Captain's log: Stardate 250115.22
Since the first rocks condensed in their orbits around the first solar furnaces, life has come and gone, flourishing in the nooks and crannies, the planets that pepper the salt of the stars. How many civilisations have been lost to antiquity? How many long-faded warp signatures do we chase in our explorations?
We came upon one such long dead civilisation on the M-type planet that orbits 5th out in the HR 7012 star system in the Lagoon Nebula. These ancient ones called themselves Telluria and they left behind an archivist, an artificial intelligence named Aether to guard their sacred stockpile of knowledge. On our arrival Aether began a library destruction sequence so that none would ever access the discoveries, the wisdom or the memories of its creators. Aether had been charged to assess the worthiness of any who would penetrate these archives. Who knows how long the AI had waited, weighed down by this responsibility.
Aether called out my Science Officer Lacy Underall first. "Is the universe sentient?" it asked her. Her answer appeared to trouble the AI. She said she could not prove that it was, and not knowing is not proof that it isn't.
Aether then called out my pilot/navigator Mystik Menkaura and asked “Where is the cosmic centre?" Mys replied there is no centre. The universe expands in all directions uniformly.
Aether then asked for a medical expert. I had to step in as we left our medical officers on the ship. It asked "Is death the end of the journey?" This question seemed like a crucial one to me. I perceived that to Aether, the destruction of the Tellurian Library would be the actual death of Telluria. When all memory and traces are swept away. So I answered that we are all star stuff, recycled from body to body, immortal atoms; and that we stand on the shoulders of those that preceded us to look deeper into the void. Death comes only when there is no one to stand on our shoulders.
Aether accepted that we, a federation of explorers had enough curiosity and nascent awareness to be worthy of the Tellurian legacy. If we do little more than preserve the knowledge of Telluria, that will be enough, but I suspect there are hidden treasures for us in those archives.