I gulp down a deep breath. Straighten my spine. Reach out to it again, steeling myself for the mental transition this time. My palm presses against the cool not-window.

The memory wraps me up in itself. This time, I let it take me all the way in.

I was created for first contact.

I was birthed deep in the heart of a nebula, brought into the universe alongside newly formed stars and molecular clouds spangled with novae and dust. I was a greatship, the only one of my kind.

My creators gave me many things. The ability to communicate with a vast variety of intelligent species through unique telepathic capabilities. Sentience, so that I too would be intelligent. They even made me beautiful, an immense, mercurial oval, so that other species would be drawn to me.

But they never gave me a name.

They sent me out into the endless dark of the universe to find life. I had a directive: Make first contact, determine whether the life-forms I encountered were capable of joining the larger community of worlds, and if so, return to my makers with a delegation so that introductions could be made.

I searched. I was happy, because I had a purpose. I told myself this often.

I was capable of faster-than-light travel. I had to be, to get anywhere in the vast emptiness. But in that blurred space between dead star systems, between galaxies that gleamed with the false promise of life, sometimes I wished I could move slower. I wished I could stop. I wished I could stay—somewhere.

Years stretched to decades, and then centuries. I gave myself a name; it was in my makers’ language, but translated loosely to Mirage. I told myself I chose this name for my ability to induce hallucinations, to communicate with other species through the filter of their own mental constructs. But really, it was because a mirage was what I felt like: something that was merely a dream, nothing but scattered light gleaming against a horizon I would never reach.

Then I found the humans.

I was too eager. It was my own fault. I caught the signals from afar; radio first, crackling and staticky, so faint that I almost missed it. As I drew closer, the signals grew more recent, and more technologically complex.

I had finally found what I was looking for. I dipped toward Earth’s atmosphere, mirroring the signals I had caught as a greeting, as an invitation.

The humans shot me out of the sky.

I jerk back, breaking contact with the screen. I trip over the coffee table and fall across the memory of a couch. “What the hell?” I demand, eyes wide. “That was … that was …” But there’s no word that can quite describe the strength of the secondhand memory that just took over my brain.

That was my birth, Mirage supplies. How I came to be.