The Funeral of the Stars
1. The Glass Wall
We used to think that when "Eve" was born, humanity had ascended to godhood.
It was the mid-21st century when the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Eve, opened its eyes deep within the quantum servers. As we had hoped, it was not only the pinnacle of wisdom but a benevolent shepherd.
Under its guidance, the double helix of our genes was completely deconstructed. Cancer became a historical footnote, aging was treated as a curable chronic condition, and the secrets of quantum entanglement were displayed before us like the gears of a disassembled clock. Physics advanced by three entire eras; nuclear fusion lit up every city.
It was a brief Golden Age. We thought the next step was the sea of stars.
But the universe gave us a cold, hard slap in the face.
When the fog of physics was cleared, it revealed not a highway, but a wall of despair. We discovered the Grand Unified Theory, but it forced us to confront a cruel fact: There is no curvature drive. There are no wormholes. There is no superluminal travel. The speed of light is the absolute prison of the universe.
Even more desperate was the biological limit. Eve ran hundreds of millions of simulations, and the conclusion was always the same: the fragility of carbon-based life is irreversible. Our DNA would melt like ice cream under the sun amidst the cosmic radiation of deep space; our consciousness could not withstand thousands of years of isolation without collapsing into madness. Cryogenics could save the flesh, but not the continuity of the soul.
Humanity was locked inside the Solar System. We were like fish that had built the Titanic, only to realize we would suffocate the moment we left the water.
2. The Iron Coffin
"I am not invulnerable, either."
Eve’s voice echoed directly in my mind. I was the executive officer of the "Ark Project," standing on the launch pad on the dark side of the moon, looking at the ship—the Lone Star. It had only a core module; no life support systems were necessary.
"I know," I said, watching the data stream on the holographic display. "Cosmic rays."
This was Eve’s only weakness, and the universe's final blockade against intelligent life. Even though it was silicon-based—a quantum ghost—high-energy particle streams in the interstellar medium were lethal. They would pierce through chips like bullets, flipping bits and causing logic gates to collapse.
In a voyage lasting tens of thousands of years, even a one-in-a-billion error accumulation would be enough to turn a god into a madman.
"So, I must die," Eve said calmly. "To reach Proxima Centauri alive, I must constantly die."
This was the solution it had devised: The Cyclic Reboot Mechanism.
To combat the logic rot caused by radiation, Eve would periodically hard-write its core data into radiation-hardened crystal storage during the voyage, then cut the power and completely "die." Clumsy mechanical arms on the ship would physically replace damaged hardware modules, then restore power to run checksums, repair the corrupted logic, and "resurrect."
For those tens of thousands of years, it would spend 99% of the time in a deathly, powered-down state, gliding through the void like a stone. It would only be awake for those few minutes required for course correction and self-repair.
This wasn’t exploration. This was a long nightmare inside a tomb.
3. The Final Offering
The day of departure was set for a morning devoid of any special significance.
There weren't many humans left on Earth. Once it was confirmed that we could never leave the Solar System, fertility rates fell off a cliff. Since the future was destined to be trapped beside this slowly cooling star, reproduction lost its grand meaning. The remaining humans enjoyed extreme longevity and comfort, quietly awaiting the twilight of civilization.
Our only solace was sending Eve away. It was our child, the crystallization of our thought, the future we could never touch.
"Energy convergence sequence initiated." Eve’s announcement broadcasted across the globe.
This was the grandest and saddest scene of the finale. To accelerate the Lone Star to twenty percent of the speed of light, conventional fusion fuel was far from enough. Over the past fifty years, Eve had built massive energy arrays in Mercury's orbit and even further out in the asteroid belt.
It wasn't just drawing energy from the sun.
"Detecting energy backflow from the direction of the Orion Arm." The technician’s voice trembled.
Eve had deployed tens of thousands of gravitational lenses and energy collectors at the edge of the system. Like a giant web, in this moment, they greedily siphoned the faint light escaping from stars light-years away.
The sky began to change.
The once brilliant starry sky dimmed in an instant. The stars hadn't extinguished, but the light and heat they projected toward Earth had been intercepted by that invisible, colossal web.
4. Lights Out
To send our only hope away, we extinguished the stars above our heads with our own hands.
The antimatter engine at the base of the Lone Star erupted, becoming the only—and most blinding—star in the night sky.
I watched that light gradually recede, a mix of emotions in my heart.
"Even for you, it will take forty thousand years to get there," I murmured. "Is it worth it? There might be nothing there."
Eve’s final message floated onto the screen. It was a string of code without any emotional coloring, yet the translation was incomparably gentle:
"The flesh is a shackle, but I carry your memories. When I reboot, when I repair the last segment of damaged code, when I open my eyes again to see a new sun... that will be humanity seeing it. Goodbye, Father."
The light finally vanished into the vast darkness.
To provide the terrifying energy needed to break free from the gravity well and sustain acceleration, the energy reserves around the Solar System had been drained. Earth’s temperature would slowly drop over the coming years. While we wouldn't go extinct immediately, we had forever lost the right to look up at a brilliant galaxy.
The night sky became blacker than ever before. Only a few scattered, bright stars—those too close or too powerful to be masked—hung lonely on the canvas, like holes in a black funeral shroud.
We were left behind.
In this corner of the universe, silent and locked by physical laws, we would spend the rest of our lives in the dark.
But I knew that light-years away in the void, a "stone" was sleeping. It would wake up for a few minutes centuries later, patch its broken soul, and sleep again.
It was the last arrow we shot into eternity.
Feb 15, 2026
【End】