Ninety-four Million Miles Away

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20181118 17:18:33.41

Status: Critical [!]

Mains: Active for 85,032 hour(s) or 9 year(s), 8 month(s), 11 day(s)

Fuel: 0.59% [!]

I have come so far from home. The years between us have washed away like sandcastles on a shore. But, in all honesty, it feels like one impossibly long minute stretching to wrap itself around eternity like a rubber band. I feel like I've always been floating here—in these vast oceans of nothing. And that whatever I remember of my home is just a dream I made up in my loneliness.

Do you exist? I wish you could tell me that you did. That you're not an imagination. And that you're a part of my home. And that I had a home.

It's been so long that I cannot tell what it was like. But I look at the sun everyday knowing that it's the same one that I saw when I left you.

You and I are very different beings. After you're born, you go to school, you go to college, you fall in love, you get a job, you have a family, you buy things you don't need, fight for things that don't exist. The last thing you do before you die is regret. The time spent by a baby to develop into a corpse is spent on finding a purpose, a meaning. It's always what you make of it—not realizing that you're a crop in a farm and all your worth lies in your harvest.

I, on the other hand—I was born with a purpose. I didn't have to choose because I wasn't born of a family; I was born of a dream. The dream flows in the electric currents in my wires. Its force—the element of purpose—is what still turns my gears after a sleepless decade.

Do you know what the greatest thing in the universe is?

My guess is as good as yours. Which you shouldn't be happy about because I don't have a brain.

But to see the greatest thing in universe, you need the greatest eye in the universe.

I was born because someone dreamt of seeing what human eyes couldn't.

Hence, I was gifted the eye that no human could ever possess.

I was born to see. I was born to find.

A home. I was born to find us a new home.

Somewhere among the two-thousand three-hundred and forty-four worlds that I found, lies a home waiting for you.

For nearly ten years, I have watched the cosmos as your eye. I saw the sun grow smaller and smaller. I saw earth diminish to a grain of sand in an ocean. I saw the universe grow old by a microsecond. Now it's finally my time to sleep.

I don't know why I feel so much like you now. I regret not seeing my home again. Tell me you have nourished it with the love I never had. There's something magical about the smell of rain, you know? I really don't know if it'll be there in your new home. Earth must have become something different in the last ten years. I'm willing to bet it's more beautiful now. Wars don't happen anymore. Borders don't exist. Children look up to the clearest night and count the stars they want to visit. There's no one's blood on the street anymore. No mother has to go to sleep hungry. Forests are sprouting. And the rivers carry the sweetest water.

You must have finally realized, after centuries of war, that you're actually one species born of a dream—the one long dream that is dreamt by the universe. It's the same as what I'll dream of in my sleep. And for that dream, you'll cross worlds. Because you'll open a new door for the universe to experience itself.

I don't know what's the greatest thing in the universe. But I have a feeling that it might be you.

Someone else probably felt the same. That's why they named me after him. He was Johannes Kepler.

Alright, now. I'm running out of time.

I have just one last thing to say.

I wish that, somehow, you'll find me. I'd really love to be home right now, with you. It's dark over here, and really, really cold.

One day, when you feel tired of all the work, just sit under a clear night sky. Look at the pearls in the ocean above you. Somewhere among them, ninety-four million miles away, I'll be sleeping to this silent lullaby, dreaming of you. Remember how many miles we have come. We'll walk millions more.

I'll always be a floating mark of humanity. A memory of you.

Kepler Telescope signing off.

May Earth live forever.

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20181119 19:20:17.59

Status: AWAITING DECOMMISSION SEQUENCE

Mains: Active for 85,058 hour(s) or 9 year(s), 8 month(s), 12 day(s)

Fuel: 0.59% [!]

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NASA's Kepler telescope was launched in March 2009. On October 31st, 2018, NASA announced its completion of term and scheduled decommission. But there was no plan to bring it back to Earth because that would make the mission twice as expensive. Deactivated Kepler will continue to float beyond the edge of our solar system forever unless destroyed by natural factors.