I Will Love You Forever

Chapter 1, part 7: Approach

Large pieces of the probe were sloughing off from contact with the atmosphere. Internal systems were actually keeping the probe to its previous course, but its consciousness did not even know those systems were still operating. It was plunging into the atmosphere, completely out of control, and would be utterly destroyed when it hit the ground. It could normally have survived hitting anything, as long as it was able to bring up its gravitic shielding. Once the graser hit it, however, it lost the ability to do anything but crash.

Even though most of its processing power had gone in that first instant, it still had abilities that far exceeded any computer system on Earth. It sought with built-in desperation to find a way to slow itself down. If it could just miss the planet and get out into space again, it could repair itself completely and try contact again when it was fully healed. But it was much too far into the planetary gravity well to miss the planet, it concluded a nanosecond later. It was going to hit, and it was going to be destroyed.

If it could find a way to preserve its central memories and abilities, it might be able to reconstruct itself. Even as its outer shells were ripped away by atmosphere, it began to hunt for possibilities that would allow it to survive.

It managed to find a way to reduce the impact effect on much of its priceless memory core. The contents were in crystalline structures, which were very tough, but not tough enough to survive planetary impact at current speed. The framework that held them together was going to be totally destroyed by the impact, obliterating most of the irreplaceable information in the outer core as it hit.

The probe managed to get external sensors working enough to realize that it was coming down in the center of thick native vegetation, where there was an open space. It did not detect the two humans.

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