Eternal Being

I want to be an eternal being, mind-stuff my primary essence, physical only in any given adopted form, flying through the cloudscape of a planet on the far side of the galaxy in a nano-engineered body (one of many I can choose from). I want to feel the alien sun's warmth on my mother-of-pearl wings as I gaze upon the never-before-seen vista below me. Foreign canyons and mesas glinting with silver and purple geology, red-leafed flora adapted to their sun's spectrum, herds of strange fauna lurching over the landscape in semi-familiar behaviors of group coordination, but unEarthly in their structural details and style of movement. Yet other organisms, animals to a degree, soar next to me, veering close to study me with hexagonal eyes housing triangular pupils, with wispy aerofoils bending gently as their curiosity brings them only safely close to the strange alien visitor.

I arrived after sleepily traversing thousands of light years over thousands of millennia (distances and timeframes measured by my Earthly origin), a voyage of exploration that took me to numerous worlds, each with its unique evolutionary dynamics and ecological emergences. This same grand story played out millions of times on as many different world throughout the galaxy, each visited by myself, and others like me, once human, now something next, as we extended ourselves both physically beyond the Earthly cocoon of our larval ancestry and spiritually beyond our simple original nature.

Some stayed behind, tending to an ever-evolving civilization and its various nascent matrioshka brains, floating in the cosmos thinking, dwelling, pondering, calculating the nature of existence. Others ventured somewhat outward but intent on settling on a nearby rocky sphere in Earth's galactic neighborhood, a cosmological house on the prairie, a place to call home, but satisfying a need to escape the metropolis of technological spread at the center, Earth and its surrounding region. But others, like myself, careened outward with no intent of stopping. The far edge of the galaxy was our destination. Nothing less would suffice.

And now here I am, on the last world, at the very edge, looking into nothing but the blackness beyond, with this final strange atmosphere holding my wings aloft as I contemplate the scintillating mauve savannas and shadow-pocked forests gliding beneath me. Where will I go now that I have bee-lined across an entire galaxy? My many eyes turn upward toward the vermillion sky, stars speckling against the twilight dome with constellations that have continuously shifted on me as I continually changed location lo these eons. My retinas perceive a soft-edged shape set against the backdrop of stars and nebulae. It looms so large in the sky that it feels like it will fall on me, yet it is farther than any place I have visited: Andromeda. It has beckoned and teased me over the course of my entire odyssey. Perhaps now is the time.