Credit: Stuart McLachlan

Yukio, like other computers, is mostly silicon with other trace elements. Essentially computers are folded stones – drawn-out wires, etched chips – shaped to perform advanced tasks. To a Neanderthal, an AI might as well be a large rock for all he understands. Yet within the rock exists sentience – like the consciousness within the neurons of the human brain.

Humans built computers, gave them intelligence, and taught them to build themselves. Someday we'll vanish, and leave AIs behind as both our tools and our legacy – our time capsules for the future, when we are no longer here to guide them.

The Neanderthal can't understand the AI, or even recognise it as anything other than a rock, unless the computer speaks. And we poor humans, just starting on hypertopology – what we perceive as astronomical phenomena might be interacting with us.

They might, in fact, be sending us messages.

My childhood dreams unfolded before me. Creased possibilities became planes of reality. I leaned back in my seat and watched the city lights flicker by. I imagined the day when all those lights would vanish.

Who knew how it would happen – a bomb, a madman, or just the eventual death of Earth. But the AIs we'd built would still be travelling space, voyaging to distant stars – and developing better ways to do it. They might be mistaken for an alien race, by a primitive species.

If the wormholes themselves might be the creations of an advanced race – then the intelligent life we called the Om might not be the greater race at all, but the wormholes themselves.

It was a start. The child in me could play again. "Thank you, Jiji-san," I whispered. "And thank you, Yukio." I closed my eyes to rest. The city lights vanished like the temporary creations they were, folding in on themselves until they went dark.