She looked at him. “How can you accept it so easily? Isn’t there anything you want to last forever?”
He smiled at her. “Yes. This time I’ve had with you.”
She grinned. “Be serious!”
“I am.”
Medio’s sentients had just begun to study their neighboring worlds with crude telescopes when Ashley arrived. He locked into a polar orbit around Anclaje, a position that gave him a good vantage in which to watch the Medions. With their primitive technology, they wouldn’t be able to spot him for some time, and until then, he wanted to be close.
The Medions were going to fly to the stars. If an incoming asteroid threatened their world, he’d deflect it. If their sun produced a vast flare, he’d block it. If the Medions decided to nuke themselves back into the stick age, he’d stop it. His versatile fleet of self-replicating robots, some as small as a gnat, would see to all those problems and many more.
The Medions would never know that he had intervened. They were going to learn about the Universe and think they had done it all on their own. And for the most part, that assumption would be true.
He was going to watch the Medions grow, grow into a race every bit as grand as humanity. Just as Felicity would have done.