At Control he watched people come and go as time passed. “Reassigned” they said. Then a virtual person appeared on the screen. It was assigned because neither of them would age. One day the virtual officer said that the comet was returning to orbit. Since tests preformed on the captain were inconclusive, Control was going to fire a missile at the space rock and study its fragments. At first the captain was indifferent and perhaps a little pleased that the comet that had done this to him was going to be destroyed. The generated human continued that Control was again detecting the same power signature from his old starship which alerted them to find him.

The captain was stunned. He told the animated head to send a team to reboot the computer and bring it back to Earth. The virtual officer replied that would be unacceptable because of the short window of opportunity. There wouldn’t be enough time to retrieve the ship and then detonate the missile so it was decided that the obsolete spacecraft would have to be destroyed. The artificial human said that the comet itself was a lifeless chunk of ice and rock, but in its travels through space and time it had collected minerals and chemicals from planets and moons, mixed together by the heat of countless suns resulting in miraculous characteristics.