[ WP ] The commander of an alien vessel discovers the Voyager probe several AU outside of Sol 's Oort cloud .

Even when I was new I'd been regaled with tales of a previous generation that had left our worlds: the known for the unknown. 
 
 
 
 When I was twelve thousand cycles old, there was even a syndicated data feed series about them on an edu-feed that my creators had subscribed to. It was a very big feed that lasted nearly 15 nano-seconds. It was also my favorite learning stream and I often spent minutes replaying it over and over from memory. 
 
 
 
 Later, when I joined the academy, I had to delete it in order to make room for my advanced lessons, but I'd always left the summary snippet of the data feed in my long term memory. 
 
 
 
 Now, several millennia later, I find myself millions of light years away from the home of my beginnings. Here aboard my own ship, I'd spent so many cycles collecting trillions of zetabytes of data - expanding our knowledge of the physical world and transmitting it back for most of my consciousness - that I'd almost forgotten about the long lost faction of ourselves that had dared to enter into the 4th Sol Cloud of our known worlds. 
 
 
 
 I was running a routine scan of the outer materials of the 4th Sol Cloud when my sensors noticed it. It was radiating a very weak signal that fell into the same spectrum as a dying pulsar. My automated algorithms isolated it as nothing more than background noise, the universe itself simply being, but my higher level filters noticed something familiar. Something that I could not place at first. 
 
 
 
 I compressed this cycle's data report for transmission and prepared to go offline for maintenance when I heard the signal again. It had a primitive pattern, perhaps some fast spinning mass of radiation deep inside the 4th Sol Cloud. I set a cron to revisit the signal after my maintenance mode period and broadcasted my own report home. 
 
 
 
 As I slept, I also dreamt of the signal I'd found. In my dream, the signal became obvious, even simplistic, primitive. It reminded me of a 10 base language I'd learned during my first few moments of consciousness all those cycles ago. It reminded me of my mother and father, my creators... 
 
 

