The Sisters of Eternal Winter

They don't pray, the Sisters of Eternal Winter implanted in their nuclear-powered spidery towers in the dark beyond Neptune's orbit. Their prayer is their care for the string of black pearls whose collective name is the Eye, a System-sized virtual telescope that looks into the universe's details and past so humankind can make educated guesses about its shape and future. Each photon is a precious gift from God to be carefully shepherded toward Earth and its unfathomably subtle scientist-computer hives.

The Sisters sleep much and are never distracted nor bored nor afraid. It takes much engineering of cell and mind to make people that can live and work where they do (but who can trust programs on their own after the long infection of cascading hallucinations that burned so much wealth and lives?)

They tend to the devices that maintain the telescopes and in doing so they are themselves part of the Eye. It's not for them with their almost entirely biological brains to understand what messages the light carries about beginnings and ends and fires burning in abstract heat across distances that grow on their own. Space swells with purpose and every thing rises towards some asymptotic fate.

Earth only receives from the far-away Sisters those priceless photons and the steady chant of maintenance logs: this satisfies them. Nonetheless the Sisters speak to each other in the local dialects of silence and omission about what's whispered in their dreams and who the voice belongs to. It's a slow weaving of an observational theology through mundane talk, anagogical gestures, and regrettably lethal mishaps. Immersives and news from Earth remain unopened. The Sisters take turns to go outside the thick flimsiness of their black walls and look homeward with patient longing while behind them little worlds crawl around a tepid sun.