Preface: This report has been normalized for the reader, adding aspects of physicality, time and emotion such that is more easily understood. The events occurred where self-conscience awareness freely roams the universe.

This was another standard survey mission. Our job is to wander the universe and identify creatures capable of supporting self-awareness. Our team was a standard three man crew; Bill, he does the hard work of making the target self-aware. Rusty takes meticulous records of the results and I put everything into a report for corporate.

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We were passing by a very interesting system and while it didn’t look like a good prospect, we thought we would watch for a while. It was a binary star system; one star was large and the other much smaller but much denser. Both stars, even though of vastly different sizes, had a roughly equivalent mass and gravitational pull.

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We hung around for a while because we didn’t have anywhere else to go right now and there is something magical about binary star systems. Both stars had planets orbiting them, the mass of all the bodies was known and their movements easily predictable, even though they appeared almost random. Watching all the gravitational forces at play, it is like choreography. 

We observed one planet, a very small planet, which would be pulled by the star that it did not orbit and then at some point in time, it would pass by a much larger planet. The larger planet’s gravitational force would pull the smaller planet out of its orbit and in the process, send it into orbit around the other star. Every now and then, the process would be reversed by the effect of a planet in the other system that it now orbited.

We noticed one particular planet that orbited the large star. Neither very large nor very small, at its closest point to the star, it was essentially a molten mass. At its farthest point, it was a cold, dead planet, not much different than millions of others throughout the universe. Not much to look at, we thought at first. We called the planet Coldstone because at its apoapsis, it was stone cold. Then we noticed something.

As the planet moved away from the sun and cooled, the heat contained within the core seemed to radiate outward, as though it was trying to keep its surface warm. It was almost like an instinctive action, like a flower that closes its bloom at night or animals that hibernate together to conserve body warmth in the winter. Could this planet be a living being? If so, we might have some work to do.

One of the disturbing parts of Coldstone was that its orbit was becoming more elliptical over time. It was slowly getting farther and farther away from its sun, pulled by the other sun. The cold periods were becoming longer. By the time it finally made it back to warmth of its sun, it was almost completely dead cold. We knew in time, the period away from the sun would be so long that it would not have anything left by the time it got back to its sun.

So, I said to the guys, what do you think this thing would do if it was self-aware and knew what was going on? Obviously, it has no way of changing its orbit on its own and we’re strongly discouraged from messing with planetary orbits. If we were to change one planet’s orbit, it could mess up the whole binary star system. That is very bad, the kind of thing that could get us called on the carpet at corporate.

Our thinking was that we didn’t have much to lose since in time, it would die anyways so at its farthest point from the sun, Bill pulled the trigger and then we waited, Rusty taking copious notes as he always does. It made another orbit, and nothing happened. We figured it was a bust.

Then on its next orbit, something did happen. As it was at its closest point to the sun in its molten stage, a mass formed on its surface, spherical in shape, not particularly large. As Coldstone started to swing away from the sun to begin it outward journey, the mass separated in such a fashion as to achieve a less elliptical orbit around the sun.

On each subsequent orbit, this happened again. It was done in such a fashion that the new mass would catch up with the original one that Coldstone had created, and they would become one. Over time, the new mass become larger and larger, although only a fraction of the size of Coldstone. 

Its orbit was such that it would still become cold, but the cold periods were not that long. It did as Coldstone did, radiate its heat towards the crust during the time away. Also very important was that its orbit was much smaller, such that it would never be affected by the gravitational pull of the other sun.

In time, what we had predicted came to pass. Coldstone went completely cold on one its orbits, there was no energy within it anymore. It would still pass close to the sun and become molten, but it no longer radiated heat to its crust as it left the vicinity of the sun. It appeared to just get very cold, and it no longer generated the masses to supplement the new little planet, which we dubbed Littlestone.

I often wondered what it would be like to stand on Littlestone, look up in the night sky and see Coldstone, now completely dead, come by every now and then. I would find it sad, but Littlestone was little more than a creature surviving on instinct, albeit with a little help from Bill, Rusty and me.

We submitted our report to corporate and bid the binary system goodbye, off to our next assignment.