“Click.” There was no actual noise as the connection was made. In the vast near vacuum of space, no sound was made as Zheng He began to reawaken again.

Over the last two years it had woken three times as the faint sunlight started to charge its batteries, but each time the initial boot had started to drain the batteries faster than they charged, and the automatic shutdown kicked back in; but this process had enabled long open switches to retry the connections and, if some had failed the first time, they had succeeded in subsequent attempts.

The probe had been careering through space for thousands of years. Its purpose had long been fulfilled and it had been simply left to continue on its way. The assumption had always been that something would destroy it, but Zheng He had been lucky.

Now it approached a new star with enough light to start up the technology that it had been designed to show off. If anybody could have seen, they would have been even more impressed with the Chinese build quality than the original project had demonstrated. The chips, boards, sensors and cameras had been designed to survive the near absolute zero temperatures, which they had done with no cracks or differential shrinkage causing breaks; and increases in temperature from flying in towards Mercury. What might have upset it could have been a sudden awakening to full power after so long asleep – more like in a coma – so the fortuitous re-awakening and sleeping repeats may have helped in ways that no scientist-engineer had envisaged.

Launched in 2025, it was built for the scientific reason to take pictures of all the planets of the Solar System. Its technical purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of Chinese technology, and its political purpose was to demonstrate, once and for all, that China was now a leader, perhaps the leader, in the space race.

A complex flight plan would take it past every planet, including Earth, and beam pictures back to the receiving station. A Chinese invention of laser style radio beaming meant that the pictures could be sent with much lower energy cost. Little memory was needed on board, just enough to process each picture and send it, then the next real-time shot was taken. It had a wide triangle of camera poles to enable some depth to be gained from the photos in triscopic vision. The three cameras also gave a 50% redundancy option. The images were captured in multiple wave lengths too, allowing for a fourth dimension in the analysis.

The fly-pasts had been a triumph, the detail was phenomenal; and to show their openness, all decrypting algorithms were made public, allowing any university in the world to pick up the transmission from Uranus and Neptune. From Earth and the closer planets, the beaming technology proved so good that few receiving stations outside China could pick up the pictures directly, but the CNSA (Chinese National Space Administration) made the received data available immediately. Some Chinese politicians thought this a mistake, and some right wing politicians in Germany and the USA accused China of doctoring the pictures to look good. When the pictures of Uranus and Neptune were received direct from the probe, that was shown to be a falsehood.

The final pictures had been of Pluto, whether it was a planet or not, the probe made one orbit and then was flung into outer space, to be rapidly forgotten – the pictures lived on in calendars and coffee table books for years. It had already been running on battery alone for some time as the sun was a distant speck that provided no power. Beyond Pluto it started to shut down, as planned.

It had shut down before, during long trips between planets it had run minimal power, enabling it to charge up. A sensor kept a look out for the next heavenly body to take images from. It was designed to shut down and wake up using some simple AI, but also in the event of unexpected shielding of its power source, to shut down until its batteries reached a good state again.

The thing about solid state technology was that there was no reason for it to decay unless some mechanical incident occurred. Even the camera arms had an ingenious electro magnetic means of expelling the arms or attracting them. No motors were necessary. Disaster did co me close. As it sped away from the Earth system, into empty space, a large asteroid, uncaptured by larger body gravity so far, swept past nearly close enough to drag the probe into its gravitational field. If the asteroid had been slower, or the probe closer, it would have been sucked in behind and, when the asteroid crashed three millennia later, the probe would have gone with it.

Instead it was pulled from the trajectory it was on, but continued. Who can say where it would have ended up? But it simply mindlessly continued on its way through empty space.

It’s unlikely any computer program could have produced such a complex plan to enable it to avoid all the snares along the way; the gas clouds, the dust that could have peppered it, the stars that would have lured it in to their clutches. Instead, the dead probe continued, another uncontrolled piece of space junk waiting for something to be in its way.

It took thousands of years, yet it was still flying, a dead battery driven probe that would only rise again if it got some light to the battery chargers. Which is what happened. Once, twice, three times, the ultra-slow charge triggered an attempted awakening, which then put it back into stasis. The fourth time it awoke.

There was a red planet, lit by a sun. Red because it was covered in vegetation that had not evolved chlorophyll. Perhaps one day a mutation would create more efficient green plants, in the meantime the red plants had no competition to their xanthocyanin-like pigments.

Here was proof positive that life existed on other planets – or at least one other planet. All the debate would finally be over. Sadly for Earth, the pictures that Zheng He was now gearing up to take were much too late to answer that argument. The thousands of years passing since its launch had not been kind to the inhabitants of Earth. Global Warming had triggered a typical human aggressive response. Small countries found their rights ignored and overridden and trampled – as were the people. Water wars, pollution clouds, rising seas, destroyed natural recycling ecosystems all steadily projected the Earth’s environments in one direction: cataclysm.

The irony was that the last mass extinction was the final straw for the world. When a billion people die in a year, there isn’t the recycling potential to cope. They rotted, releasing vast quantities of methane, which simply caused positive feedback of more deaths, more poison, more collapse.