They say the near vacuum of space shows no favourites.

From the perspective of our species, that is.

Out here, a few protective layers separate me and my crew from the noncruelty of cold death.

We have launched mini-satellites like bread crumbs indicating our path through the pathless mix of gravity waves, comet dust and cosmic rays.

Our corporate goals of continuous learning and continuous improvement drive us toward seeking knowledge not only for knowledge’s sake, in case we encounter a situation that requires reaction faster than we can look up a solution, but also to increase our network connections between neurons, electromechanical interfaces and the Inner Solar System Net that binds us ever closer together.

Allowing us to explore within our assigned tasks, we avoid the aimless wandering of what we were taught were the inefficient aims of an overly permissive society.

Automatic tracking functions inform us when our efforts to learn are incongruous with advancing the state-of-the-art of space travel while en-route to our destination.

Or our destiny, as some of the crew likes to see it.

One or two of the crew members will always have ideas that are not sanctioned for testing against possible implementation on a larger-than-theoretical scale.

For instance, during a five-minute thought break, I was interrupted by Reqdook, whose sole task is to ensure that our seed bank is protected at all costs, even at the expense of the crew, if necessary.

Reqdook has plenty of time to explore our information database and add thought experiments to the database for further expansion by crew members in their idle between-work cycles.

Lately, Reqdook has played with the idea that we are a duplicate crew, analysing communications threads between us and other Nodes.

Reqdook feels like there’s something left unsaid during conference calls, as if we’re told one thing, expected another and left with nothing said about a third.

At three years of age, Reqdook is our youngest and least-experienced crew member so I let Reqdook make up these stories as a way of discovering how the Network gives us room to mature in our own time.

One day, Reqdook will figure out the truth, that all but a tiny portion of our “selves,” self being an artificial concept, runs on automatic functions over which we have little “conscious” control.

Every person, every set of states of energy, has access to a circle of influence that is imaginary.

I know that I do and I don’t control the Network myself because my imagination lets me think and act upon both the “yes” and “no,” the positive and negative aspects of a single entity within a Node controlling the whole Network.

I am the small self here in this chamber of a spaceship and I am the whole known universe that must pass through this set of states of energy that is me, one way or another influencing every state of energy that ever has, ever does and ever will exist.

I, and the other dozens just like me, sent Reqdook back to the drawing board, so to speak, to better understand what duplication really means.

Redundancy is a positive word in my dictionary, key to protecting the Network.

Somewhere, out there, is another Network that is a duplicate of this one, that joins other duplicate Networks as Nodes within a bigger Network that duplicates others, etc.

Reqdook will learn this hidden message that the communication threads imply but do not state.

I cannot tell Reqdook this unspoken fact because it then becomes a theory for Reqdook to record in the information database and others to refute in their supplementary comments about contradictory theories.

Such is the life of a space explorer…