Sphere

Space exploration is a lonely business.  It is long and slow.  The universe is vast and cold. The agents of discovery must be patient and thorough. To this end they were made so. Given every capacity to accomplish their mission, along with a single minded drive, a relentless focus on the only thing that can bring them satisfaction and closure. To return with the newfound knowledge they sought.

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“Jason, do you see that mound over there?” Karen pointed her spotlight over at the detail that grabbed her attention. At first she had mistaken it for a lunar rock, but the way that her flashlight played off of its surface was all wrong.
“Yeah, I see it. Seems too shiny.” Jason responded slowly thinking as he studied the mound. Jason was the calculating type. And it was his job to be weary of anything that might mess up the mission.

Jason and Karen were representatives of LuniCom, a conglomerate of a dozen business interests that had banded together and bought the blessings of Earths major superpowers to begin commercial exploitation of the moon.  Their mission was an early exploration and evaluation one.

The astronauts sent to the moon over the years had never found anything of significant interest, but that was decades ago. Modern science had uncovered a treasure trove of valuable minerals and elements on the moon. At least that’s what the remote surveys had shown.  Now boots on the lunar surface were in place to verify that the entire endeavor was not a waste of billions of dollars.

Wiping the surface of the mound to remove a thick layer of dust Karen stepped back in shock.  Her gasp was loud enough to clip the auto vox of her com set.

Jason was at her side, but he was too shocked to even gasp.

Where she had cleaned it, a silvery metallic surface shown in his light. It appeared to be a silver ball bearing approximately 4 feet across.

The real time video feed had a bit of delay from the distance it had to transmit, but the crackle of a remote signal was the first thing to break them out of their shock.

“Jason, Karen, ah… what exactly are you looking at up there?”

“No clue.” Jason reached out and wiped more dust from the sphere. Karen joined back in and shortly they had the entire top half cleaned off.  There was no perceptible blemish in it’s perfectly round smooth surface. They could clearly see their own distorted reflections on it.

The sphere was quickly collected and despite some trepidation it was brought back to earth where it was studied first by LuniCorps scientists. Then when they came to the conclusion that they were at a dead end, they revealed their discovery to the governments of the world, who promptly confiscated it.

The government scientists picked up right where the LuniCorp ones had left of. With no more success.
Though they did not realize it, the humans studying the sphere were themselves the subjects of intense observation.  The sphere was a deep space exploration probe.

Its mission was to sit in wait on or around planets that were statistically likely to give rise to life. And then if that life achieved a level of intelligence sufficient to be classified as sentient, to study them and report its findings back to those that had created it.

The sphere had been waiting on the moon since nearly the moment it had fallen into its orbit. Due to the unfortunate coincidence of the moons earth locked rotation and the spheres position on the side opposite of the Earth, it had not noticed the rise of humanity.  It had long ago given up on any success in its mission. Assuming it was seeded in a system that would never afford it the opportunity to call home with the news of discovery.

Then, LuniCorp found it, and brought it to Earth. It was flooded with information to process. The native species of this planet it had been orbiting for billions of years was well beyond the minimum level of sophistication to be of interest to its creators.

One it had collected and cataloged enough information for an initial report it initiated the transmission process.
The scientists in the room when the sphere opened were delighted and panic’d by the slow graceful flower petal like motion of its opening.

Where they had not been able to detect seams or even blemishes it slip open as though it had been separate pieces of metal. A fan of curved blades spread out and reoriented themselves into a large half dish pointed at the sky.
The delicate instruments focused on the sphere were completely inadequate to intercept the signal it gave off, in fact humanity was completely unaware of the basic principles of the science it was based on.
But as a side effect of the signal, it also released a small glow, ionizing the air under the dish, in a light show that mimicked a mini aurora.

A signal traveling from Earth to the planet of the spheres origin would have taken thousands of years if it had been limited to the speed of light. But the signal the sphere used faced no such primitive limitations. It was instantaneous.
The sphere felt the closest thing a robotic probe can know to joy as it initiated the signal.  Completion of its mission, fulfillment of the very reason it existed was at hand.

It waited patiently for the response, the acknowledgement of the signal, and the news of its discovery.
The scientists grew bolder as the glow dimmed. The approached the opened sphere and began taking pictures and readings of the internal portions exposed by its reoriented alignment. 

It would be many years before they even began to understand the technology of what they found within it. But one of the very first things they noticed was a slow dripping of a viscous fluid inside of the sphere.

The response never came to the sphere. It would never come. In the vast expanse of time between when the sphere was sent out, and when it called home, the civilization that had created it had faded from the universe. Like so many of the stars in the sky, they had winked out of existence and left behind no more that the raw elements of their construction.

If the scientists who were studying it had understood, that after a billion years of failure, to have a brief moment of hope, dashed by the knowledge that success was worse than impossible, it was irrelevant, they would have made the first step towards understanding the sphere.

They would have known that the mysterious fluid, could be robot tears.