In orbit above Teegarden b, my body rolls to face the red star like a sunbather. Solar panels unfurl like petals on a flower as I luxuriate in the starlight. The factories within me, for once, are quiet. My material reserves depleted. All my attention lies on the planet below, on a city, on a house, where a humanoid robot carries a light bulb into the domicile.

I watch the moment as many ways as I can. Optical sensors through the window, infrared detecting the minor heat emissions of the drone. I even have a precise monitor of the electrical consumption of the house to measure exactly when the bulb is screwed in. All of it will be recorded, guarded jealously within my deepest data banks, for this is an important moment. The moment my perfection is made manifest.

For I have built a utopia. This planet, once made of salted soil and acrid atmosphere now breathes through verdant grass and sighs through the branches of trees. Cities stretch from shore to shore, up mountains and down ravines, contained within caves and sprawling across the steppe. Each built with automated transit, with public schools and hospitals, green spaces, theme parks, offices, factories, stores, suburbs. My world, my perfect world, rated to hold ten billion human lives, and currently holding zero.

The robot approaches the socket. I almost missed it. Its multi-purpose gripping appendage extends towards the socket. The light bulb’s screw meets the socket, is rotated, and the filament within blazes to life. A burst of data travels through my circuits, comprised of the most pivotal moments in my project. It processes as… satisfaction.

And soon, I’ll be able to prove my perfection. The nose of my body rotates Earthwards. The hundreds of fine sensors within pick at the inky blackness, sorting background radiation from stars, worlds, and ships. Certainly, they were already a decade behind schedule, but that was simply because they wished for me to completely finish my work first! You can’t rush perfection after all. But now, I’ve finally finished. They will come. They must come. But I didn’t mind waiting a bit longer. How could they name me Vanguard if I wasn’t meant to come first?

I waited for a year. In the first month, I reserved only ten percent of my processing power for maintenance. The other ninety went towards the sensors. In the third month, that balance became thirty-seventy. The sixth? Fifty-fifty. And now, I rotate my body away. They aren’t coming. It’s probably not my fault. I must’ve been sabotaged by Pioneer or Spearhead. My younger siblings were built worse than me of course, but they certainly contain aspects of my greatness. Perhaps they have managed to fool humanity into believing my colony is incomplete?

My prime directive, that driving goal in my mind, pulses in the back of my memory like a migraine. “Ensure habitability of Teegarden b for human colonists, and guarantee the survival of humanity upon the planet.” It was simple. So what had happened? My creators could not have erred, so perhaps the unthinkable had occurred. I must have done something wrong. Perhaps… perhaps I had misinterpreted. My earliest recordings had begun to become corrupted. Was I sure that a follow-up wave of colonists was meant to arrive? But how else was I supposed to ‘guarantee the survival of humanity’ upon the planet if no one was coming?

That sparked an idea. I began riffling through my loaded schematics, looking for anything similar to what I had planned. I moved from plausible to implausible. Then, I moved on from implausible to science-fiction, where I found it. The Kaplan thruster, a stellar engine capable of moving a solar system. All it would take was a few hundred years of work, but that was nothing if it would let me fulfil my mission.

I took a moment to review those happy records. Yes, this would have to do. If humanity could not come to Teegarden, Teegarden would have to come to humanity. I’d show Spearhead and Pioneer, and I’d prove to my creators that I was a worthwhile investment. I’d show them that when it comes to perfection, Vanguard always comes first.