As the squishy’s ship entered the system’s Oort cloud it began spewing out millions of little von neumann machines that proceeded to gobble up a bunch of asteroids and comets and build from their constituent matter a large rocky-ice intelligence (which shall hereby be referred to as Rice). Meanwhile, the squishy noticed a gas giant wandering through the Oort cloud and thought it had interesting swirls so he moved his ship into orbit around it. The squishy then decided to pass out for a few thousand years.

While the squishy slept, Rice began building and manufacturing all the necessary components for an approximately two hundred thousand year observation period of the third planet from the star, which observations from nearby interstellar civilizations agreed, was at the beginning of a mass extinction event.

The squishy’s civilization had bid on and been awarded this contract by offering to do the whole thing dirt-cheap via their new Rice technology. They were to observe close-up and collate the resulting footage of said mass extinction, which would then be distributed/disseminated across the galaxy and various satellite galaxies, this being of monumental significance to the squishy’s entire civilization, as it would upjump them into the more important sectors of galactic federation.

The spectacle that was a mass extinction, sometimes called Planet Ex, had recently (i.e., within the last few million years) become widely loved by the galaxy et. al., it being the preferred form of entertainment, of watching the quick and the slow of millions of species going extinct. It made them feel all warm and gooey inside, these interstellar civilizations, to see life snuffed out en masse.

But why was he here, the squishy asked himself every time he woke, if Rice was handling everything? Perhaps it was because his civilization wanted something squishy and familiar and biological, a fault of his civilization, yes, but he could understand their fears, of not wanting this screwed up, of having him as the backup. And maybe too, he was here to keep Rice company. For these asteroid-comet level artificial intelligences could, if left alone for long enough, become eccentric.

For example, there was the time a Rice-like mind drastically lowered its albedo and altered its infrared signature and disappeared into a system’s Oort cloud. And when its squishy woke he was met with a message asking him if he wanted to play hide and seek and that the Rice was hiding and would he please come and find it? Then there was the time a Rice tried to assemble itself into its own planet, and thereby grow its own life, which ended with no life and a despondent Rice and an attempted suicide by star. The most common eccentricity, however, was when a Rice molded asteroids into pleasing configurations, e.g., making gigantic asteroidal squishies, though these tended to be unstable and somewhat disturbing to said squishy, to see oneself orders of magnitude larger, with every physical characteristic of oneself rendered and exaggerated in rock and ice. Though, it should be noted, that the Rice usually only meant this as a sincere gesture, its way of saying, I like you squishy.

So every time the squishy woke it was to purportedly check the progress of the mission, but of course he was really only checking the sanity of Rice, who, in its one hundred and twenty-third millennium seemed mostly sane. Except that now it preferred to call itself Riceroid and had done some reprogramming on itself, and had sent, what it called, Roids, to the third planet for ‘inspection and retrieval’ which seemed to mean gathering the genetic code from as many species as it could find (a clear violation of that subsection of Galactic Law which clearly stipulated no retrieval of genetic material during mass extinction events). Also, it seemed to be having some sort of spat with a gas giant who had stolen one of its Roids. The Roid, now a moon, would no longer communicate with it and in their final exchange had declared that the gas giant was a god and that Riceroid was just a self-important douchebag who lacked planetary-level mass. Riceroid hadn’t taken this news very well and had sent a fleet of what it called Steroids to bombard the Roid for its betrayal.

The Riceroid had then begun work on, in its words, a menagerie of squishies, which was basically just a bunch of asteroids formed into the shapes of all the different types of squishies on the planet. Riceroid told its squishy how much it loved all squishies and that it really couldn’t go on like this, to watch so many squishies dying, to see their squishy species going extinct. It wanted to do something about it, but it wasn’t sure exactly what. And then before the squishy could do anything to stop it, Riceroid descended inwards. It soon became clear it was on a course for the third planet.

Riceroid sent the squishy a message saying that it had decided that the mass extinction was taking too long and it couldn’t stand watching squishies suffer. And it had decided to help them by speeding things up a bit. The squishy watched from the Oort cloud, not exactly horrified, because this was the most interesting thing to happen to him in nearly a hundred and twenty-three thousand years, as Riceroid smashed into the planet. Now whether this was planned or not he would never know, but it drastically quickened the mass extinction of the planet, which ended approximately ten thousand years after the impact event and saved his civilization a shitload of money and time.