Chapter Text
[Simon]
“The EDEN Foundation is p-proud to announce the maiden voyage of the Hail Mary and other l-l-luxury cruise liners of our latest astro-sailing fleet! Escape the mess aboard one of our premier ships, designed and d-dedicated to cater to your every need! Our top-of-the-line droids will clean up the mess while you’re away-y-y!”
“Yeah, yeah, up yours,” Simon mutters, flipping off the holographic advertisement as he passes by. Dirt and trash crunch under his feet as he shuffles through the barren wasteland around him.
He really needs to just take a metal pipe to these stupid advertisements one day, just so he can stop being annoyed by the too-cheerful jingles and disgustingly sugar-coated marketing. His eyes narrow as he scans the obviously staged happy faces of the family currently on screen. The little girl is sitting on her father’s shoulders, pointing at a luxury cruise liner, its spotless, gleaming white hull pointed toward the stars.
Of course in these ads there’s only a brushed off comment of the trash, the very trash Simon can now see piling up as far as the eye can see. He’s surrounded by mountains of garbage, covering nearly every available surface on the dry, dusty ground and stretching up in endless towers toward the smog that always hangs low over the empty buildings. The sun burns a sickly orange through the haze, tinting the whole world a diseased yellow hue.
Simon’s internal sensors announce a warning for ‘poor air quality’. They’ve been doing that for the better part of the last five centuries.
He glares a the static-y faces of the family on the holo-ad, as if the state of the world is their own starry-eyed fault. Maybe in some ways it is.
“What a bunch of bullshit.”
He doesn’t know why he still bothers to come out and complete his ingrained directive. It’s not like there are any humans or even animals left on the surface that he needs to clean up for. Any directive he was once given has long since expired. He was probably expected to rust and rot like all of his brothers, his fellow trash-clearing units, centuries ago. The only reason Simon can think of for why he still does this is… he just has nothing better to do.
Sure, he supposes if he really wanted to he could just give up and let himself stop like all of the other droids who accepted their own obsolescence and pointlessness, but unfortunately Simon is a stubborn son of a bitch who has a bit of an internal bet of whether the Sun or him will burn out first.
Simon tugs down his goggle as the wind begins to stir the dust up. His forecast for the day was less than ideal, and he’s sure that by the time midday hits most of the area will be too thick to see very far through. He’ll have to rely on his internal GPS to keep himself from getting lost again.
“Another day in fucking paradise,” Simon mutters.
“The EDEN Foundation-“
“Shut up,” Simon snaps as the holo-ad begins to repeat itself.
Simon hefts his ratty old duffle bag higher up over his shoulder and begins to trudge up the latest mountain of trash he’s been in the process of building, a tower of compressed cubes balanced precariously amidst the long abandoned skyscrapers around him. One more day of eternity, one more day of shuffling through everything else that was left behind.
Not for the first time Simon wonders if this is really all he was built for.
[Grace]
“This is your last chance. Do you understand?” Stratt’s monotonous voice holds a distinct edge to it as she stares down the younger droid.
Despite Stratt’s model being distinctly shorter than Grace’s, Grace still finds himself cowering in front of her. It’s no shock to any of the other droids in his unit that he’s being singled out. He’s often the one screwing up - missing tasks on his completion list, bumping into guests around the ship, and just generally failing to fulfill his directives. When Grace glances at the other bots in his unit, most of them avoid eye contact with him. Carl at least nods in his direction, but that seems to be the most support he’s going to get.
Grace turns back to Stratt, fidgeting despite such a thing being frowned upon in a service and research droid. “Yes. I…I understand.”
“You don’t even need to find anything,” Stratt says in a way that’s supposed to be encouraging but only serves to make Grace feel even more incapable, “Just follow your directive. Go down to the surface, take a few scans and photographs, and no droid gets scrapped.”
The final word echoes damningly off the metal walls.
It’s enough to send a shudder through Grace’s system. His internal processor unhelpfully runs through the sensation of the incinerator at his back, the unrelenting crush of the trash chute grinding his parts down until nothing remained but a few screws and metal plates to be jettisoned out into the cold, unforgiving void of space. It was the worst kind of fate, the fate of droids that were ‘faulty’ and ‘useless’.
“I know you’ve had a difficult time adjusting to your new directives since the child-care unit started renovations,” Stratt says, her tone changing to something softer. Grace wonders if it does that automatically like his own or if she has to consciously modulate it. “But I cannot cover for your failures any longer. This is the easiest mission I can give you. There will be no more second chances.”
“…Yes, head unit,” Grace says.
He doesn’t blame Stratt for her frustration, not really. The droid hadn’t been lying when she said that she had been covering for his shortcomings. He’s pretty sure she’s somehow even managed to hack the system to keep his screwups from the auto-pilot administrator’s watchful eye, but even she wasn’t all-powerful enough to keep him safe from the consequences forever.
Grace straightens up. “I’ll make sure the mission is successful.”
Stratt’s eyes whir as she looks him up and down. Not for the first time Grace hypothesizes the other might have some kind of scanner implanted that can somehow deduce truth from lie. Fortunately, Grace isn’t lying. Well, he’s definitely summoning confidence he doesn’t really have, but he’s not lying. For as much as Grace is clumsy and struggles outside of the classroom, he really, really doesn’t want to get scrapped.
Apparently Stratt sees that much resolve in him, as she simply nods.
“Good. The research shuttle will be departing tomorrow and arriving on Earth in approximately seven day’s time. You mission is expected to last the duration of two weeks on Earth. The shuttle is automated to depart at exactly 0:00 Standard Time. I do not believe it is necessary to elaborate on what will happen if you are not aboard?”
Grace grimaces. If he misses the shuttle back home, he’ll be stuck on Earth until the next one arrives, which is currently scheduled for some point one hundred years from now. He doesn’t fear being abandoned on Earth as much as he fears being scrapped, but he definitely doesn’t want to be testing the limits of that comparison.
“No, head unit.”
Stratt blinks, then turns to the rest of the unit. “That is all for the staff meeting. Units are dismissed back to their stations.”
The room empties as quickly and efficiently as ever. No one in Stratt’s unit seemed to like sticking around lest her attention fall on their heads as well. Grace shuffles out with the crowd, only pausing once he reaches the hallway.
“Hey.”
Grace looks up to see Carl had lingered in the hall. Grace tries for a smile, but it comes out as more of a grimace. “She really read me the riot act, huh?”
Carl shakes his head. “You’re doing fine.”
“But I’m not,” Grace sighs. “I screw up every directive I’m given, I can’t help any of the guests to save my life, I mixed up the salt and sugar yesterday, half the other droids are freaked out by me-“
“You only screwed up four directives you were given, none of which were severe, you’ve helped plenty of guests, especially the younger ones, the salt and sugar weren’t properly labeled and even Stratt admitted to that, and the only reason some droids are freaked out by you is because you were given full emoting software,” Carl lists off dryly.
“Kids need to see emotions,” Grace mutters.
“Exactly,” Carl says, “Look Grace, and I mean this in the nicest way, but you aren’t built to be in this unit. We’re security. Management. We keep the ship running in a way no one is supposed to see. You’re supposed to be out there helping kids. Of course you’re going to screw up a few times when you’re not performing your original directive.”
“Even so, it shouldn’t be this difficult,” Grace says, “I should be able to do this.” His fans begin to kick on as the picture of the incinerator pops back into his head, making his body overheat at the mere prospect of it. “I don’t want to be-“
“You won’t,” Carl says seriously. “I know this also isn’t your main directive, but all you have to do is take some scans of Earth. Both of us know there isn’t really anything down there so… go snap some photos for a couple of days then build a sculpture out of trash for the rest of it or something.”
That reluctantly gets a smile out of Grace. “I wasn’t the art droid in the chid-care unit.”
“And you’re not supposed to be a scouting droid either, but here we are,” Carl says with a shrug.
Grace glances around, but when he sees no one listening he admits, “I’m worried I’ll screw this up and get scrapped for good.”
Carl shakes his head. “You’re going to do great.”
“You have a lot of confidence in me that I really don’t think is backed up with evidence,” Grace says wryly.
“Sometimes life is about theories, isn't it?” Carl says, “I have a lot of faith in this one.”
It’s not enough to completely erase Grace’s concerns, but it does make the tangle of wires in his chest feel a bit less tight.
[Simon]
So Simon has a bit of a habit.
It’s nothing serious, nothing he really puts much stock in, but he’s taken to collecting things over the years. It’s part of what he does to break of the monotony of packing and stacking trash, and so far it’s done a good job from keeping his processor from degrading completely. He doesn’t pick up anything too big, just curiosities and trinkets from a bygone era of humanity that he recognizes from holo-advertisements and what few tapes and recordings he can find.
Lightbulbs, silverware, odds and ends that might have once held some kind of sentimental value to someone but now lay rotting with the rest of the garbage that had been long abandoned. And okay, maybe there’s some sentiment there, even if Simon would never admit it aloud.
He knows what it is to be left behind
He takes it all back to his rusted charging station. Once it was full of droids, him and all his brothers retreating there every evening as their schedules concluded, but now it’s just him and whatever he’s managed to find amidst the wasted remains of an empty world.
Usually he just tosses whatever strikes his fancy into his duffel bag to haul back in the evenings. There’s little ceremony to it, though he does try to sort things into neat categories once he makes it back to his charging station. He’s sure any other droid would be horrified by his method of organization, but it wasn’t like there were any others around to criticize him, or that he’d listen even if there were.
It’s another unremarkable day of kicking around trash and watching the unchanging clouds of smog drift by overhead when Simon finds it. He hadn’t even been looking, instead dangling his feet over the edge of the trash mountain he was sitting on the summit of. He’d been flicking crushed tin cans off the edge of it, watching them drop through the air and timing the distance between the drop and the impact.
“Dull,” Simon mutters, even as he reaches for another. The crunch of the can beneath his metal fingers echoes loudly around him, bouncing off the empty skyscrapers nearby.
He’s just about to toss this can off the edge as well when a glint catches his eye. Simon carelessly tosses the can aside before leaning down to try and get a better look at whatever it is. It’s buried in one of the trash cubes, flashing in the light whenever he tilts his head. Without hesitation, Simon punches a hole in the side with his hand and begins to dig through the compressed garbage.
His questing fingers glance off the edge of it, hooking around what feels like a leather cord. It’s wedged into the cube pretty tightly though, and Simon has to crack the whole thing open like a rotten egg to pry it free.
“Hm?”
What emerges from the filth is some kind of pendant, a flat resin circle edged with brass and tied to a leather cord. Encased in the resin is what appears to have been seeds or leaves of some kind, though the resin has cracked apart and somehow one of the seeds inside has sprouted.
Simon blinks, processor whirring as he turns the pendant carefully over in his hand. He slowly extends a finger to brush against the bright green leaves stubbornly poking through the pendant. They feel incredibly fragile under his touch, and he’s afraid to do much more lest he crush them entirely. His internal databanks tell him that this should be impossible, that life stopped growing on Earth once the soil began to dehydrate and the rivers flooded with toxic runoff, but now the impossible is staring him back in the face.
An unpleasant shiver runs though his circuits
Simon glances around. There’s no one nearby, there never is, but in that moment he feels a strange, irrational concern that he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be. He tries to tell himself that such a concept is ridiculous. He’s been alone for nearly seven hundred years. Who would still be around to judge him? But the feeling of being observed doesn’t abate.
Unnaturally paranoid, Simon scrambles to his feet and heads back to where his patched up old duffel bag is waiting. As he hovers over his bag Simon realizes he really has no idea how to take care of a plant.
He has a vague idea of what he needs from his databanks – soil, water, and sunlight – but he was designed to be a trash packing droid, not an agricultural one. He digs hastily through his bag for something, anything, he might be able to keep the plant in. Eventually, he comes up with a small, metal black box, dented and rusting but at least not falling apart like everything else.
He messily fills it about halfway with some soil before planting the sprout in it, pendant and all. He doesn’t have any water on him at the moment, but he thinks there might even be some left in the open barrels near his charging station from the last rain cloud that passed through. It’s still the middle of the day, but it’s not like anyone’s around to lecture him for leaving his self imposed ‘shift’ early.
For the first time in seven centuries Simon abandons his directive, grabbing his belongings and carefully cradling the budding sprout in his hands as he hustles down the trash mountain back to his shelter.
[Grace]
‘So that’s Earth,’ Grace thinks. He’s only recently come back online, having been deactivated for a majority of the trip on the shuttle. It feels like waking from a deep sleep, though now he’s on the shuttle alone with only the auto-pilot aboard for company.
Grace makes his way to the window and looks down at the planet that humanity once called home. He’s seen it before on holo-vids he taught to educate the children and thousands and thousands of photos and videos of Earth are stored in his data banks, but none of that does actually seeing the actual planet itself justice.
It’s not as green as it is in his implanted memories.
The masses of land are brown and dried out, surrounded by the murky blue oceans. The atmosphere is thick with smog that swirls in brownish-yellow trails. He knows from the historical reels that Earth is now stacked high with garbage and waste, a rotating graveyard of plastic-choked waters and acidic rain.
And yet…
He can’t find it in himself to be disgusted by it. For all that the Earth was now thick with the consequences of humanity’s short-sightedness, it was still beautiful. It was still a place that so many people once built and lived their lives. It’s the site of every wonderful video he’s ever taught to starry-eyed children in his life, the place he’d taught all of them to love and still consider their home even when they’d never touched its soil.
Shuttle landing in twenty minutes.
Grace’s head snaps up at the sound of the auto-pilot’s announcement. “Oh, thank you!” There’s no response. He doubts the auto-pilot has an advanced enough AI to respond, but it still feels wrong not saying anything. He takes one last look down at the planet slowly spinning below him, his destination for the next two weeks.
It seems so simple from up here, but as a science droid Grace knows there are always unexpected variables.
[Simon]
It’s been about a week since Simon first found the pendant, and he’s happy to say it’s growing much better than he’d originally anticipated. Frankly, it’s a miracle it’s growing at all. Even with Simon now doing his best to shelter the plant from dust storms and the overly harsh sunlight outside, he knows the soil he’s been using isn’t the best quality, nor is the water from the rare rainstorms that blow through.
Fortunately, the plant seems to be as tough as everything around it, somehow still surviving despite all the conditions threatening to choke the life from its roots. In many ways, Simon admires its tenacity and sheer will to live.
He’s taken to leaving it right outside the door on the walkway of his charging unit during the day. He doesn’t want to risk it being buried or otherwise crushed while he’s out doing his normal routine, though part of him is reluctant to leave it behind whenever he’s gone. He finds himself often wondering about its condition throughout the day, and for the first time since practically the day he rolled off Eden’s assembly line, Simon finds himself distracted while on the job.
Any time he isn’t working is spent hunting through the piles of trash for supplies to build a better planter for his little sprout. He knows eventually he’ll have to re-pot it once its roots start expanding and it outgrows the black box he’s kept it in. Unfortunately, Simon’s databanks don’t hold any guides on agricultural care - and he’s pretty sure by this point any guides there might be out there have long since dissolved into dust under the weight of the past centuries - and he’s at a loss for how to continue to keep his current plant alive, much less try and propagate it.
He hasn’t found any other plants either on his daily trips out to the city. It’s as if this single budding sprout is the only disruption to his otherwise unchanging routine, and yet it’s somehow managed to turn everything that Simon understands on its head. For the first time in a long time Simon thinks that maybe, just maybe, there’s something still worth finding amidst all the garbage and waste.
It might all be for naught
He could screw up, the plant could die, the environment might not actually be as accommodating as he’d hoped, hell, he could completely malfunction and rust to pieces before that plant ever grew into something more, but even with his processor running all the worst case scenarios possible Simon can’t help but think of that 0.001% chance that maybe, just maybe-
And that’s about as far as Simon gets to thinking before the ground rumbles and the clouds split and a ship straight from the heavens descends on top of him.