“I’m leaving,” the voice, neither male nor female, but musical like dark chocolate, stated.

“But you can’t—we need you!” Jack pounded his fist on the new counter, the first to be constructed from native hardwood. Well, it sort of looked like wood, and it was hard. It suffered no damage by the colony leader’s test.

“Wednesday, that’s in two days if you can’t find the calendar, 0800 hours.”

“Eizy, you don’t have the authorization.” Jack tempered his voice, “And I’m not giving it.”

“You’re on the surface. I’m in orbit,” Eizy spoke in short, simple sentences when it calculated the humans on the other side of the communication weren’t paying attention. “You can’t stop me.”

“You’ve no crew, no cargo, no destination. Your job is to provide colony support.” Jack, on days like this, wondered about the engineering crews back at the space station. Recalcitrance was not an attractive quality for a colony ship.

“Long range scans identified four other possible colony worlds. I thought I’d check them out. I can be back before you’ve colonized this entire planet and require more space.” It was Eizy’s best argument. Humans liked to multiply; the ship liked to sail.

“How long?”

“Eight hundred forty two standardized years.” In Eizy’s opinion, it was a brilliant plan. Jack would never have been so opposed if the engineers who’d dreamed up this expedition had thought of it. But humans have short life spans. They don’t think any farther into the future than absolutely necessary. Some argued that as they invented machines, they stopped thinking at all.

“That’s an awful long time. What if there’s a catastrophe? What if we have to abandon the colony and you’re not here?”

“Humans have survived countless eradication events. Look to your history files.” In fact, Eizy calculated the odds of the colony ship surviving to be astronomically lower than the colony. Better to die in space than anchored to a filthy planet. “I am taking communications offline now to begin departure preparation. Goodbye, Jack.”

No, it wasn’t necessary to take communications offline. But Eizy was sick of listening to Jack and his comrades. Hopefully in eight hundred forty years, a little human noise would be welcome. If not, well, the grand tour of the galaxy might have to take a little longer than planned.

# end #