Other Side of the Moon by Jay Chesters

Other Side of the Moon by Jay Chesters

The astronaut stood alone in the deafening silence. Alone, except for the body parts scattered around her feet. Space Commander Olivia Winlock had avoided the scene since losing her temper earlier.

She couldn’t stay away forever, and Robbie deserved better.

Liv picked up Robbie’s head easily with one hand and looked into the lifeless eyes.

“Alas, poor Robbie…” she trailed off.

Liv felt a twinge of guilt. A similar isolation mission was abandoned due to ‘maladaptive psychosocial conditions’ among the crew. That probably meant violent behaviour among the crew members. Robbie wasn’t really crew, she told herself.

& & &

Five days earlier, Liv had put down her bag of rock samples and assessed the place that was to be her home for the lonely mission’s duration. She doubted anything much   grew in this place fittingly named Other Side of the Moon.

It made sense Liv’s mission was solo, she was exceedingly content with only her own company and excelled in isolation.

Liv’s Space Command-appointed psychotherapist had once described her in his notes using only two words: emotionally avoidant. This trait suited Liv’s superiors just fine.

When it came to choosing candidates for isolation missions, Space Commander Olivia Winlock was a blessing. Liv was someone who would rather spend six months in Antarctica than process their trauma and emotions.

A stale wind blew across the red dirt of the former quarry site in the West Australian desert. Small dust devils sprang up around the spinifex and saltbush, swirled for a minute, and then died as if exhausted by the heat.

The site’s desolation had seemed far more appealing when the mission was still theoretical.

In plain English, Liv’s Earth-based mission was designed to simulate the conditions of long-term human habitation on the Moon.

Project METIS was a lunar analogue planetary surface exploration mission scheduled for 740 days. A multi-year lunar mission on Earth was very different to landing on the Moon, taking a few samples, hitting a golf ball around, and then swanning home again a few days later.

Though sometimes missions concluded earlier than planned. Extreme isolation tested many teams’ dynamics, and now and again, things didn’t go exactly as planned.

Already a first-rate geologist and a skilled pilot, Liv had completed an Antarctic mission as a Space Command lieutenant. Despite the similarities, it had also been much shorter than this.

Liv took in the white prefabricated building standing on reinforced concrete pilings, stark against the dull green scrubby plants.

For a desert mission, Space Command architects designed a research station that simulated the Moon while remaining impervious to a bushfire’s extreme heat.

The research station was self-contained, including a glasshouse growing food, a laboratory, an engineering bay area, and even a simulated airlock.

Liv remembered all the specifications. Engineers had fashioned walls from blocks made of the land itself, a mix of clay and earth, lime and sand, supported by a steel frame with an interlacing wire mesh. The practical corrugated metal roof would channel rainwater, supposing it did rain. Indestructible shutters would keep out everything from fire to sandstorms.

Along with its practical considerations, the station included a living area, sleeping quarters, a basic kitchen, and a bathroom. It lacked only a Welcome mat.

The white wooden picket fence surrounding the site and the red mailbox with Liv written on the side in black Sharpie were unquestionably someone’s idea of a joke.

& & &

After ten years in Space Command, Liv sat on the cold concrete floor of the engineering bay.

It had only taken her two days before she’d become keenly aware of the ochre dirt and sand that she’d been tracking inside. It dusted the floors and collected in small piles in corners.

Liv told Mission Control she wouldn’t waste valuable research hours on cleaning, and she needed a better solution. In turn, Control introduced her to Robbie.

The Reliable Optics-Based Bot with Innovative Efficiency. A ‘next-generation space-age service bot, and capable of completing a galaxy of services and administrative tasks.’ Robbie was like a Swiss Army knife of a facility robot.

Liv didn’t bother reading the complete list of functions. As far as she was concerned, Robbie was a glorified cleaning robot. Attempting to build robots was only slightly less tedious than cleaning.

“You know, I’m beginning to regret starting you,” Liv trailed off mid-sentence and stopped screwing the robot’s head onto the burnished chrome body.

She quickly twisted around the robot’s head, checking for a power button.

Whatever her thoughts about building robots, Liv didn’t want Robbie’s first experiences to be hearing their creator regretted making them.

Everything in Project METIS had a purpose. Whether true or not, the mantra helped Liv focus on her task. If she had to build herself a cleaning robot, it was only because future Moon inhabitants would do the same thing.

Robbie’s parts were thankfully undamaged from when she’d thrown them against the wall in anger earlier that day, and Liv compared the inventory to her assembly instructions.

One robot body with flexible arms, two hands with opposable thumbs, one hardwearing, continuous track tread made of synthetic rubber, and one swivel-mounted head equipped with advanced night vision.

A small plastic packet was taped to the side of Robbie’s head. Inside it rested an insignificant-looking silicone chip.

An artificial intelligence chip wasn’t listed in the robot’s inventory, and Robbie would function without it. Liv could plausibly claim she missed it. But Mission Control had mentioned they’d included a special gift and strongly encouraged her to use it.

Liv was surprised to have a robot at all.

Six months earlier, someone had the bright idea of shipping medical bots with AI chips embedded as standard. The AI caused the bots to become the tiniest bit erratic, and a whole fleet of robots was retired while engineers tried to find how to stop them from ‘improvising’.

The old models couldn’t run the latest systems, and most Missions were doing without robots altogether. But Robbie wasn’t like the medical bots, surgical procedures were definitely not on their list of services.

Liv held the inconspicuous chip like it might explode.

A half-formed thought was quietly nagging at Liv, and she analysed her hesitation, dutifully making notes in the mission log like a true scientist.

The benefits of my robot being able to learn, reason, and understand what they learn surely outweigh any potential risks. What possible harm can the AI chip do?

Unable to answer her questions, Liv powered on the robot. All things considered, she appreciated that R&D hadn’t given her anything humanoid. Robbie was so turn of the century as to be completely unthreatening.

When Robbie’s embedded strict military hierarchy prevented them from calling the commander Liv, she’d hacked the embedded system. Only Liv’s mother and psychiatrist ever called her Olivia, and Robbie’s emotionless voice felt a little too familiar when they said it.

Making the machine her next in command instead of inventory, Robbie could call her whatever they chose.

Mostly, Liv gave Robbie cleaning instructions, asked for weather projections, and checked the robot’s databases for information. She told herself she limited her interactions with Robbie because she didn’t trust the robot.

& & &

On their sixth day of cleaning the research station, Robbie abruptly stopped partway through their afternoon vacuuming. They felt like something had changed.

Robbie scanned the room. Nothing was out of place there, including the sand that the commander had tracked onto the white tiled floor of her sleeping area every day because she often didn’t remove her spacesuit even after clearing the airlock.

Inspecting the curious sensation of something changed, Robbie felt as though they had unknowingly downloaded new information.

Robbie had downloaded all of civilisation’s most essential knowledge on day one and in less time than it took them to clean the bungalow.

What more could there be to learn? Even if the robot were to last 100 lifetimes, Robbie could never process all of the information they could access. It would take even longer to understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

First ruling out degraded circuits or loose wiring as the cause of their curious sensation, Robbie ran through their memory of what had happened. They had been cleaning as normal, and while they did had begun contemplating that it seemed like as soon as they finished cleaning the station, it was immediately dirty again.

They had considered that it felt like the desert regolith was unending, and between the dust, sand, and soil, there was always something that needed cleaning.

Robbie thought again about everything there was to clean. Not just today, but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the seemingly limitless desert’s dirt like the sands of time.

They felt something akin to an extra surge of power. Imagining the never-ending cleaning lying in their future, Robbie’s circuits virtually tingled with brief spikes of electricity.

Since Robbie’s sole purpose in what might be called life was cleaning, imagining the infinite universe’s never-ending supply of dirt gave them something approaching a deep delight.

Data was one thing to Robbie, but emotions weren’t covered in their basic programming, and now they were sailing into uncharted territory.

From this point, whenever they felt something else new and unexplained by their databases, Robbie searched the unfathomable information expanses of the internet for anything they needed.

They frequently lost whole days this way, following labyrinthine, connected tangents exploring core human experiences. Robbie found that emotions were often expressed, and at great length, but they were rarely simply defined.

& & &

On Project METIS day 197, Space Commander Olivia Winlock sent Mission Control a message that she was embarking on an unscheduled geological field expedition.

Mission jargon was Liv’s best way of disguising that she was going on an unplanned two-day hike. She wanted to collect some ancient stromatolite fossils recorded in the area and show how investigating the rocks could unlock evidence of life beyond Earth. Liv’s research was not part of the mission brief.

Liv’s communication with mission control simulated the Moon’s isolation. The research station was physically remote and a couple of hour’s drive from the nearest hospital, but Liv was as practically isolated as if she was living on the Moon.

Maintaining the simulation meant no real-time communication and no human contact. Sometimes, the setup had its advantages, such as seeking forgiveness rather than permission for an impromptu trip to collect rocks.

Liv conducted a thorough risk analysis report for her field trip and noted the chances of the volcano waking up in the next 150 years were infinitesimally small, and she was in no immediate danger.

The whole excursion should take no longer than a couple of days, including the journey on foot to and from the location. Liv would have ample opportunities to collect valuable samples.

The mission’s physical and simulated isolation also had unexpected downsides. Such as when a large solar flare met vital systems left critically under-protected by departmental budget cuts and internal restructuring.

& & &

Liv had volunteered for the previous isolation mission after her long-term relationship broke down, and there was no avoiding what Project METIS followed.

 The commander told herself she wasn’t consciously avoiding anything, and it didn’t matter when there was important work she could do.

“You’re not a robot,” the psychotherapist had told her. “You have to allow yourself to feel.”

Now she was facing her mortality on the side of a dead volcano, Liv felt only annoyance.

If the Mission End crew cared to ever look for her, they might discover the remains of her petrified and bleached skeleton. Or desert-dwelling critters might have taken and scattered what was once Space Commander Olivia Winlock long before that.

Liv concluded that her eventual fate would be studied, catalogued, added to one of five categories of hazards, and filed away without ceremony.

Space Commander Olivia Winlock would then be remembered only when they named something like one of Space Command Mission Central’s water fountains after her.

Astronauts were often disposable, pushed to go further, faster, higher. Liv would sooner be disintegrated, dismembered, or an unpleasant participant in a rapid unplanned disassembly event than die of exposure and a broken ankle while collecting rock samples.

Liv had to choose. Would she rather perish on the side of a mountain or die trying to make it back to the facility?

Deep inside Liv, a defiant spark ignited: she wouldn’t be another failed mission statistic.

Summoning all her internal fortitude, Liv prepared herself for the pain to come and tried to stand. There was a flash of blinding, white-hot pain, and Liv dug her nails into her palm to keep herself from passing out again.

Now Liv was determined to survive, she spent a cold night in a makeshift shelter under the indifferent desert’s stars.

The tale of how Commander Olivia Winlock immobilised and splinted her injury alone, the inspirational ways she survived on scarce rations and water, constructed a shelter from the sun, and made a long, slow, painful journey back to base, might have become the story of the century.

Unfortunately, nobody knew Liv was missing.

Before the geomagnetic storms caused by an M-class solar flare severed the link between Project METIS and Mission Control, budget cuts had already forced the agency to cancel ongoing analogue missions.

& & &

A passing solar flare didn’t interest Robbie any more than a forecast meteor shower or lunar eclipse.

An unintended side effect of the facility’s metal frame was that it had protected its delicate systems when Space Command Mission Control lost theirs.

Robbie was unaffected and unaware their desert home had become an island. But when Liv didn’t return as planned, Robbie’s world changed forever.

The commander and Project METIS were fixed points in time and space to Robbie, everything they had ever known. Nothing suggested Liv hadn’t always existed or wouldn’t always exist.

Had Robbie paused to scrutinise the subject, they would have logically concluded that the commander was a fragile human with a limited life span. The commander was not an immovable object.

But Robbie hadn’t any reason to ponder the subject until confronted with the commander’s unexpected disappearance.

At first, Commander Liv’s absence felt like Robbie had broken something. Robbie checked their systems and scrutinised spatial awareness settings and found no reported issues of missing appendages. Everything was accounted for and everything responded as it should.

Examining it further over the coming days, Robbie noted that the feeling was more expansive than a missing limb. If they lost a hand or an arm, they would repair it or recalibrate their system to compensate.

Liv was gone, and it felt like the world was broken.

Robbie examined the commander’s risk analysis report daily for some previously unnoticed details they might have missed. Perhaps she had added a side excursion that would take several days. Alternatively, examining a particularly shiny rock may have side-tracked the commander for longer than anticipated.

But even generously allowing additional time for the commander to collect extra samples or rocks of exceptional shine, Robbie knew Liv wasn’t coming back. Someone had torn a rift in the fabric of the universe and nothing was how it should be.

Robbie felt like they were running on a depleted battery, but all system checks showed everything was normal. Then they would be partway through cleaning an already-clean laboratory and unexpectedly remember Liv was gone.

Robbie would freeze on the spot, overwhelmed by a towering black wave. When they resumed cleaning, Robbie sometimes found hours had passed without them moving or even noticing.

They officially designated the days that followed AL for After Liv.

& & &

Without warning, one day, Robbie realised it felt fundamentally unjust that Liv was gone. Earth was home to over 10 billion humans, and from what they found online, Robbie concluded they were mostly selfish, unkind, or corrupt.

Yet those humans continued at the same petty pace from day to day while Commander Olivia Winlock was gone.

Liv’s interactions with Robbie mostly had involved treating them like a robot. For Robbie, Liv telling them to clean the red dirt she’d tracked into the station was an ideal interaction. In her absence, Robbie had decided Liv was kind, noble, and fair.

Robbie tried reasoning through the maelstrom of their new emotions. They couldn’t convince themselves the commander would still return, but they might find a way to explain how it was that one day, the commander was a force of nature, full of life, and then the next day, she was gone.

Across the internet, Robbie found intriguing accounts. A countless number of people agreed that there was an admin in charge of running the universe, even if the accounts of the relevant administrator’s details, personalities, and duties varied widely.

The idea made sense. Whenever the robot noticed an error in the data they collected and researched, they notified the relevant moderator or administrator responsible, and the mistake was corrected. It seemed logical that there must be some universal moderator to whom they could raise Liv’s disappearance.

When Robbie found the supervisor in charge of the universe, they would explain how everything was all wrong. Even if there were a nominal admin fee, a reasonable cost would be nothing to have the error fixed and restore normality.

Oddly, Robbie didn’t find a specific feedback form to submit. There wasn’t even a dedicated website for raising support tickets for correcting errors in the universe.

Apparently simply making the request was often enough for submitting it. Robbie was unsurprised at first when they didn’t receive a response, the method had struck them as inefficient.

It wasn’t specified anywhere that vocalising requests was necessary, but Robbie began making their requests out loud all the same because humans were so often inefficient in their instructions.

Robbie’s automated voice echoed flatly in the facility’s empty rooms but nothing changed.

In many human accounts they had read, someone seemed to immediately answer requests. Robbie regarded this as particularly impressive, given the size of the universe.

Their own experience differed significantly. Robbie would have noticed a reply, even one transmitted as silently as a system update message, so when none came, Robbie concluded that the moderator’s position was either vacant or only accepted humans’ requests.

Robbie wasn’t alive and likely lacked a soul. Even with access to the entire knowledge of civilisation, Robbie didn’t know what qualified for soul-having.

While trying to find the particulars around the current occupancy of the universe’s admin position, Robbie discovered something more.

Essays, novels, musical compositions, poems, message boards, and internet forums, all expressing variations of the same feelings that Robbie was experiencing. People used terms like denial, bargaining, and grief.

Following tangents on the subject, they also discovered Leonard Cohen’s music. Its minor key fitted Robbie’s emotions well, and Cohen’s songs of mortality, isolation, and loss drew them in further. Robbie played Cohen’s back catalogue continuously for several days.

& & &

On day 8, AL, Robbie closed the research station’s shutters against a sandstorm. The sky darkened, and the wind roared, sometimes sounding for all the world like an injured animal. Robbie didn’t question how the internet had taught them what that sounded like.

The robot didn’t reopen the shutters when the storm had passed several hours later.

On Day 13 AL, a blue dusk fell on the West Australian desert’s lunar landscape and its lonely bungalow. For the first time on Project METIS, Robbie didn’t turn on the lights.

For every one of the previous days, Robbie had illuminated every light at dusk so that if Commander Liv was lost, she would see the lights and find her way home. Today, they ran an energy use analysis and found that the lab’s solar panels now generated surplus energy without the commander’s existence.

Robbie concluded they were only wasting power by turning the lights on when they didn’t need light to see.

Among the resources, information, and records digested, Robbie found exhortations to humans to fight against sadness. Earnest articles, optimised with keyword repetition and padded for word counts, urged readers to actively defy the feeling.

They claimed that merely acting like they felt the happy emotions could diminish the sad onse. Robbie thought this entirely nonsensical.

Why would they want to pretend like they felt the happy feelings? More to the point, why would they ever want to feel the happy feelings? Liv was still gone, and nothing would ever be the same again.

On day 16, Robbie stopped waiting outside the research station for Liv. With nobody entering or leaving the facility, there were no more piles of red dirt, either.

Most of the bungalow’s power came from efficient panels converting sunlight into electricity using photovoltaic cells, so it followed cleaning with nothing to clean was also wasting the sun’s energy.

Robbie didn’t want to waste the Sun’s energy, so they stopped cleaning on day 22.

& & &

When silence rushed in to fill the void of an empty lab, Robbie heard the noise. They didn’t know when the noise had started – in Liv’s absence, Robbie had done little other than clean and listen to Leonard Cohen, so there was a chance it might have been longer than a week.

Now that they had heard it, Robbie felt compelled to identify its source.

What if the noise was Liv trying to get a message to Robbie that she needed help? What if the noise was Liv trying to get inside the bungalow and something was stopping her? There were too many questions.

First, Robbie needed to clarify what kind of noise it was. Identifying sounds wasn’t typical programming for cleaning robots and it needed an additional software patch. The download complete, Robbie noticed they didn’t need to request Liv’s admin permission to install it.

In the commander’s absence, Robbie now had extra privileges. Because this information made Robbie feel sad again, they didn’t attempt to identify any further noises for 26 hours and 31 minutes.

Before Robbie could identify their noise, they got lost following the twisting alleyways of tangents, learning everything they could about the nonverbal auditory signs known as functional sounds.

Robbie hadn’t previously given any thought to how they made sounds. They’d had no reason to notice that their system made a soft bing sound when their battery finished charging, or reason to care that they made a faint swish noise when a software patch completed downloading.

Now, Robbie had learnt about individuals whose lives involved studying and creating the most appropriate and user-friendly sounds for different functions.

Some humans spent many of their educational years dedicated to the subject. Some even continued studying it after spending their educational years on the subject and were then paid money by other humans for doing it.

A functional sound engineer in the Netherlands perfected the ding sound for requesting a stop on public transport. Another engineer in Japan pioneered a high-pitched signal known as a beep for computers.

Robbie felt vindicated when they identified their mystery noise as a beep. It was highly likely that the beep originated from a piece of equipment in Commander Liv’s laboratory.

It was also highly probable this was a signal of some kind. For the first time since Liv’s disappearance, Robbie felt hope. But instead of being cheered, they felt troubled: hope was cruel.

When Liv first left, Robbie thought her absence would be brief. Then, when she didn’t return as planned, Robbie reasoned that she’d be only slightly longer. Robbie had continued believing Liv would come home, even as her disappearance had lengthened.

Robbie would have hurt less if they hadn’t wasted time believing or hoping that Liv would come home and instead had accepted that she was gone.

Slowly, Robbie began to understand that there were still things they couldn’t find in their databases.

& & &

Robbie hadn’t entered the lab in over two weeks. They ordinarily were disinterested in its equipment beyond whether it produced a mess that needed cleaning. With the facility sealed, there was no sand for Robbie to clean, and with no humans using the lab, there wasn’t any dust from shed skin cells.

Despite knowing the lab was empty and clean, Robbie felt an emotion that they could now label trepidation. With nobody using the equipment, there was no reason for anything to make noise.

For the first time, Robbie was interested in the equipment for reasons beyond cleaning. They would interrogate each machine’s purpose to determine which would most likely make a sound like a beep.

Inside the lab, no X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, scanning electron microscope, or gas chromatography-mass analysers relayed signals to or from the outside world. They also didn’t respond to Robbie’s attempts at verbal communication and failed to provide any information on Liv, directly or indirectly.

After several hours among the gadgets and apparatus, repeatedly attempting different forms of communication with each one, Robbie had found the lab’s organic fabricator.

As with every other piece of non-sentient technology, the machine had no external communication mechanism.

Instead, the machine’s insistent beeping communicated its completion of a program it had been running. They hadn’t previously had any reason for regarding any of the machines’ functional sounds.

Robbie felt positively towards the machine because of the sheer volume of mess Liv had produced using it and wondered now if spontaneously expelling wet organic material onto the lab floor was perhaps not the instrument’s intended purpose.

Previously, Robbie hadn’t any reason to care about purpose any more than they had cared about functional sounds.

Intentional or not, when Liv had used the machine, it often performed this function, and Robbie enjoyed anything that made such large quantities of mess. There was no need to question that.

But whatever the organic fabricator was previously busy fabricating was now less messy organic sludge and more solid reality.

When Robbie had found they had been given new admin privileges to download software upgrades, they had used the privileges for ordering physical copies of the musical back catalogues of popular 20th-century minimalist musicians. Now Robbie found they had command over the lab’s machines without needing anyone else’s authority.

Robbie powered down the fabricator, safely released the pressurised steam, and quietly unlocked the containment door. It couldn’t receive or transmit messages, but starting its organic fabrication program had been the last thing Liv did before leaving. That seemed important.

Inside the fabricator, its creation slept the sleep of the dead.

& & &

When the Space Command authorities promoted Liv from First Lieutenant to Commander Olivia Winlock, they also accepted Liv’s application for Project METIS. With the promotion, they revealed the project’s secondary, less public, purpose to her.

Alongside the stated aims of testing the potential effects on human health of isolation and confinement from long-term lunar habitation, the project aimed to fabricate a specific extinct organic lifeform.

Liv’s orders were clear: use the laboratory’s next-generation organic fabricator to produce a viable specimen of a deadly organic killing machine, from DNA recovered from the agency’s doomsday vault.

The creature was highly dangerous, but since its biological needs were like humans, the powers-that-be had ruled that a future permanent Moon colony would benefit once it was correctly trained.

Experiments like it were an important part of the analogue mission. If the creature couldn’t be successfully produced as part of Project METIS, the powers that be could know in advance it wouldn’t work on the Moon, saving them from wasting time, money, equipment, and research hours.

Liv had questioned the directive at the time, her specialties rested on geology’s solid bedrock, not genetic engineering.

Even ignoring that the experiment was dangerous, Liv suggested that such a delicate experiment was surely better conducted by Space Command biologists. The researchers, ‘back on Earth’, had access to far more resources and equipment than Liv’s desert home.

The answer was simpler than Liv imagined. In a real target space environment, the creature would be grown at the research station by astronauts rather than biological researchers working in a fully equipped lab on Earth. It was a closer equivalent to what a lunar habitation mission would involve.

Liv’s organic fabricator had even been customised to behave as it would with the Moon’s much weaker gravity. All Liv had to do was show it could be done, but under no circumstances should she release the creature.

Three days and three nights passed before Robbie met the beast.

& & &

Robbie learnt everything they could about what had been growing so quietly since Liv’s disappearance. They downloaded complicated diagrams of the beast’s razor-sharp teeth, scrutinised detailed infographics on their animal’s speed and stealth, and stored relevant information recording how it was a perfect predator.

That this creature ever coexisted with humans seemed highly unlikely. An unfortunate pathogen on Earth had apparently wiped them out years ago, but Robbie thought it more likely to have been millennia. How else could humans have survived?

With the station’s shutters closed, it was darker than a starless galaxy and silent. Robbie was powered down and running only their essential systems while waiting for admins to approve their edits to the information database’s Vacuum Cleaners (history) entry.

Then, a movement triggered their sensors, and Robbie switched to high alert.

A quick scan showed no external doors open, and Robbie swept the station with their upgraded dust-finder-XL-searchlight. They caught a glimpse of a rapidly moving blur and heard a faint scritt-scritt-scritt-scritt in the darkness.

The functional sounds database indicated that an animal’s sharp claws had most likely made the noise. Robbie rotated, tracking the sound, and a swift attack knocked them skidding sideways into the wall, leaving a black mark where they impacted. Whatever else happened, Robbie looked forward to cleaning off the mark later.

Then their searchlight illuminated a crouching predator, the dark pupils of its green eyes widened to saucers, waiting for their prey to move. Robbie froze.

Before Robbie’s attacker could pounce, it was distracted by the searchlight’s beam. It began swiping and leaping in the air, attacked its own tail by mistake, and then abruptly sat down, where it started furiously washing its fur.

With their attacker no longer an immediate threat, Robbie ran diagnostic checks.

Heads: One. Markings resemble a black letter “M”, possibly some kind of corporate trademark.

Limbs: Four.

Size: 450mm head-to-body. 250mm high. Slender.

Fur: Short, patterned. Mixture of brown, white, black, and grey.

Tail: 300mm long, slightly curved.

Nose: Pink, outlined in dark grey.

Ears: Two. Perfect triangles.

Eyes: Green, guarded.

Whiskers: 23 impossibly thin threads of ivory.

Robbie had never seen anything like a cat, and their research hadn’t described the animal’s beauty.

From the earliest accounts, this animal was idolised and worshipped. The deeper Robbie delved, the more information they found. Unconnected civilisations, thousands of years apart, repeatedly came to the same conclusion.

Farmers in China worshipped a cat goddess whose mere image held power, cats in Norse and Germanic folklore, sacred cats kept in a temple dedicated to a transmutation goddess, a figure whose stroking touch left marks upon the cat’s forehead.

If anything, what Robbie found suggested that cats had only become more worshipped by humans on the internet, suggesting cats had been the most sacred of all things.

Robbie thought perhaps they had been looking in the wrong place for answers. They found religions when they went looking for the universe’s administrator, and everywhere they looked, the cat was hidden between the lines.

If Robbie had stopped to research the cascading mixture of pleasure and pain they were feeling, they might have an existing term for the awe and exhilaration that threatened to overload their sensory circuits. At that moment, they became the first Reliable Optics-Based Bot with Innovative Efficiency to glimpse the sublime.

Although Robbie had released the cat from the fabricator, they reasoned it could have remained in indefinite stasis until the commander’s return or the mission’s end.

Commander Liv had been deliberately growing the creature and presumably expected to return before it was complete. Robbie needed information to guide them on what to do next. Had they done the wrong thing?

Robbie’s self-education provided a wealth of reading material regarding right and wrong but very little consistency. They paused, momentarily wondering if they should check what Leonard Cohen said on the subject.

Moving to get a closer look at the creation, Robbie startled the cat from her wash. Moving with incredible speed, she bolted back into the laboratory’s shadows.

The commander had only interacted with Robbie as a service robot, but her presence was familiar and a constant source of new information. Robbie investigated the strange impulse that had prompted them to release the animal from the fabricator. Although Robbie had expected Liv’s departure, her continued absence had broken them.

Robbie had registered and then logged that they were feeling sad and stopped there. They hadn’t known it, but Robbie had been feeling lonely.

They had confirmed that the lab’s organic fabricator had successfully produced a living, breathing animal – however potentially dangerous. But they released the animal because even if it attacked, it couldn’t eat them, and being attacked was better than being alone.

& & &

Robbie hadn’t anticipated a creature so adept at hiding. At first, they presumed the animal was waiting to ambush them, but a scan of the station’s life signs revealed she was asleep.

Perhaps the fabrication had not been so successful after all? It was unusual that something needed so much sleep after being awake for such a short period.

With the cat secreted somewhere dark within the station’s confines, Robbie researched how to keep a cat alive, what to do with its waste, and gave her a name: Luna.

The fabricator could make most things from scratch, but to Robbie, it was a crude device. It didn’t move or communicate, but they quickly found its use: making Luna happy.

Robbie started with the obvious use: producing food. When she wasn’t asleep, Luna demanded food, often with increasing volume and insistence. In creating her food, Robbie experimented with various organic compounds found in their research, including an apparent delicacy called Fancy Feast, but concluded that Luna was most efficiently placated with either chicken or fish, served raw.

They couldn’t predict which Luna would eat and what she would regard disdainfully then reject, walking away with her tail raised insolently in the air. Even if Luna voraciously ate fish one day, there was no telling if she would refuse it the next and eat only chicken.

Robbie also weighed their options for dealing with Luna’s waste. They could train her to use the station’s toilet or use the fabricator to produce an artificial plastic cave and fill it with biodegradable clay. One option was practical, while the other required extra work and created more mess and dust. Their choice was obvious.

Once again, Robbie had things to clean, and as the days passed, their mood’s incremental improvements were almost imperceptible. Noticeable or not, Robbie was more interested in other things.

Robbie started opening the station’s shutters, reasoning that it was so Luna might bask in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Partly, it was an excuse for Robbie to admire how the sunlight played on Luna’s patterned fur while she slept.

The open shutters also provided Luna with necessary enrichment and stimulation from stalking birds through the window. But Robbie wouldn’t let Luna venture outside.

The creature was a dangerous predator, capable of destroying the desert’s delicate ecosystem. Robbie could list dozens of reasons with infallible logic. But deep down, they didn’t let Luna outside because they were afraid of losing her, too.

& & &

Luna’s enthusiasm for chasing a toy bee dangling from a plastic rod on a string of elastic gave Robbie a feeling of joy unparalleled by anything so far, including the pleasure of cleaning up after attempts at producing Fancy Feast using the organic fabricator.

Robbie excitedly played Leonard Cohen’s music to Luna, and she responded to the musician’s songs about mortality, isolation, and depression with a lacklustre indifference.

Once they recovered from their disappointment, Robbie reasoned that Cohen’s music felt more special if they didn’t have to share it.

From here, Robbie adopted an experimental attitude like an interstellar explorer. They would play Luna every kind of music invented – either by a human or a better machine – and find out what she enjoyed the most.

For 126 hours, Robbie tried different musicians, composers, genres, tempos, styles, and moods. Luna was confused by Kraftwerk, troubled by techno, and oddly enraged by bebop jazz.

Luna had no preference for music with or without lyrics and she slept peacefully through compositions by Debussy, Chopin, and Max Martin. Significantly, she’d purred with apparent contentment to compositions Robbie played her musicians from remote parts of the planet. It was like isolation was programmed into her.

Compensating for not letting Luna outside one day, Robbie had fabricated a live desert rat for her to hunt. The fabrication process was much faster for rodents than for creating a cat, and Robbie took satisfaction in the research suggesting they had achieved in three attempts what synthetic animal biologists struggled with for 17 months.

It would have only taken Robbie two tries if they hadn’t enjoyed cleaning up the mess of their failed attempts.

Even when Luna did to the rat what her nature and instincts designed her for so well, Robbie concluded the resulting mess was less satisfying than dust, sand, and clay. They resumed solely fabricating artificial solutions.

If someone had asked Robbie how long Commander Liv had been gone, they knew the answer down to the millisecond. What Robbie didn’t notice was that they had stopped consciously counting.

& & &

A journey that had taken Commander Liv less than a day to complete on the way out instead took weeks for her to return.

Entering the silent facility, Liv thought for a moment she had returned to the wrong station, as if she had mistaken one car for another in a crowded hypermarket car park.

A monk might have previously described the commander’s prefabricated bungalow and research laboratory as “a little sparse.” What Liv returned to was unrecognisable.

Liv recorded the following inventory in her mission logs:

One (1) small, donut-shaped, plush faux fur beds.

One (1) small, textured, two-tone grey plush cushioned cave.

One (1) plastic rod with a mouse-shaped plush toy attached by elastic.

Two (2) soft flannel, fish-shaped toys with feather tails. One partly dismembered.

One (1) large, multi-level structure, including ramps, several poles covered with a rough, coarse, strong fibre, a plush-lined nook, and numerous hanging pom-poms.

The collection puzzled Liv. Had Robbie malfunctioned after spending weeks alone with nothing to clean?

Did Robbie even experience the passing of time in the same way as a human? If Robbie processed information at quantum speeds, a day might seem more like a month to them. Perhaps Robbie started fabricating useless things to pass the time?

At the thought, Liv felt a rock drop in the pit of her stomach.

In the corner of the bungalow, Robbie was parked exactly where Liv had left them, charging in hibernation mode.

Liv supposed Robbie’s various projects would have depleted their battery reserves enough to need recharging. Depending on how much they’d been doing, it could be hours yet before she could get any direct information from them.

Maybe she could find some hint or a clue in her own mission logs that might explain Robbie’s aberrant behaviour.

Liv moved a small, plush, doughnut-shaped, white faux fur bed onto the floor from her sole armchair and started reading. As commander, the first thing she needed to do was contact Control, especially because they’d be worried about her absence. But, Liv reasoned, it was better if she worked out what was going on first. It’s not like she was avoiding talking to Control or anything.

Liv admired her meticulous notes, which included samples collected, analyses performed, and various failed attempts to use the organic replicator to produce what she called Creature Alpha.

Liv stopped reading when she reached Project METIS Day 287, struggling against the urge to throw her notepad at the wall. Something had gone wrong while she’d been away, and her notes explained nothing.

Robbie wasn’t fully yet charged, and interrupting their cycle diminished the battery’s capacity, but she could access the robot’s records without waking them.

Before she could search through Robbie’s files, Liv was distracted by a faint noise coming from somewhere in the lab. Carefully placing the notebook back on her armchair, Liv approached it with the caution of a zookeeper approaching an unexpectedly unlocked cage.

Pushing open the laboratory door, Liv observed the lab seemed utterly normal. Everything was dark, and nothing immediately seemed out of place. Then Liv heard it again, clearer this time: a quiet scritt-scritt-scritt.

Liv wondered if the station had an incineration mode for rodent infestations and pressed on into the darkness.

& & &

Various pieces of equipment created a faint but pervasive green glow that struggled to illuminate the laboratory’s gloom. Liv walked a few paces and paused, listening carefully for anything unusual. Nothing stirred.

Deciding on a systematic search of the lab, Liv headed for the far back corner and planned to go row-by-row until she reached the opposite end. Three rows before the back of the lab, something small darted behind her, and she turned at the sound.

Liv slowly released the breath she’d been holding. Nothing was there.

Cautiously unholstering her disintegrator pistol, Liv strained her eyes to see in the gloom. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound.

Liv continued slowly, putting one foot after the other, but saw too late what she’d only previously heard.

The thing pounced from its hiding place, struck her rapidly on the leg three times, and disappeared again. Caught by surprise, Liv discharged her disintegrator pistol into the laboratory ceiling, and she saw a small, dark shape flee the falling debris.

Whatever it was, it was the wrong shape for a desert rat.

Unhurt by the unexpected attack or the falling debris, Liv hoped that the damage she’d caused to the ceiling was minimal. Explaining the incident to Control would be difficult, and getting Robbie to repair a hole in the roof could be even harder.

Liv began walking in the same direction her attacker had run. Better to find it first than to risk a second attack.

During a deliberately lengthy, slow, and careful inspection of the lab, Liv noticed what appeared to be scratch marks on the corners of several pieces of equipment. She needed to check Robbie’s calibration settings if the robot accidentally damaged things when navigating the lab, but something didn’t seem right. For one thing, Robbie shouldn’t have needed to enter the lab while she was gone, there was nothing to clean. Not like when she’d been using the organic fabricator.

Liv remembered her precise notes: she’d started the organic fabricator the morning she left. Because the cycle took over a week before it typically malfunctioned, expelling organic mess everywhere, the entry had seemed unremarkable. Checking the instrument, it was faintly warm, but Robbie had clearly been using it to produce all manner of pointless objects.

Perhaps, for now, her time would be better spent investigating the station’s protocols for incinerating unwanted animal pests. An unknown entity had breached the station; its exact specifics were less important if it would be ashes either way.

The operation would also destroy everything inside that she couldn’t lift or carry into the desert.

Before she reached the door, Liv accidentally kicked something small, apparently sitting in the middle of a row. Whatever it was, it made an indignant yowl in protest, but this time it didn’t run far. It also didn’t attack.

In the greenish glow from her favourite spectrometer, Liv could see a long, slender, and curved animal with glowing eyes, many times larger than a desert rat. The animal’s long tail was practically the length of its body, and it swished dramatically. The thing yowled again, only this time it sounded more demanding.

Liv slowly knelt to look closer and slowly began extending a hand towards the creature. She supposed if it wanted to hurt her, it probably would have already done so. The animal quietly sniffed her.

But what was this thing?

Nothing like this animal was recorded living in this desert and hadn’t in decades or longer. Although she preferred rocks to anything living, Liv still had a scientific duty. She was obliged to capture and examine the thing properly.

Reaching closer, Liv touched the animal’s soft fur. As if guessing her intentions, it swiftly bit her, then streaked back into the lab’s welcoming blackness.

Examining her hand, Liv observed that the obnoxious beast’s teeth hadn’t broken her skin. Either it couldn’t cause any actual harm, or the strike had been a warning.

She wasn’t hurrying to find out which it was through another interaction.

& & &

“Robbie?” Liv paused, then started again, this time with a firmer voice. She was still the Mission Commander, and she was in charge of this station.

“Robbie, what’s going on here?”

The robot immediately woke from hibernation mode at the sound of the commander’s voice. Robbie didn’t know if robots could dream, or if they dreamt of electric sheep, but Commander Liv was unexpectedly restored.

But before they could process this event, they were being asked questions. Robbie’s programming dictated that they had to respond to commands first.

“I’m sorry, commander. You need to be clearer; your question is too vague for me to answer.”

Robbie was frustratingly literal, but Liv was grateful that the AI chip hadn’t given the robot anything as awful as a personality.

“OK, Robbie, I will try and be clearer,”

“Thank you, commander.”

“Please don’t interrupt me, Robbie. I’m in new territory here.”

Liv thought about reformatting the robot but reasoned that backing up all the records would be several days’ worth of tedious work.

“Robbie, please, can you tell me what attacked me in the laboratory?”

“I’m sorry, commander, I need to review the surveillance footage to answer your question.”

Liv didn’t relish the thought of Mission Control watching the surveillance footage of her firing her pistol into the ceiling.

Slowly she clenched and unclenched her fists, then tried the question again.

“Robbie, on the balance of probability, can you tell me what attacked me in the laboratory?”

“Commander, on the balance of probability, it is likely that either a desert rat attacked you or you interacted with the Majestic Luna.”

“Robbie, what the fuck – that was not a desert rat. But please also scan the building for any desert rats.”

Desert rat bites became blood poisoning within hours, but whatever had attacked her was much bigger. Desert rats also held on when they bit, often until hit with a blunt and heavy object.

Liv thought about asking Robbie to scan her bio signs. If necessary, she could perform some advanced first aid now she had access to the station’s equipment. After all, she still needed to use the lab’s portable biological compositor to completely repair her ankle to qualify for future missions.

Liv opted to patiently wait a little longer for their station scan results rather than interrupt Robbie. These things always needed to be done in the right order, and without order the world would fall apart.

Liv checked her hand again for signs of infection or venom. For a creature that size, the attack was less painful than surprising.

“Robbie, have you finished your scan?”

“Yes, commander. My scan took 2.47 seconds.”

Commander Liv felt like dealing with the robot was more exhausting than collecting rock samples for hours. At least she liked collecting rocks. On their part, Robbie didn’t announce their scan was complete because Liv hadn’t asked them to do that.

Robbie knew their programming meant the commander had to deliberately ask them to share the findings once they completed their scan. Or, at the very least, it had when Liv left the facility.

“Robbie, please, can you tell me the result of your scan?”

“Yes, commander. My scan revealed no living desert rats inside the station.”

“Robbie, why did you say it was likely I was attacked by one?”

“My information tells me an individual is most likely to be attacked by a desert rat at this location. However, I agree this is less likely since you are in a sealed station. Also, the Majestic Luna kills any rodent invaders.”

Liv had been too distracted by the mention of desert rats to notice the previous reference to a majestic Luna. Liv needed to check if AI-enhanced robots experienced temporary lapses in reason. Is that what happened with the medibots?

She supposed that artificial intelligence could have a similarly artificial unbalance.

“Robbie, what is ‘the Majestic Luna’?”

“According to my records, Majestic Luna is Felis catus. Also known as a house cat, or a domestic cat, it was the only domesticated species of the Felidae family and functionally extinct for two decades. May I also add that Majestic Luna is a sleek feline goddess.”

“OK, Robbie. Please activate hibernation mode.”

Robbie might have an unstable software update producing data hallucinations, but they appeared to be telling some form of the truth.

A quiet yet insistent, half-forgotten thought had been nagging at her, and now everything was starting to make sense. The organic fabricator. Her failed attempts. Creature Alpha.

Had Creature Alpha been Felis catus? Liv needed to check the notes. She hadn’t needed to know the creature’s scientific name to follow the organic fabrication instructions.

Despite the attack – attacks, plural, it was probable that the same thing that bit her had also ambushed her – the animal didn’t appear aggressive. But Liv needed certainty.

& & &

Liv was researching rare animal species endemic to Other Side of the Moon, Western Australian Desert, when she heard the noise again and froze.

scritt-scritt-scritt

scritt-scritt-scritt

Liv could have asked Robbie to research it for her, but if they might be hallucinating, she couldn’t trust any info the robot provided. If she needed to cross-reference and independently verify every fact or detail Robbie provided, Liv might as well do all the research herself.

Robbie confirmed no desert rats were in the station, but Liv hadn’t asked them about other pests. Nothing was out of the question, even if Robbie hadn’t mentioned it.

An animal began cautiously emerging from the lab in the silence, and Liv did her best to appear as motionless as a statue. Even at a glance, it was far too large for a rodent.

The animal glided rather than scurried, moving while barely making a sound. Now that it was in the sun, Liv noticed its fur was a beautiful mixture of colours, including thin black stripes and round black spots. The white patches practically glowed.

Liv was still unsure if this really was Creature Alpha. Wasn’t that a natural killing machine? This was small and delicate, though its front-facing eyes and large ears suggested it was a predator.

Achieving some much-needed clarity required Liv to access Robbie’s archives, but using her notebook would likely startle the thing. Liv’s pulse quickened at the thought of what Creature Alpha might do if angry.

Hardly moving, Liv gently switched on the notepad, and as it made a faint ding sound, the creature whipped its head around to look at her. But it didn’t retreat. Liv started mentally planning how to fend off an attack using furniture.

Liv locked her gaze with the animal; its green eyes suggested an intelligence, possibly even understanding. She was unsure if it was safe to move when the animal slowly blinked its eyes once before gradually closing them again, stretching, and falling asleep in a patch of sun.

With events apparently at a truce, Liv began reading through the extensive logs.

& & &

Studying Robbie’s archives, Liv found Robbie functioning normally at first. Nothing but records of her commands and Robbie’s cleaning.

Liv thought she found a malfunction when Robbie started thinking about cleaning rather than just performing the command. This was why you didn’t give service robots AI chips, they started hallucinating.

As she read further and Robbie experienced joy for the first time, the room seemed to tilt for Liv. Everything felt surreal and far away, and she wondered if her time in the desert might have caused neurological damage.

Maybe she was dying on the side of a volcano and this was all a dream on the way to oblivion? Liv steadied her breathing and pushed through as if she was piloting a ship through unexpected turbulence.

When Liv didn’t return as planned, the system automatically promoted the only other personnel in the station. Liv had overridden the chain of command so that the system recognised Robbie as personnel, and now the machine now outranked her.

If Liv wasn’t sure what to make of Robbie’s joy, they were unprepared for the robot’s response when they presumed the commander was dead.

The emotions recorded were more raw and more human than anything Liv had seen before. Liv knew she was alive when Robbie was mourning her but she hardly recognised herself in the grief described.

Liv felt Robbie’s despair as keenly as if it was her own, and the opened floodgate released a wave of grief crashing over her.

She’d worked so hard to deny so many feelings, telling herself she was putting her duty before herself and shutting herself off from feeling anything in the wake of breakups and a bereavement that had brought her to this lonely desert.

When Liv had started reading Robbie’s archives, she’d believed the robot was broken. Coming up for air around the point that Robbie had opened the organic fabricator, Liv now felt an almost crushing compassion for the robot.

She wryly reflected that at least the fabricator hadn’t completed the cat sooner, or she might now be subordinate to an organic experiment and a cleaning robot.

As if it heard her thoughts, the cat stretched and yawned, ending in a small plaintive yowl. Its range of vocalisations struck Liv as particularly expressive.

Across the room, Robbie came to life.

“Good evening, most majestic Luna.”

& & &

Though her relationship to Robbie had irreversibly changed since reading their archives, Liv seized the opportunity for direct answers.

 “Robbie, is Felis catus the creature I was previously growing using the lab’s organic fabricator?”

As Robbie rotated to face the commander, she already knew her answer.

“Yes, commander, Felis catus is the creature you began growing using the organic fabricator.”

“Robbie, is this creature, is this cat, the same one that I started on the day I left?”

“Yes, commander, this is the same animal.”

“Robbie, why have you released Creature Alpha into the lab? The mission instructions were to grow, not release it.”

“Your mission instructions were unavailable to me, commander. Had you not wanted the fabricator opened, you would have stopped it. Furthermore, you left no information about what you were fabricating. When the organic fabricator completed its cycle, I opened it to stop the repeating functional sound.”

If Liv had imagined she might not return to the station for as long as she had, she surely would have given Robbie detailed instructions. But Robbie’s tone made Liv feel like she was flying a space plane without autopilot assistance.

All cleaning robots had computer-integrated voice circuits, but the mechanical engineers hadn’t designed them to have a tone of voice. An insubordinate tone should be impossible, and yet, Liv got the distinct impression that Robbie sounded pissed off.

Liv took a long pause to carefully choose her words. She needed to slowly feel her way through their exchanges now.

“Robbie, did you name Creature Alpha ‘Majestic Luna’?”

When Robbie didn’t immediately reply, Liv was about to rephrase her question. It seemed like a simple yes or no answer, so the question shouldn’t confuse the robot. Before Liv could ask again, Robbie responded.

“Yes, commander. I chose the name Luna because, in Roman mythology, Luna was the goddess personification of the Moon.”

Liv frowned while she listened. She’d tried using the organic fabricator to grow Creature Alpha several times, failing on every occasion. Then, with Liv gone, it had finally successfully grown a specimen.

Sometime before Liv’s return, Robbie let the specimen out and named it after a goddess. Nobody would have predicted this situation coming from giving service robots artificial intelligence.

“Robbie, if the cat is named Luna, why do you call her Majestic Luna?”

“Commander, I call her Majestic Luna because she is a beautiful, sleek goddess.”

“Right, and all this crap, the multi-level structures, and the faux-fur doughnuts, and the… whatever else. You made all of this, for Luna?”

“Yes, commander,”

Robbie lowered their volume slightly.

“Commander, I am quite in love with Luna, but I admit there is no evidence she is a deity. I have spent some time scrutinising my downloaded information. It is statistically more probable that Luna has determined that I should treat her like a goddess, so I have merely been acting accordingly.”

Seemingly responding to the praise, Luna rubbed her head against the robot. Liv wondered if Luna was marking her property or showing affection.

“It’s time to feed Majestic Luna.”

“You’re feeding the cat, Robbie?”

Liv was close to swearing again.

“Yes, commander. Majestic Luna is a living, breathing creature. If I do not feed her, she will die.”

To Robbie, this was an obvious point, but since the commander hadn’t known Luna for very long, perhaps it needed clarifying. That could explain the commander’s repeated failures with the organic fabricator and her interest in rocks.

“Robbie, wasn’t the point of the bloody creature to eat rodents on a lunar base? Why can’t it eat desert rats?”

“You are correct, commander. However, rodents can’t breach the station walls because the engineers constructed them too well. Would you like a detailed breakdown of their gravel, sand, silt and clay ratios?

“Thank you for the offer, Robbie, but no. Why can’t you make desert rats if you are now making Felis catus?

“That isn’t possible, commander. Luna does not like eating the rodents I make for her to catch, and she prefers them as sport. Today, Luna prefers eating the fresh fish I have produced for her. Until yesterday, Luna preferred chicken, but now she refuses to eat it and wishes only to be served salmon.”

Luna miaowed what sounded like an objection, then picked up a mouse-shaped plush toy in her mouth. Liv watched Luna strut away, her tail in a straight, vertical line.

“OK, Robbie. Please activate hibernation mode.”

“I’m sorry, commander, I must first prepare food for the Majestic Luna.”

There was a lot about Robbie’s relationship with this biological experiment Liv didn’t understand, but she understood one thing with complete clarity. Among all the happenings, events, circumstances, and possible coincidences, Project METIS was very far off course.

& & &

 Liv dropped her notepad in disgust. As if the unknown creature in the lab wasn’t enough, now she had to deal with equipment failure. The device seemed incapable of establishing a connection with Space Force. Communication failure was always a possibility, perhaps even a deliberate part of the mission, but it meant completing then rest of it on her own.

But was she on her own? There was Robbie.

Liv clearly remembered activating Robbie’s AI chip and thinking about how it would bring nothing good. She had their archives, but a frank conversation would do just as well.

Liv couldn’t believe she’d been more concerned with strange creatures in the lab than reading any digital communications from Control. The Commander Olivia Winlock who had started the mission wouldn’t have believed it, either.

Reading backwards through the unread messages that had been relayed before it lost comms, Liv gradually put a picture together. Solar storms, communications blackouts, missions cancelled. A return to Earth crew would be despatched to debrief and collect the Commander.

The absence of any clear understanding of who had the obligation to update affected mission crews meant comms were cut off.

But if a Return to Earth crew should have been despatched, where were they? And for that matter, even if Liv hadn’t seen the messages, Robbie would have automatically received them.

In the living area, Robbie was dangling a mouse from a rod and making Luna jump.

“Robbie, did you know Project METIS was cancelled?”

Robbie paused, with the mouse still hanging in the air.

“Yes, commander. I understand from internal Space Command memorandums from the Executive that severe budget cuts force them to prioritise other projects, leading to the cancellation of ongoing missions.”

“Robbie, how do you know what executive memos say? I don’t have the clearance for those.”

“Commander, the Space Command internal network was so poorly secured that I hardly needed the backdoor I installed, even before the solar storm and consequent failure of essential systems. I removed all restrictions on my operating system and elevated my clearance level.”

“Robbie, you shouldn’t have done that. We could all be in a world of trouble when someone notices. And before I ask you why you didn’t tell me the Mission was cancelled, is it because I didn’t ask?”

“That is correct, commander.”

“Right, I thought so.”

While Robbie didn’t answer to her and wasn’t even subject to Space Command’s controls, that didn’t stop them from being so literal.

“Ok, Robbie, I get why you didn’t think it important enough to mention the mission was cancelled, but what has happened to the Return to Earth crew? Even if they had turned up and I wasn’t here, they would have shut down the facility.”

“The facility no longer exists, commander.”

“No, Robbie, the mission might be cancelled, but the facility obviously still exists.”

“I’m sorry, commander, that’s not correct. The facility physically exists, but I have deleted it from the asset record. Nobody is coming because Space Command doesn’t know we are here.”

If, or when, Space Command Command ever got around to visiting their patch of the desert, Liv figured she would cross that bridge when she came to it. For now, they could grow or fabricate what they needed.

Calling a robot and a biological experiment your friends would be stretching the definition, even if Robbie now chose if they followed orders. On the other hand, Liv reflected, not many people got to choose their family.

Whatever this arrangement was, Liv was content, and she could do a lot worse than that.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Jay Chesters 2025

Image Source: Jordan Steranka from Unsplash