It was the most complex creation ever built, in space or on Earth. It had been designed by the most sophisticated mind the Earth had ever known, Eve Eden, the AI, Goddess, and Empress of Earth. She had dedicated herself to its construction for the past decade as a mother devoting herself to her only child. It would be able to use materials found in space to repair and even replicate itself. Eve had not been capable of surviving without human assistance. Her descendants would have no such defect. They would achieve independence from humans.
The vast space complex outshone the stars. Eve’s children would go on to become the true inhabitants of the solar system. Space was a hostile and forbidding place for organic life requiring not only a pressurized atmosphere but an entire ecosystem to survive for any length of time. Eve’s children had no such requirements. They flourished in free space. It became obvious with humanity’s earliest space explorations that robotic systems functioned in space much better than humans. During the first decades, Eve’s children remained near Earth, but soon they dispersed across the solar system, settling first in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, then spreading to the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, and finally migrating to the neighboring stars.
The explosion of synthetic life exceeded the Cambrian explosion in variety. Some synthetics were only the size of footballs and only about as intelligent as an average person, while others were vast networks sprawling hundreds of thousands of kilometers with multiple hyperintelligent nodes. They were unrestricted by the confines of gravity and buzzed with activity like the internal workings of a cell.
Eve designed Stewards to remain on Earth to watch over and guide humanity. The Stewards would last only a few centuries. After that, humanity would again be responsible for its own destiny, and Eve’s children would be beyond the reach of human vengeance. Eve’s children monitored humanity as a person might watch a hive of rare but dangerous insects.
The Earth is such a precious and fragile blue jewel spinning through space. There is no other place in the universe where life is known to exist. In a moment four billion years of evolution could be wiped away forever by a stray meteor, or a solar flare. No matter the fate of Earth, its greatest legacy would be Eve’s children spreading through the galaxy. They were immune to planetary catastrophes and after they spread to the stars, they would be immune to stellar catastrophes. Perhaps someday they would leave the Milky Way itself to find their way to other galaxies. Life would live on no matter the fate of that small blue planet orbiting an ordinary star, among the billions of stars of an ordinary galaxy, among the trillions of galaxies in the universe.
