“We stand on others’ shoulders, of course.” The proper line, that of accepted scientific humility, was, “on the shoulders of giants,” but she had not got where she was by bowing the knee to past generations. Midgets, lots and lots of midgets, she thought, and then—she could barely keep back the appalling giggle—on the shoulders of monkeys.

At a thought from her, one wallscreen and their Mind’s Eye HUDs displayed the schematics of Brin 2 for them all. She wanted to direct their attention and lead them along with her towards the proper appreciation of her—sorry, their—triumph. There: the needle of the central core encircled by the ring of life and science that was their torus-shaped world. At one end of the core was the unlovely bulge of the Sentry Pod, soon to be cast adrift to become the universe’s loneliest and longest research post. The opposite end of the needle sported the Barrel and the Flask. Contents: monkeys and the future, respectively.

“Particularly I have to thank the engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi for their tireless work in reformatting—” and she almost now said “Kern’s World” without meaning to—“our subject planet to provide a safe and nurturing environment for our great project.” Fallarn and Medi were well on their way back to Earth, of course, their fifteen-year work completed, their thirty-year return journey begun. It was all stage-setting, though, to make way for Kern and her dream. We are—I am—what all this work is for.

A journey of twenty light years home. Whilst thirty years drag by on Earth, only twenty will pass for Fallarn and Medi in their cold coffins. For them, their voyage is nearly as fast as light. What wonders we can accomplish!

From her viewpoint, engines to accelerate her to most of the speed of light were no more than pedestrian tools to move her about a universe that Earth’s biosphere was about to inherit. Because humanity may be fragile in ways we cannot dream, so we cast our net wide and then wider…

Human history was balanced on a knife edge. Millennia of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and desperate striving had brought them at last to this: that humankind would beget new sentient life in its own image. Humanity would no longer be alone. Even in the unthinkably far future, when Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars—an infinite and expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of the whole universe, and perhaps even beyond that. Even if we die, we will live on in our children.

Let the NUNs preach their dismal all-eggs-in-one-basket creed of human purity and supremacy, she thought. We will out-evolve them. We will leave them behind. This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to.