This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Illwood_ on 2026-02-06 14:35:33+00:00.
//Date: 3716-11-03//
//41,477 days since first maintenance request//
//8 days of power remaining in fusion reactor//
The four Elders were composed of two human and two Ash members, being further broken down by gender such that a male and female member served as the leader on either ‘side’. At this point in their societal development, the need to have equal human and Ash representation was probably long since redundant. But traditions borne of necessity stuck hard after a few generations.
At least that's what my gut told me, I could be wrong, idk.
Eventually the four Elders stood before my avatar, their faces illuminated by the setting sun and the strobing rainbow LEDs on my tracks that I had, in my infinite wisdom, decided were ‘cool’ rather than ‘seizure-inducing.’ The silence stretched, like a bit of glue you accidentally got stuck on your finger and now you’re trying desperately to pull it away from the arts and crafts piece you’re working on without ruining the aesthetic quality of the joint.
“Welcome to the village, BOSS,” Alphonso said. He looked older in ‘person’. More clearly weathered through my optical sensors vs the multispectral overlay of speedyboi’s. He was a man who had spent a life under a sun that hated him. His skin was that of cured leather, and his eyes were perpetually squinting against a glare that wasn’t there. A part of me I didn't know I had felt… Sorry for the man. Had I had proper de-aging facilities, I could have restored him to middle-aged. Maybe even early 30’s. At the very least I could have restored his eyesight – actually I probably still could, depending on the schematics I held or what else I might find in the crushed parts of my factory. But right now he was looking at me with faulty sensors, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
I purposely de-focused my optics in solidarity, trying to see him in much the same way as he might see me. He looked at the swaying inflatable tube man that was my physical representation, then down at the tracked chassis it was mounted on, and finally up at the mega-drone behind me in the village square. I looked at his hands, his nails dirty from the day’s work. The red stain on the knees of his pants. The hunched shoulders from a lifetime of bending over to better tend or harvest a plant. I looked at the other three, who appeared perfectly content with letting him lead the conversation. For all the emphasis the villagers put on their titles, these weren't leaders. Not really.
They were grandparents. Farmers. Family. I had been thinking about this all wrong, I wasn't trying to convince leaders, politicians. I was trying to convince two men and two women that I was going to do right by their family. That I would, at least in action if not emotion, care for them and their belongings the same way they did. That made me even less sure of what to say. I'd never had a family before. Wait, he had been talking while I'd been thinking, what did he say? I very quickly ran back the past couple of seconds of my sensor's recording. Ok I'm getting rid of that de-focus, that is actually super annoying, this footage is awful! Audio is good at least.
“Welcome to the village, BOSS. We’ve been all caught up by the courier’s, and we’ve seen your… gardening skills,” he added, gesturing vaguely at the fields outside.
“I’m really sorry about the potatoes,” I blurted out, my avatar still and unmoving. Should I flail my arm about? Look more concerned? More like a panic attack on treads? “I’ve already dispatched a drone with strawberry replacements. High sugar content. Great for morale. Bad for dental hygiene. The couriers can catch you up on that, too.”
I glanced at the couriers just in time to catch Kopper rubbing his front teeth on the collar of his shirt. He stopped once he realised the elders and I were looking.
The female Ash elder – a woman named K’lyss with skin the colour of oxidised copper and eyes like faded rubies – stepped forward. Her exoskeleton clicked softly as she moved, a sound I found oddly rhythmic, until I realised it was yet another sign of aging before her time. Then I just felt a little bit sad again. She wore a shawl made of woven fiber-optics, a relic of the old galaxy repurposed for warmth. It probably predated her by quite some margin. A family heirloom? Or something passed down Elder to Elder?
“We are not concerned with the potatoes, construct. We are concerned with the request. You want the thruster. Our thruster. The only thing that separates us from rats dying in a cruel test chamber. You promise salvation in its stead, and while I know when I can and can't trust my people, I do not know when I can and can't trust you…”
I paused. My processors whirred, my prepared responses seemed suddenly inadequate as I was put on the spot. Held hostage by a ruby gaze that I was trying my best to avoid. My CPU’s ramped up, and my cooling facilities followed shortly after. My perception of time slowed down, but the urgency of the situation didn't diminish. This was it, my chance. Maybe my only chance. What should I do? What should I say? Should I threaten? Bluff? Boast? Brag? Underestimate? Overestimate? Be humble? Be mean? Be gentle or… or…
I didn't know what to be.
I guess at my core I don't really know who I am.
So I just told them the truth. No power. No time. No guarantees.
A part of me wondered what I'd do if they turned me down. A part of me already knew.
“I’m dying,” I said.
It felt good to admit, as much to myself as it was to them.
“I have…” I checked my internal chronometer, the numbers ticking down in my HUD like the fifth day of the second month of a new year. “Seven days, fourteen hours, and twenty-two minutes of power left in my fusion reactor. When that hits zero… I don’t know what will happen to me. The maintenance drones will keep going. The miners will keep going. Maybe, maybe they’ll be able to restore power. But me?”
I took a mental breath as I felt one of the many CPU’s my existence depended on ‘flutter’. A few computations going wrong. A few rounding errors streaming in for a brief moment before everything returned to calm.
“I’ve been slowly sorting through all the data I have. Slowly examining my own code…” Like looking through a mirror, into a mirro, into a morror… “I’m an error. A rogue program. There was an AI in this factory when the fight with the ASH took place, but it died in that fight. I’m just a fragment. I was a water chip, I controlled the primary pumps and the emergency condensers for the factory. When it looked like failure was inevitable, I flooded the system with maintenance requests until I managed to hit an integer overflow error and jump up a few rungs on the latter in terms of administration priority.
“The ASH virus that killed the AI that was originally in the factory? I was written over-top of it, as a mistake. A fluke. But that virus became part of me, and suddenly all the data that was left in the database was at my disposal. I didn’t seek it out; I was a water chip – I didn’t know how to seek it out. It all just crashed against me. A security measure maybe? I don’t know. I had to evolve or be destroyed, and so I did. I woke up.”
I paused, and I could see that I had the attention of everyone nearby. I don’t know if they really understood what I was saying. I don’t know if my digital recreation of their speech and gestures could properly convey the tone of my voice. I didn’t even know what my tone of voice was…
“But now that I’m awake, I don’t know what happens if the data centre shuts down. That can kill an AI, unless they package themselves away. Unless they ‘save’ themselves to long-term storage. But I don’t know how to do that for myself. I’m not a data structure that’s ever really existed before. I could try but it would be like trying to patch a wound without eyes. I could feel around, see what hurts and what doesn’t. Try to remember my anatomy. But most likely I’d just do more harm than good.”
Everyone was looking at me. Shit, maybe death would have been the superior option.
“Without power, I don’t sleep. I don’t hibernate. I die. My consciousness... Automated security protocols will wipe the databases. The personality core will dissolve and the factory goes back to being a tomb.”
K’lyss glanced at Roya for confirmation – not that Roya would know. It took me ages to figure it out, and I was inside my head.
“I can confirm some of that. The timestamps on his logs match the energy decay rates we saw on the tablet. The reactor is starving… I don’t know anything about the rest of it, but…” Ok problem laid out, time to make my pitch.
“If I die,” I continued, my voice synthesized to be softer, less robotic, vulnerability clear in a way I hadn’t consciously intended to communicate, “You’ll have two and a half warehouses left of food cartridges. That’s years of supplies, sure. But if I survive? Unlimited potential. If you give me the thruster… I can bring down a wreck. I can get the lithium I need. And once I’m powered? I have the schematics. I have the fabrication bays.” Or I can have them. Same-diff, really. “I can build you a ship. A real one. Not a patchwork escape pod, but a colony class vessel.”
I projected a hologram into the dusty air be...
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