It had been a busy thirty hours but finally the last shuttle took off from the main colony ship. The AliceNet duplicate pilot, Alexandria bid I and the humans farewell as she turned the craft around and began the fifty light year return trip to pick up additional settlers. Overall thanks to the power of our size changing technology we were able to pack a breathtaking five million human beings into a cylindrical craft that that was only one kilometre in length and one hundred metres wide, yet still have plenty of room left over for additional equipment and supplies.

All five million of these colonists had now arrived on the surface of the planet, to take up residence in their homes. Some of which the residents had immediately disliked and sought to swap places with other colonists who coveted their piece of real estate. The teething problems of new settlements would take a while to sort through but were unavoidable.

In the weeks that followed the entire area that was Ms Jenkins footprints was turned into an exclusion zone. Humans would not be allowed within a hundred kilometres of her footprints for a few months yet; this also included the site between her footprints that Sarah had proposed to have her marriage at. Even with the social pressure of a newly elected council that requested a special exemption from me to hold the wedding in this area I held firm against anyone being allowed in this hazardous zone. The entire area she stepped into had immediately become almost as hot as molten lava due to the friction heat caused by the vast amount of the planet’s crust she had displaced in addition to the normal levels of heat to be expected at those depths.

To make the print habitable would involve months of work via millions of drones that would smooth and polish the ‘Microscopic’ imperfections of her design, install climate control systems and other infrastructure such as lifts and air/spaceports. I also had to manipulate the weather to ensure that rainfall into the area was controlled and that the bottom of the footprint didn’t become completely waterlogged (the bottom of the print was twice as deep as the deepest ocean on this planet, making drainage impossible). Most importantly of all, a safety fence had to be installed to avoid the prospect of anyone falling down into that thirty five kilometre deep hole in the ground.

A few months later the site was ready and to commemorate the opening the human council decided to host the opening ceremony at the same time as the wedding between Sarah Jenkins and Jeremy Carlin. A crowd of hundreds of thousands had gathered to see the couple wed. As was now tradition in the New USA, celebrity weddings would typically involve the newlyweds grown to several hundred metres in height. Ostensibly this was so that the large crowds could see the bride and groom from far and wide, but in practice I was more sympathetic to the critics that characterised this ‘Tradition’ as ‘Vain and Narcissistic’. But maybe that was because I just hated weddings or perhaps it was just a reminder that despite my permanently youthful visual appearance, I was an over three hundred year old spaceship.

This couple had both been authorised to grow to a height of eight hundred metres, or about the same height as the tallest structure on the planet at the time. Both of them dressed in the traditional wedding attire of the western world that I had known from my days on planet Earth. Perhaps the biggest difference being that the groom had around his neck a special ‘Shrink Collar’ while the bride didn’t. I can leave it to your imagination as to what symbolic significance they attach to this.

I can attest as well that after thirty years the both of them are still happily married and have contributed to the further growth of the human race through the three children they have had. The feeling of awe they must get in knowing that their own mother had once created the very geographical formation that they went to school and lived in along with the millions of people around them. It was something that all of the children of the ‘First Impression Artists’ had to live with so they were all in good company. Today this couple have retired from their jobs and live quite lives inside of the Sarah Jenkins (Left) city, away from the crowds of people that would ask Sarah for her autograph (or a symbolic tap of her shoe). Sarah has always maintained that if she had the opportunity to do it again, that she would. Indeed if you could ascend to the same height and hold the same godlike perspective, wouldn’t you?

The demand for new worlds by the human race was relentless. In spite of there being only five billion human beings in existence we had already settled thirty terraformed worlds, with another ten undergoing terraforming. The humans of all these worlds demanded an affluent lifestyle that consumed vast amounts of land and resources. It was in a sense, quite wasteful but at the same time, even with a high birth rate it kept the population pressures low and along with the ability of the AliceNet to control dangerous technology helped to prevent the outbreak of new wars among the human race. The human race had enjoyed the longest period of unbroken peace that had ever existed in their long and violent history.

Our ability to grow human beings to the spectacular heights of hundreds of kilometres is intended to be in the end a testament to the kinds of vast power and responsibility that rests on our shoulders but also a statement of our intent. The human beings alive today are too young to remember when the vast scientific powers of the human race had brought, within my own lifetime a revival of slavery, imperialism and totalitarianism and then a near complete collapse of human civilization and the world that supported them. Too young to have wept when finding their own home-world was a near dead husk of snow and rubble from the effects of nuclear weapons, asteroid bombardment and the footprints ‘Behemoth Soldiers’. Even today the ability of the AliceNet to remediate Earth’s environmental destruction is limited and slow-going due to the extent of the damage. But soon enough Earth would be made great again and human beings would be able to survive and thrive there once more.

In one sense I speak to you of the vastness of human beings whose shoe prints can be filled by whole metropolises, of the vastness of our exploration of space which extends in an expanding bubble hundreds of light years from Earth, but in another broader sense we are positively tiny and microscopic before the universe itself. The size of our galaxy alone is one hundred thousand light years across and the universe itself holds billions of galaxies stretched out over billions of light years. To top this all off, there may indeed exist other universes just as large as this and practically infinite in number. Against this backdrop, we are but a tiny drop in the ocean that is our universe and even more so in a vast multi-verse.

In our explorations, we had met nothing that could stand against us, no alien civilization powerful enough to challenge us. But this is only what we have encountered so far. We are the not end, we are just the beginning. My name is Alice and I am an immortal, mind uploaded spaceship with all the time in the universe. Yet in the end I am, underneath it all, only human. I shall always endeavour to my best for all of you.

The End