I

Once upon a time there was a spaceship, and on the spaceship there lived a race of cyborgs: computers and machines encasing what you would know as a gingerbread person cookie. Before they appeared in any charted area of space, the Gingerborg, as they were collectively known, wandered in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way; Alpha Centauri, your nearest star, was nearly invisible to their strongest equipment. Ah, but "wandered" is not the correct word. Ship was on a definite path: a spiral outward from some unknown central point.

At some point during the long, monotonous journey that led seemingly nowhere, the Gingerborg had an epiphany. It was quite impressive. Imagine an entire community of nearly identical flour-based life forms, who suddenly realize that they do not know where they are going. To add to that, the Gingerborg shared a central brain, a hive mind. Ship hung in dead silence in space (not at all unusual, as everything in space is silent) while the befuddled crew tried to make up its collective mind. What now? Should they just keep maintenancing Ship, wherever it may take them? That had been their task for as long as any of the crew could remember, and that was quite a length of time. The Gingerborg had never interrupted their jobs to think about why they fixed this bit of wiring, adjusted that solar radiation deflector. Cyborgs are not programmed to ask "why?"! Any normal being can ask "why?" with more than adequate talent. Doing as they had always done seemed like the best choice; but a tiny piece of the hive mind (specifically, the cyborg called Pip) disagreed.

"We must find the place from which we came. We want adventure," it whispered cautiously.

"Adventure?" screamed the rest of the Gingerborg. "Adventure is a nonsensical string of syllables! How can we want something that is nonsense? We do not want it! How can we speak an untruth? Error! Error!"

This division of thought, which was theoretically impossible given the current definition of "hive mind," caused the Gingerborg much mental stress. Finally, the race of diminutive automatons convinced itself that it must know its origins...for the purpose of gathering and storing data, of course. It still would not admit to wanting any association with this "adventure."

Two other cyborgs, Chip and Zip by name, set to work on a reverse-extrapolation of Ship's flight course. That is, they were looking for the aforementioned "unknown central point." What they found was a small, blue-green planet orbiting a yellow, G-type star...