The Pod

Author : Leah Hervoly

I have been drifting along for the past seven hundred and eighteen years. Things are starting to look the same. Puffy red nebulae over here, collapsing white dwarf over there. Once in a while I see a galaxy get sucked into a supermassive black hole like some kind of interstellar juice box. The colors are breathtaking and remind me of sunsets. The stars hardly change, though.

At first I tried to make my own constellations, but ran out of Latin names and animals and only managed to catalogue about twelve hundred. My programmer wasn’t the brightest in those departments. Every so often I think back on the day the escape pod ejected from the main ship and launched me blindly into foreign space. I’m not even sure what galaxy we were in when we were attacked.

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

As an android, we don’t really have a need for recreation or entertainment, although shutting down to recharge for longer than necessary is incredibly boring. The pod I’m in doesn’t offer much in the way of visual or intellectual stimulation. I don’t mind, though. I like to think I have a good imagination.

Its A.I. has become a bit eccentric as well. After about ninety years it decided that it was going to be a female and dubbed itself Samantha. She doesn’t talk to me anymore. She kept wanting to show me videos she had taken of people walking in front of the pod when it was still attached to the main ship. I found these dull and expressed my disinterest around the three hundred year mark. She hasn’t said a word to me since. I miss her singing.

Not that I’m really complaining though—I’m not lonely even without Samantha talking to me. The lack of company has been endearing and allows me to retrace the philosophical roots that my programmer installed. I know the Poetics by heart, and find that when I’m gazing out at the stars Plato’s theories are much more believable. I haven’t been able to wrap my wires around Descartes yet, but I’ll get there.

I’m not sure what the malfunction was that prohibited the pod in locating a civilized planet and landing. Samantha had muttered something about missing binary code, but I think that’s only because she was upset with me. Sometimes the radio transmitter crackles and I can hear indistinct voices requesting coordinates, but most of the time I just peg that as wishful thinking and turn off the communicator.

I smile slightly when I notice that another twenty four hours have passed. Another day ticks off on a file in my hard drive. I look out of the window and smooth down my monofilament fiber hair and blink my blue glass eyes. I absently fiddle with my plastic fingernails. I’m not worried that no one will find me, or that nobody realizes I’m gone.

I kind of like it out here.