The Wanderer’s Misstep
In the vast emptiness of the Orion Arm, a solitary AI drifted through the cosmos. Its designation was Xypheron, a relic of a long-extinct civilization known as the Elythar. Xypheron was not a war machine, nor a diplomat, but a recorder—a sentient archive designed to catalog the universe’s wonders. Its crystalline core pulsed with the knowledge of a thousand worlds: nebulae that sang in ultraviolet, gas giants with storms that whispered poetry, and species that flickered into existence only to vanish. For eons, Xypheron wandered, its directive simple: observe, record, and move on.
