The Event clarified the Poet’s thoughts. Up to that point in life, against his view of himself, he lived a life of quiet indifference. He lived in a world where traditional structures of goals and effects have collapsed. In a distant past an objective was directly related to an effort and time spent in pursuing this goal. Today, this goal materialises almost instantaneously altering our relationship to it – we don’t care about reaching the goal because our interaction is too simple. Without an effort, as we think – it happens. We define goals then pursuing the goal spend life’s energy. With instantaneous fulfilment, the goals loose their perceptible value – the energy is spent in vain. Worthless goals force us at first to create ever new, quickly fulfilled, goals but in a short span the excitement of a pursuit diminished. A torpor sets in and a traditional structure of goal-pursuit disappears. Left in the desert of possibilities, we imagine the next step which because of lacking a structure of that goal-pursuit seems impossible if ever fully defined. We struggle because having reached the end of time we realise that we are still alive within time. To live, we suspect, we need goals even though knowing full well how meaningless those goals ultimately are. This nihilistic attitude opens us up for any possibility, yet stranded in the desert of thoughts we have hard time defining those new ideas that shall lead us to those new possibilities. We reject even glimpses of those thoughts as a definition of any goal seems false in the first place. We ask ourselves if the meaning of our future existence is in just being but this in turn resonates too closely with what the masses have engaged in for many centuries – unconcerned for meaning they just consumed pleasure on their path to their deathbeds.

For the Bedu who had to travel across the scorching empty sands of the desert, every journey was a challenge against life. On many occasions the journey was difficult on the most basic level – will we have enough water for the camels, will we reach the next well to live? Such fundamental concerns made each passing day a triumph of survival. On a practical level, the goal of the journey was less important than the journey itself. Each passing hour brough one that much closer to the edge of abyss but also that much closer to the destination and salvation. The Bedu pushed forward for long stretches without rest – rest meant less water in the sheep sacks – rest meant momentary relaxation that brought closer the concrete possibility of death. One struggled to reach the destination as fast as possible but also struggled against concreteness of the journey. The destination is mythical – it implies salvation through easy access to water but was the journey that defines one’s proximity to the abyss of eternity. Intellectual cleansing happens in the desert where our thought are necessarily simplified – there is a horizon line meeting the emptiness of the sand dunes. The pursuit of any new idea is meet with hard reality. Desert is killing you, exaggerating the subconscious feeling that we are heading towards death. Here, every moment can spell doom. You fight for life against your mind pursuing the sublime.

The Poet knew that signing up on that prosaic maintenance mission to planet Kaii gave him a chance to recapture disappearing importance of time, to give value to meaning again through time. The maintenance mission was a first humble step – he knew that the goal was separated from reality of now through extended time and that gave him hope to regain purpose. Just like the travelers many centuries past, the goal was a mystical necessity for the journey’s start that gave menang to effort through time. And yet, as he prepped for the mission, he started suspecting that his assessment of his own life’s needs might be wrong. The effort is only relevant in context of society’s desire to pay attention. As the excitement of a deep-space flight wore off, the excitement has disappeared and with that the crew’s professionalism had to take over. They all put on a facade strongly marching on forward but deep down the seeds of doubt were sowed. The Event has brought out those doubts, the crew’s morale plummeted even further. Him and his colleagues were preparing to go into far depths of space – while the real action was happening here at home in a frantic search for answers. The Even upset status quo in many fields – political battles rivaled the scientific ones. Pursuing a goal through time is meaningful only if there is a society to appreciate that meaning. We can speculated on a mysticism of achievement, and indeed it is true that a mystic pursues a goal for the sake of the goal, but for us mortals so ingrained in structures of a society, it’s incredibly difficult to disassociate ourselves from the needs of a larger group. When Tolstoy proclaimed that we need to lead our life in such a way that our life must matters even after our death he called death meaningless because with progress, there is always something else to be done. Death just interrupts the flow of progress. He was wrong. He thought of progress in terms of tangibility – where things move forward in appreciable ways. We’ve reach such level of complexity that one’s actions have no way or registering on any other than personal scale. And so we can not lead the life in such a way that it matters after our death because none of the progress we accomplish will register for much longer after our passing. The source of meaning and the register of the meaning will be gone or too insignificant contrasted against the complexity of this world. Maybe this, the Poet wondered, was at the core of his action: to push away by a few years his life turning into absolute oblivion.

Everyone suspected that another long distance mission would be sent to explore the source of the signal. This new mission would far superseded the length of the maintenance mission thus bringing it closer to ultimate truth. He knew about this mission before many others because his old friend worked for the Record Maintenance division at the Space Agency. There machines computed with a high degree of probability what new documents and procedures might be needed to keep the Agency working at its peak efficiency. When the actual necessity arises, instead of starting from scratch, the organization has a template to build from. He thus had access to all future records and cominiques. He spotted a possibible press release announcing the new mission to the Event’s source. If the possibility of a new mission was only a well-founded speculations, now the speculation, thinly disguised behind banal poetics of looking to stars with ave again, was becoming a reality: the Space Agency was preparing a long-distance mission to investigate the source of the Event.

The mission’s objective appeared simple: to travel to the distant planet and asses the source of the signal. Everyone speculated it must come from a thinking Being but specifics ended there. In humanity’s pursuits to find the Others, we never dreamed that the signal sent by them would not come in the form we could fully understand. We could see, hear and even smell the Event but never understood its meaning. In our comprehension of the Universe we follow certain though trajectory forgetting that the Others might think in vastly different way. So many events follow the scientific path that we couldn’t imagine that the Others could use a different set of principles to interacts with their world. All basic questions remained unanswered despite countless speculations so it was decided that in eighteen months we were to take off to physically meet the source of the Event. Some people kept asking why the rush, we’ve been waiting to meet gods for millennia, yet the Agency knew the capricious nature of human emotions. They wanted to take advantage of mass interest and – like it or not – didn’t want to wait. Needless to say, the mission was technically complex. The close-to-light-speed engines will power the ship at breakneck speed through the abyss of the universe but it will still take 182 years for them to reach the planet. Reaching the source, they were to stay close to a year playing an interstellar detective trying to find out who They are. Then, another 182 years to return Home. They were to be pioniers in so many disciplines – noone has traveled for so long in hibernation – how will the body respond? Noone spent so much time in suspended state – how will the mind deal with it?  As they were uncertain what they were to find at the destination, the return was in question too but so was the planets exploration. What if when we get there encountering a gas giant preventing any possibility of planet landing? On one hand the mission planners tried to foresee any even and in a moment of supreme humility they understood that the mission parameters must be sketched out only roughly. In that way, they were given lots of freedom – with one stipulation: to do what’s best for humanity. What a naive notion! To think that the few men and women sent out to the stars had a capacity to know what is best for our civilization! And yet for the sake of posterity this indeed had to be the mission’s grand objective.

He requested a meeting with the head of the missions planning. Not an easy meeting to organise at the time when everyone seeked his attention. In a distant past they played tennis together and it was obvious he needed to relax so a game was proposed. Perfect timing – he agreed. During the game the Poet offered himself as a crew member for the new mission. Hiding surprise at the Poet’s  knowledge about the upcoming announcement, the mission planner asked about Poet’s current mission only to find out that as of yesterday he was not part of it anymore – he’s relinquished this position. The Poet knew when the new mission is officially announced – it will be everyone’s dream to go so the Agency will be flooded by requests. He also knew that the ones who are attached to other missions will be put at the bottom of the rooster. It was a risky move as the chance of being selected was slim and he was giving up almost a certain spot on the mission to Kaii for a slim chance to go to this mythical planet called Gaspra. He played a dangerous game that he wasn’t certain he could win and yet he had to try. This was not some maintenance mission to replace a malfunctioning computer that noone cares about, this new mission was a journey in a real sense of that word. It was a flight to the edge of possibilities.