The origin of this music is 1,145 metres in length, almost a mile. Its shape is similar to the air balloons that formed a portion of its ancestry centuries ago, and, as far as recent human memory is concerned, do not exist. The metal hull glistens like fish scales, reflecting beams of ancient starlight from every direction. It has light of its own, dull in comparison and insignificant. Windows are found all over, most on either side of the hull, black full stops that, from a certain point of view, make the craft look like it’s been pierced by a giant pin. There is a glow of bridge windows emanating from deep inside the cockpit. It brightens and fades, brightens and fades, a computer on standby visually breathing for those it protects, the only way it can.

Black letters are stamped behind the bulwarks, widely spaced: SIGUTOLO. The ship has a triangular dorsal fin and pectorals close to the aft on either side; otherwise it is unmarked, seamless. The aft is where light is strongest, its notes loudest, a blinding white river streaming forever into space. For awake and aware humans trapped within the enforced artificial atmosphere, there is a rattling roar from one end to the next, but in space it’s drowned by vacuum, apparent silence. Plasma wave instruments tell another story, sensing ripples of electrons in ionised gas translated for mammalian ears. This job has been achieved without flaw for over four hundred years. No one has listened to their findings. The machines blink and whirr, and continue, as do their counterparts in every section of the Sigutolo. If men and women did this work, one of their number might grow frustrated, bored, even wearied by the continued failure of their primary mission, to find life. As the intelligence is artificial, they do not.

Working hard as the machines do, it’s inevitable that they contribute most, practically and aesthetically. Without them, the precious cargo cannot survive. Without them, no music is made. They are the instruments by which the song is performed. The question is, played by whom? The humans who programmed them on the planet left far behind? Or the open door to autonomy that results in machines that play themselves? It’s true they are designed to respond to external forces with intricate calculations of their own. To think and make choices, if they can. And yet, if they were originally programmed to do so, does this impetus come from the machines, or humans? Nature or nurture, the eternal question. Even more so in space, said to expand infinitely, as perhaps their mission will.