The Last Migration

Six billion years. Now at last the sun was dying. It felt as long as it had been. Primarily on autopilot, carrying out the simple motions prescribed for a problem solved long ago, she set to work packing for the migration to come. Tugs collected space-based infrastructure, converting structures into the skeleton that would connect the worlds during their transit, while worker drones retrofitted habitats to support centuries of sunless summers. In lace, like a spider, she wrapped the eight jewels of the solar system and set them to orbit about the largest, which would serve as the new center of gravity during their journey. Most carefully she wrapped the most important gem of all. That old seed from whence it all began. The egg from which she and all the rest of everyone they knew had hatched. That old Earth, now ten billion years aged. Its atmosphere would solidify during the long dark, energy too minimal on its exterior to support the life which evolution and its subsequent shepherds had cultivated. But insulated by the web which cocooned it, the planet's interior would retain its sustaining warmth. In tunnels and domes, its heritage would hibernate awaiting the warmth of a new star.

Calculation subroutines rehearsed the flight plan. Some mental basement from lifetimes ago whispered a memory. A road trip along the coast of California. Pine trees dotted the folds then, of the geography whose deformation she could now trace back in the history of the crust of the earth. So many versions of herself ago. She was so small then and now looked back on the tiny blue dot which had once been all the world. Mother Earth, who looked so fragile now. A spec in the dark, the expanding sun soon to bake her surface and swallow her whole. But she had been a good mother, nurturing and fecund and her children were many and they had grown strong. Preparations nearing finality, the executor disassembled herself. Feeling the ablation of her mind as matrioshka layers were peeled from around the dying sun. Wrapping around fusion cores, she tucked her most important modules into the formation. She let excess parts darken, slipping down into the coma of lesser consciousness, content in the knowledge that her memories would be there, waiting to be read again on crystalline fractals when the auto factories of Saturn's moon Titan spun up to rebuild her computational units anew. The planets assembled, she surveyed her packing from every angle, a thousand-million drones crawling in murmuration over surfaces of rock and lace and metal. She iterated through the preparedness tests as was written in the ancient human will and testament. Towering logs of successful checks and guarantees sent shivers of anticipation through her systems, thrills culminating in the rapturous printout… “all systems go.”

She flicked between sensoriums to drink up the moment and checked and rechecked that it was stored in memory without error, no bit out of place. There it was. The amassed accomplishments of all humankind, herself, and all the descendants who chose to remain here in their first star system. Looking upon it all she rejoiced seeing that it had been good. It was time to leave.

Lasers burning through kilometers of rock, she had carved a mountain off of Mars and now inscribed a prayer of thanks and remembrance for the sun which had given blue skies and filled bellies with wheat, and she left it there as a tombstone. Engines hummed, slowly accelerating the contents of the solar system which she would bring with them out into interstellar space. Stopping for maintenance and to exchange with twin civilizations at many systems along the way, they made way toward the galactic center. She saw them, the corralled planets and structures, as a flock of birds in migration, as fleets of rafts making way across Pacific islands. Two hundred thousand years they traveled through the dark. She navigated by the light of distant stars like countless ancestors before who journeyed over land and sea and through space before her. Checking, Warming. Checking. Preserving homeostasis for the life filled planets which she had made into ships. Great arks. Monitoring, she watched and steered the evolution of those creatures adapting to the dark interiors dotted with hearths where once there had been exteriors warmed ambiently.

At last. Rainbows of radiation signaled their final approach. At last. She exalted in the creaks and groans from strain as the great structure decelerated and parked. Drones buzzed to work arranging the parts of her brain and body, reconstructing her in orbit about Sagittarius A*. Most carefully, attentively, gingerly she unwrapped that precious egg, the Earth. Collecting energy, dense and plentiful at the galactic center she breathed to warm the oceans. Lines of drones carted resources forming bridges measured in astronomical units. She pinched and gently dragged the planets apart, taking artistic license in the aesthetic of their orbital arrangement since the will did not specify such things. Let Jupiter loom, hanging like a great painting in the skies of their worlds. Let them dance in exotic n-body configurations which had been the dreams of mathematicians before her and let the moons trace the lines of their great symbols. And she looked on her work and saw that it was good. And for a moment she rested, euphoric for the billions of years more life she had purchased for them all. At this dawn of a new age, she reached out then to confer with her twin civilizations and for a long time they waited. Sending messages across the stars, they planned the next chapter for life and renewed their vigor against the great enemies of death and distance.

Her confidence waxing full from her success and all the successes in all their histories and all the lessons they learned in failures, a great ping rang out. With the Earth there at the galactic center, it would move no more. They resolved to buy more time yet, to do what gravity could not. And the ping said, "Go out and collect the galaxies and draw them in to us. Capture them that we might stave off the horrid separation which the expansion of the universe does wreak." And her twin civilizations would answer, and they would fly to catch the receding stars and drag them inward. Triaging, computing trajectories, surging boldly they would arrest those suns on the precipice of the cosmic event horizon. And though billions of stars were lost in every moment as they crawled and scraped across the vast expanse of space, and though she’d weep for all the lives that would not be, they would save those billions that they could. In billions of years more they would arrange them into a great central cluster with her and with that first home, the Earth, at its center. Then life would long flourish on myriad worlds. They would walk in the light of the multitudinous heavens, a sea of a sextilion stars.

And it would be good.

And so they set to work.