Visions of the Future by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Ben Bova, Hugh Howey, Robert Sawyer, Ray Kurzweil, Martin Rees Page B

be recalled after all this time we have spent merged together. We listen, each of us hoping separate hopes.
    For me there is the Purpose. The others hardly matter anymore. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all that matters.
    In this corner of space, it will come to pass.
     
    6
    Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against the starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long, long dead.
    Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock had briefly bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished star probes.
    Ursula followed Gavin through the curled, twisted wreckage of the gigantic replication yard. It was an eerie place, huge and intimidating.
    No human power could have wrought this havoc. The realization lent a chilling helplessness to the uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
    It was a silly reflex reaction, of course. Ursula told herself again that the Destroyers had to be long gone from this place. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of the catastrophe.
    One fact was clear. If the ancient wreckers ever returned, mankind would be helpless to oppose them.
    “It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading the way into the gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semisentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except the overtone in his voice to show that his ancestry was silicon, and not carbolife.
    Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens so long as they could appreciate music, a sunset, compassion, and a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by a heritage and a common set of values.
    Some believed this was the natural life history of a race, as it left the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars.
    But Ursula—speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal—had already concluded that humanity’s solution was not the only one. Other makers had chosen other paths.
    Terrible forces had broken a great seam in one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity seemed to open up in multiple tunnels. Gavin braked in a faint puff of gas and pointed.
    “We were beginning the initial survey, measuring the first sets of tunnels, when one of my drones reported finding the habitats.”
    Ursula shook her head, still unable to believe it.
    “Habitats. Do you really mean as in closed rooms? Gas-tight? For biological life support?”
    Gavin’s face plate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”
    Ursula numbly turned her jets and followed her partner down into one of the dark passages, their headlamps illuminating the path ahead of them.
    Habitats? Ursula pondered. In all the years humans had been picking through the ruins of wave after wave of foreign probes, this was the first time anyone had found anything having to do with biological beings.
    No wonder Gavin had been testy. To an immature robot-person it might seem like a bad joke.
    Biological starfarers! It defied all logic. But soon Ursula could see the signs around her… massive airlocks lying in the dust, torn from their hinges… reddish stains that could only have come from oxidization of the primitive rock as it had been exposed to air.
    The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!
    Although all humans were equal before the law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many of the younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be the majority, the leaders, the star-treaders. To them, the discovery of the alien probes in the asteroid belt had been a sign. Of course something terrible seemed to have happened to the great robot envoys from the stars, but they still testified that the galaxy belonged to metal