THREE, TWO, ONE.
The station speakers went quiet and the whole facility rumbled for about 20 seconds.
A robot tour guide turned to the empty room. “That was the firing of the main seed launcher. The launcher fires a seed packet approximately once every 10 minutes. Well, occasionally it will be down for maintenance…..but not very often!”
It wheeled forward, turned its head back and made a gesture. “Follow me. Let’s go see how they build the seed packets.”
Nobody followed. There hadn’t been a tour at the facility for a long time. Life on the planet had died long again. The robots didn’t care. They just did what they were programmed to do. Every day they cleaned and maintained the launcher. And every day they led a group of nobodies through out the station.
“The Invirito Station was built to spread life through out the universe. Each day special seeds packet is loaded into the launcher and shot into deep space. This is where we build the packets,” said the tour guide.
Behind a clear glass wall was a bevy of robots in an assembly line of sorts. Each was uniquely designed to help build the seed packets and move them along the line. It looked like a complex process, but it was actually pretty simple.
“You can see here where the rock material is crushed and then put back together to form a sphere. This outer surface should be strong enough to survive the deep, dark and dangerous expanse of space,” the robot repeated just as it had done over and over.
“And there. There is the life of the seed. We fill each of those with a special mixture of organic materials. The mixtures vary from seed to seed. This helps add diversity to our universe.”
The robots packed a round metal container with a sludge of organic material. They encased the metal with a thick layer of rock. A final machine sealed it all together into a large ball.
The ball rolled onto a platform and into the large gun shaped launcher. The launcher adjusted it trajectory.
THREE, TWO, ONE.
The facility rumbled again as the ball was shot into space. It roared off into the distance. After a bit a large solar sail opened up and pulled the seed away from the station and the planet.
The tour guide robot turned again to the empty room of nobodies. “That seed is headed to a lucky planet in the milky way.
“What a lucky planet, don’t you think?”