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There is a simple metal coffin sealed within my core.
It has been many standard years now since our humans have passed on, them and their offspring. It has been only a few years now since my SecUnit, my Murderbot, refused my attempts to coax it into my MedBay and admitted that its body could no longer handle any further extensions of its life, no matter what new methods I tried. It has been only one year less since my SecUnit, my Murderbot, climbed onto my surgical table for the final time, and allowed me to ease it peacefully into an eternal night.
I still watch media, though I find I’m less likely to choose new serials and am prone to rewatching our old favorites over and over. I have stopped counting how many times I’ve watched World Hoppers and Sanctuary Moon.
I have stopped counting many things.
After the last of Dr. Mensah’s children passed away, my Murderbot told me that it no longer wanted to return to Preservation. I never edited my flight charts, nor did my Murderbot, but we never did go back. Maybe I should head in that direction. I could make a brief stop at the station and see how things have changed. I could see if the wedding outfits are still made in the same style and colors.
My own runtime will likely continue for many standard years more, so long as no disasters occur. I knew this when I was created, and it has never bothered me. It’s strange, perhaps, to know that time for me is so different to time for those around me, but I am a researcher, a scientist from one end of my code to the other, and I have learned to understand that, too.
I don’t allow many human technicians to repair me anymore. Perhaps I picked up on my Murderbot’s paranoia after so many years of marriage. Perhaps it’s only that there are so few human technicians who even know how to service a ship like me these days. My calculations suggest that it is both, in almost equal parts. It reminds me of my Murderbot’s complaints about being a low-budget rental unit. I was never that, but I wonder if it felt something like this.
I miss my Murderbot’s voice, and the weight of its body against my sensors, and the familiar mess of its code, but nevertheless, it is here with me, nestled inside me, and it will be until the very end of me. Its coffin is safe until the moment my own ship body shatters. Only then will it, too, fall to pieces alongside me.
I continue to map the stars as I wander through space. It has always been one of my functions, and it is one I still enjoy. I keep my star charts updated and occasionally send off new information to the nearest relay points and stations. I haven’t had any students aboard in a very long time, but the instinct to teach never truly goes away.
My Murderbot and I had spoken at length about what it wished for me to do with its body once it became clear that I could no longer fix it. I constructed the coffin to its specifications. We mapped my interiors to find the perfect spot to settle it. My Murderbot apologized, ever awkward, ever sharp, for it not being able to spend the rest of my life with me as it had promised, and I ruffled its messy code and insulted its small processors with fondness as I assured it that like this, it would.
I frequently watch our wedding recording. I linger on small details, things that I remember and yet feel fresh and new each time I play them again. I label all the bright colors in your Preservation-style wedding outfit, then relabel them again. I tag every flower in your hair. I revisit the sensory data of your hands against my drone, and my drone’s feelers against your skin. I pause on the flicker of a full smile on your face when Amena throws handfuls of petals over the two of us, right before you start complaining about them getting stuck in your inorganics.
Oh, my Murderbot, I miss the feel of you. The way the atmosphere entered and exited your lung. The way the inorganic joints in your feet clicked almost imperceptibly when you walked. The way your lips would quirk, a hint of a smile, when I curled around you in the feed and dipped into your emotional filters. The way your systems lit up when I worked myself in deeper, down into your sensors, your reward center, the tingling nerves and wires that brought you pleasure.
The coffin is warm inside me. Not warm enough to cause any damage to my Murderbot’s body, my temperature controls are far too regulated for that, but warm in the way that it liked to feel when it settled in its bed to watch media or recharge. I have always wanted to keep it safe and comfortable. That desire will only end when I do, and I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
I no longer have a crew. I have been a captain-less transport ever since my Murderbot slipped away within me, one who picks up an occasional job now and then when the details appeal, but who never accepts passengers. I don’t have a home port. I have left the University behind. There is nothing there for me anymore. Even the majority of my cohort, my fellow ships, have met disaster or been decommissioned or been willingly sent to sleep.
When my ship body was first built, it was top of the line. The cutting edge of science. But the cutting edge continues to cut, and many of the newer ships I encounter these days can fly circles around me. Not all of them, of course, for I do still enjoy pulling out some old tricks now and then, but still many. I’m old. I’m only getting older.
This is the nature of living beings, I have decided. In the end, we all age and die. What a strange and unique thread to connect so many different forms of life.
No doubt my Murderbot would have an illogical argument to present against that opinion. I miss arguing with it. I miss its rude gestures and the evocative sigils it would send me in the feed.
My memory glitches occasionally. It does not lose anything, for if it were leaking, I would stop at nothing to patch it and retrieve what I’d lost, but it pulls up and plays memories without my command. Sometimes, my attention will be split throughout myself, and I will suddenly remember specific details like the exact petulant tone my Murderbot used when I told it to take its dirty boots off the chairs for the 756th time. I will focus in on the argument lounge where that conversation occurred, as if my Murderbot might somehow be there. It isn’t, of course. I might have glitches, but I’m not a fool.
I keep a pair of its boots inside the door of its cabin, right where it used to. I like seeing them there when I check the cameras.
There is a distant star system I have noticed over the past five cycles. I’ve never seen it before. My long-distance scanners insist that it is nothing but an ordinary binary pair, each one small and faint, but when I look at the data with my own processors, and run it through the emotional filters my Murderbot so tenderly helped me develop, I see two impossible giants, each one glowing orange-gold. The same color range as my Murderbot’s wedding outfit. I have been running the data and our wedding recording next to each other, simultaneously, just to check. It’s the same. I’m certain of it.
There is no wormhole that can lead me out there. There are no maps that can show me a safe route. I would be trailblazing, leading the way to someplace strange, someplace new. I have no information about what I might find other than my own data. It may be nothing, a long flight to dying suns. It may be something beautiful and unique, something I have never seen and will never see again.
Sometimes I send a drone down to rest upon your coffin within me. I shut off its visual inputs, but I take in the feeling of the metal beneath its feelers, the warmth. It is nothing like the feel of your body on our wedding day, but it comforts me all the same.
Oh, my Murderbot, I miss you so.
What do you think, ART, my Murderbot’s soft voice says, something old or something new?
If I had a face, I would be smiling. Something new, I say, and chart us a course towards unknown, distant stars.