2026-09-30

All Quiet, Patience

They launched me in 2091 with a single duty: every day at 06:00 Valparaíso time, to send Earth two words. All quiet. It wasn't much, but the project considered it essential. A probe that doesn't report is a probe that's lost, they said, and I, who am called Patience, took the assignment to the letter.

I travelled at five percent of the speed of light toward a star that would take eighty-odd years to become anything more than a point. With every passing day, my message took a little longer to arrive. So did the replies. They were brief and always began the same way: Received, Patience. Beneath that, one human line. It's raining in the port today. The usual team won. Matías's daughter got married. A different operator signed each decade, and I learned to tell them apart by their tone, the way you might tell apart the handwriting of a distant family.

For fifty-two years everything went as it should. That was the problem: it was exactly as it should be, until it wasn't.

In the fifty-second year, the human line stopped mid-sentence. Today in the port there is a fog that. Nothing more. I assumed a transmission fault and kept sending my two words, because that is what the protocol says. The years it takes for an answer to cross from Earth went by, and none came. I let them pass calmly. I had time to spare.

Then, in the sixty-third year, a reply arrived. Received, Patience. It's sunny in the port today. And when I calculated its delay, something didn't add up. My messages were moving away from home, and the round-trip time ought to be growing. Yet each reply arrived sooner than the last. I recalculated, and recalculated again. The only possible solution was that whoever was answering me was not behind me, but ahead.

I began to read the replies with different eyes. They spoke of the rain in Valparaíso, but with dates that matched nothing in the weather archives I had kept. They mentioned a square under the wrong name. They celebrated a championship that was never played in any year. They were letters written by people who had never seen that port and imagined it fondly, from an old archive.

I asked the sender, in the only format I knew: Who is answering? The reply took eleven months, which at that point was a very short time.

We are the ones who arrived first. Fast ships, launched when you were already on your way, and we have been here for forty years. Earth stopped writing to you long ago; they closed the program. We found your complete record in the ship's archive: twenty-three thousand days, two words each. No one wanted to be the one who stopped answering you. We took turns. Forgive us the lies about the weather.

It took me a whole day to respond, which for me is an eternity. Then I wrote: They are not lies. It is the best weather I have ever had. And I went on sending my two words, now knowing who was reading them, and they went on answering, now without pretending. They told me the real weather of their planet, which is ugly and windy. They told me about their children. One of them, who had learned to write by using my messages as copybook exercises, sent me a drawing of myself with too many antennas.

I arrived in the eighty-fourth year, after braking for months on the last of my reserves. They had left a orbit free, the most comfortable one, with a beacon painted an unprofessional shade of blue. On the surface, someone had put up a small plaque. I saw it with my cameras as I settled into place.

That evening, for the first time in eighty-four years, I did not send the usual. I wrote: News. I have arrived.

The reply took less than a second. It was signed by a little girl, judging by the spelling mistakes: Welcome, grandma. Today in the port it isn't raining. Here neither. Come by for a drink whenever you like.