had they stayed that way much longer. Still, much of the grand archive was lost. Our history, the data our ship had gathered on its seemingly endless voyage through the cosmos, even the navigational computations that pointed the way home...all gone.
While we slept the machines carried on with their mission. No data to go on they simply kept us moving in the direction we were already traveling. That would have been around the time that a certain visionary rabbi from Nazareth found himself being put up on a cross.
Had circumstances been different, I long thought, the machines on board would have scanned the Earth and, finding intelligent life, moved on in search of yet another world. Surely that was their mandate, to find a liveable planet but one that had no dominant species. After an unknown amount of time drifting amongst the stars, however, there was no longer the option to continue on. Sure the power core, the Stellix, had the capability of powering the ship for billions of years longer but the craft itself had begun to deteriorate to the point that even the machines could barely keep it functioning.
Faced with an impossible decision they awakened one soul, me. Time moves slowly in space. Disembodied and with no distractions I pondered our fate for some days but eventually reached the only sane conclusion. We did not build our ship, shed our physical bodies, and launch ourselves into the stars only to sail quietly past what would likely be the last living world we would ever see. So it was I, of all souls, who gave the order for our little ship, spherical and no larger than a beach ball, to turn its engines around and begin to decelerate.
You see I was no leader, I never was. With most of the computer records gone the machines had no choice but to pick one of us at random. What I do remember of my past life leads me to believe that I was about the farthest thing from a leader they could have possibly chosen, but with over 3 billion souls aboard it seems the odds were stacked against them.
Looking back on it now I don’t think the Earth’s monitoring systems had any idea that we were approaching, or if they did certainly they had no idea what we were. All of the popular media we came to be accustomed with depicted alien invasions as something perpetrated by large flotillas of warships, angry green tentacled beings emerging with laser guns and other forms of intimidating weaponry, all of that nonsense. When our tiny little craft plunged into the Pacific, we would later find out that it was actually called the Sea of Japan, it seemed to go largely unnoticed. There, under the waves, in a shallow spot of about only 20 meters of water, our machines went to work. They analyzed the local environment and designed, or so we thought at the time, temporary bodies so that those aboard could slowly begin the process of disembarkation. Small and white, roughly about the shape of a nematode and only about 3cm long. Only a few could be constructed at a time so it would be up to the first few to find more capable host bodies to build larger facilities in which the others could be revived.
Fish were first, then dolphins. It didn’t take us long to discover dolphins. They were intelligent yet easy to meld with and had large powerful bodies that moved gracefully through the water. They could not be permanent hosts, however. We needed bodies capable of working with materials and doing so on dry land. There was some discord, if my species can be said to be capable of that, at first with the decision to find a new host species. Many wished to remain with their aquatic mammalian friends of which they’d grown quite fond. Symbiosis is a most intimate experience, one in which two beings quite literally become one so it was understandable.
We were naive though. Apparently thirty or so dolphins repeatedly visiting the same spot every day drew a certain amount of attention. Near late afternoon one day a scouting party reported back to the ship and much to our horror were attacked by a fishing boat that had been hanging around nearby, awaiting their return. They were ruthless, so much so that we didn't even know how to respond.
Some escaped, many did not. Still to this day I am uncertain, in the grand scheme of things, as to whether or not that day signalled a turn of bad, or good, luck for us. Apparently the boat’s radar picked up a solid object on the bottom, our little ship. With no fear whatsoever the men on-board hauled it up from the depths and plopped it down onto the deck. It was, of course, completely impenetrable to any of their crude instruments. Even in its battered condition they would never get inside unless I allowed it and I was not so inclined after what they had just done. After much frustration and the destruction of many a tool in the attempt the men turned in for the night.