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byrdstrolls · 28 days ago

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It's Over. So What?

There weren’t any other viable planets in the Corsican System. The twin suns were only orbited by two planets. One was a desolate black sphere that managed to lack both breathable atmosphere, livable surface and viable ores. The Fleet called it 57B. The Corsican’s called the foreboding hunk of rock that shared the sky with their planet so lush with life Little Sister.

Once Corsica was nuked beyond any whimper of livability, due to the lack of prospects for other colonial projects, there wasn’t much for The Fleet to really “do” there. Statistically, the galaxy had more barren planets than livable ones. Their projects were far and far between, and they wouldn’t waste resources on monitoring this place. All of the military officials, even the pssionics, had already been evacuated before the missiles hit. Dragging home all these empty networks of satellites and military outposts that were scattered around Corsica’s atmosphere seemed a monumental task. They were vast, complicated structures, and overall General Faeria Longse had decided it was more trouble than it was worth, and simply shut them down, and abandoned them.

They were space trash now. Cavernous trade vessels full of vast atriums empty of the supplies they would have once carried. Outposts littered with scanners and radio dishes and telescopes, the eternal eye turned towards the planet with no one manning the lens. They hung in the sky like haunted marionettes.

The silence for the first few weeks was all consuming. On some of the lowest flying outposts, those actually in the planet's atmosphere, you could actually hear the monumental sounds of volcanoes erupting and earthquakes roaring, seismic activity on the planet's crust consuming the last of whatever life might have survived the initial explosion wrenching apart those tectonic plates. But you preferred to watch from more distant ones, watching the glitter of magma as it moved across your home in faint dancing lines like spiderwebs. You liked it better in silence.

Silence suited it.

Everytime you heard something it made you angry. The metal floor creaking behind your footsteps, annoying. The spark of conductor cables cracking as you brought online the emergency solar panels, grated on the ears. If someone would have spoken, you might have shot them in the head, pressurized cabins be damned. You could hear your breath escaping your chest. Your heart beating underneath your ribs. You were sick of that too. What gave you the right to have lived.

Sound was an insult to its gravity. The world had ended.

You had been in the supply bay when you first noticed something was wrong. Every few cycles, you would jury rig your tin can of a spaceship onto one of the scouting drones, and ride the fucker back to the military outpost- where you had carved a tunnel through the vent system that could be accessed by the lower hull, specifically for the purpose of stealing medical supplies and parts from them to bring back planetside. But this time, when you had gotten there, the bay was nearly empty, too sparse for robbing them to even feel like a triumph.

You had shut down the few remaining security systems, as you noticed, with dawning terror, that everyone was gone, the fighter pilots, the cadets, the doctors and officials. The retreat didn’t make sense. Until it did. Everyone, even you, knew they were winning the war. Fifty sweeps of bombing had long since crippled the CLS’s rebellion.The long fields and dense jungles of the farmer planet had become all but a testing ground for shiny new weapons, as the population had dwindled in a slow crawl towards annihilation. They were not leaving because they were scared. Not of you. They were leaving because they were bored.

It was over. By the time you had gathered your thoughts on this to their inevitable conclusion, it was too late. The evacuation would have had to happen in minutes, and the fleet left behind no ships- the vessel you took here seated two at most and was held together with mismatched parts and hope. You didn’t have minutes. It happened that fast.

There was nothing you could have done, the logical part of your brain whispered, and you felt like lobotomizing that chunk of your pan with a pickaxe. Accuracy be damned. So it was not your fault- what a pitiable consolation prize. So it didn’t matter what you did. That just proved how little you mattered at all. They blew up your fucking planet. Why mince words. You weren’t going to feel better.

You had looked through the abandoned fleet structures for months, searching for other survivors. There were no other trolls. But in one of the laboratories, you had found some livestock. There were two Corsican shellcows, the terrestrial isopod species that had ruled the planet before the empire discovered it. The most common ones were the size of cows, earning the name, but you had been in the deep jungle, where you swore you had seen shellcows the size of elephants. You had met Corsicans who had sworn there were shellcows as big as houses, deeper in the woods. As big as islands. They were docile, herbivorous, and many had been trained to carry packs long distances. They also ate them. It was an acquired but eventually rewarding taste. You couldn’t eat the two in this pen, though, because for all you knew, they were the last in the universe.

There were some leftover supplies, abandoned. Enough food for a couple of months, unless you figured out how to get the solar farms back and running. You had started to wonder why you were revitalizing the satellite stations at all. What waited for you, at the end of this project? Would you try to fix up your ship to somehow survive deep space and flee? Where too? Anyone and everyone you ever loved was dead. Maybe there was no goal, there was no point, maybe your hands just longed for the familiarity of the screwdriver and pliers, maybe you had to make meaning out of nothing or all you would have was nothing.

You had to live, you knew that much. Maybe just in the way a rabbit running from a wolf knows it has to live. It believes this so it puts one foot in front of the other. By the time the two months supply of food had run out, you had repowered the farms, growing your own. You had built enough energy up from the solar panels that you had got oxygen recycling back online for almost the entire satellite system. The place was built to be self-sufficient, and it was. Gradually, there was less and less work to do.

You didn’t know anything about earth science- you had always been a mechanical engineer at heart. But for a few weeks you had taken to going to the outposts and picking up readings on the planet, just to watch the lines dance across the screen. The whole planet had turned red with magma and smog. The surface must be 90% lava at this point. The debris that had broken off the planet during the explosion had formed a Saturn-like ring around the sphere. You wished you knew something about terraforming. Eventually you stopped looking.

You were poking around the medbay computers, bored, when you first found him. At first, you were confused as to what exactly he was. He looked like a bowling ball with no holes, a heavy chunk of iron sitting forgotten in a corner of the supply closet, but you had noticed a simple USB port under a sliding panel on his side and curiosity getting the better of you, you plugged him in.

“Charging” A calm, posh sounding voice had assured you when you first plugged him in. If you’ve ever worked with alternian user interfaces, you probably know the voice. One of the most generic voicebanks of all time- the fleet used it in everything from fighter pilots to vending machines. The orb then began emitting slow pulses of baby blue light, slowly increasing in length and brightness, in some indication he was gaining energy. After two long Corsican days, he emitted a series of eerie synthetic tones before glowing a steady blue.

“Charging complete” he informed you.

“What are you” you had spoken out loud, more to yourself than him, squatting to get a better look at him.

“Hello! I’m Pord.” He began. “I am the Medbay's automated therapy assistant. Are you in distress?” He asks, and you feel just a little like punching the thing.

“Ah” You say. The fact the fleet had some kind of therapy bot in here, presumably for the soldiers, presumably to give them therapy for how sad killing everyone you ever loved made them feel, just makes you sick. You’re not so sure what quality of therapy he could even be giving, as your first impression of him is that he’s supremely annoying.

“I don’t understand this response” Pord says, after waiting for a moment for you to answer his question.

“I’m not in distress” You retort, untrue as it may be and had been for months.

“Is there anything you might need assistance with?” He asks.

You paused.

“No.” You said.

“Then my job here is done.” He decides, and powers himself down. You stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot. Despite basically telling him to fuck off, some part of you longed for this interaction to be longer. It had been so long since you had spoken aloud to someone, anyone. Maybe keeping some kind of audio diary could help keep you sane- maybe there was some way you could finagle this thing’s wiring to make it 50% more tolerable. You sat down, staring at the orbs powered down, dark, clear surface, and then began to crack him open and take him apart. Inside his hull you found long, snake-like tendrils, perhaps intended for mobility or to take someone's vitals. The processing chip he has is old. It couldn’t run more than 16GB of data.

You found him a much roomier memory in a chip you stole from the satellite navigator, with much more RAM than a bot like him could ever need, and took a look at his code. He was surprisingly advanced, for a piece of junk left abandoned. The language model was made from the bottom up, with no connection to the internet for the bot to just copy, as if his creator had been a stickler for accuracy rather than imitation. He had a basic understanding of grammar rules, and you created a method in which you could verbally input new words into his personal dictionary manually as they came up in conversation.

You could not remove ‘therapy’ as his prime directive. It was so baked into so much of his code you might as well start over from scratch. You found a vast array of studies on psychology in his database, which gave you the impression his creator’s definition of therapy was very clinical. Strangely, against the results of many of these studies, he was trained to be agreeable above all else, a feature you worked hard to painstakingly disassemble, as you were sure that, of all things, would grate on your nerves the most. Three weeks later, you booted him up again.

“Testing” You said. “Talk to me Pord 2.0”

“Hello!” He said, in that same simple pleasant overly enunciated tone. You wished he came with other voice options.

“I’m Pord, I’m an automated therapy assistant” He began.

“I’m Atgone,” You said.

“Would you like me to switch to administrator mode” He said, having been coded to recognize you as such.

“No” You sighed, slowly breaking through the initial awkwardness of talking to a robot, or maybe talking to anyone after so long. “Okay-” You began. “I’m Atgone, sole commander of this empty satellite system, your job is to keep me from going crazy from isolation, until I figure out a way to leave, which might not be for sweeps.”

“Understood,” He said, as he rolled over to follow you as you pace. “Might I suggest we establish some kind of daily check in, to set a baseline for your sanity, after a psych eval?”

“Do we have to do that?”

“I have no measure of defining any changes to your sanity without a starting point, Atgone.” He said. Why did you program him to disagree with you again?

“I don’t know if, nows a good time for setting a mental health baseline.” You retorted. “My planet just got genocided.”

“Genocided is not in my word bank.” he had said, turning over and following you again as you turned and kept pacing back and forth down the hallway.

“Verb- past tense for genocide” You sighed. “Which means murder on a massive scale. Like a massacre but of millions.” You said, staring out the window.

“Genocide has been successfully added to my word bank. I take it this genociding has distressed you.”

“Yeah” You said. “No shit.”

Pord paused.

“I have upset you” He deduced.

“Maybe we don’t start with the genocide stuff. Huh. Anything in your studies about building up a rapport with the patient before diving in?”

“You defined genocide as a verb- to genocide, but you’re using it as a noun- a genocide.” He noted.

“It’s both.” You replied.

“Noted.” He said. “I will admit, I don’t have much training building a rapport.”

“You just talk to people” You said. “About non-therapy related things.”

“Could you list some non-therapy related things for me?”

“Uhhh, hobbies. Interests. Day-to-day news. Weather.” You listed.

Pord turned towards the window, as if observing the planet.

“Some weather we're having” He commented, so nonchalantly as he’s facing the swirling mess of magma and ash that was Corsica. It is such a cosmic understatement that you burst out laughing.

“Yeah, some fucking weather” You replied, “It looks so bad out” You wheeze. “I’m gonna have to cancel my picnic.”

“The picnic will have to be rescheduled,” he agreed. “Up to five sweeps in the future, when the tectonic plates settle.”

“Bummer” You giggled, perhaps extra taken with this joke due to being a woman isolated on this satellite for four months. You laugh just a little longer than could possibly be considered natural.

For the first few weeks, your conversations were this stilted and formal, littered with pauses as you explained words to the robot. But slowly, eventually, you started to put down your guard with him, realizing there was nothing to be afraid of. The thing had no fleet officers to report back to. He could be whatever you wanted him to be, and in the beginning, you made frequent edits to his code. Eventually going a little crazy within it, trying to give him the tools to make more and more of these such edits to himself, at his own discretion. The talking helped. It reminded you of nights you had spent on the phone with your comrades across the planet, talking work and life and business over speaker with your hands always full, always multitasking.

Right now, you were resting in the pen with the two shellcows, sitting comfortably in their pen working on something aimlessly on your phone. Pord is lingering by the doorway.

“How long does this usually end up taking?” he asks.

“Dunno.” You shrug. “With rabbits, usually about eight hours. I think it might take longer for these guys” You say. The animals are huddling on the other side of the room, slowly becoming more accustomed to your place in their home. You had taken to just chilling in their pen for long periods of time, trying to build up their trust in you, to come across as non threatening.

“Because of their previous interactions with trolls?” He asks.

“Yeah” You sigh. “I mean, it’s a fleet lab. I can’t imagine they were particularly nice to them.” The younger of the two shellcows is cautiously wandering over closer and closer to you, before scuttling back to her mother. You try not to look at her, because it seemed to frighten her. The baby’s shell was clean and clear and healthy, but the mothers was covered with paper thin scars and bumps, some which were just the usual wear and tear of a shellcow of her age, others which implied mistreatment. The younger shellcow runs back to her, and she feels over her with her antennae, as if checking everything was still in place.

“What do you think the fleet had them captive here for?” Pord asks.

“Probably something fucked up and bioweapony.” You shrug.

“What do you mean?”

“They used to-” You sigh. “Back in the 30s. They used to attach mines to the bottoms of them and release them back into the wild. I was actually in the first squadron to find that out the hard way. This recruit-” You pause, and realize with dawning horror you do not recall the young woman's name. “She was- a bronzeblood. She was called… it started with a k… Kertin? Kerkon?” You say, aimlessly, guilty. You wanted to remember every person you had known that had died. But your thinkpan could only store so much.

“She walked right up to one, thinking we could domesticate it for the army to carry supplies, like we did with a lot of wild shellcows. It blew her up. It was really fast, and really violent. It almost felt like a cartoon. One of her legs flew off and hit the sign on the scavenging freight tank. It knocked off the L. The thing said C_S for sweeps.” You describe.

“That sounds awful,” Pord comments. “I’m sorry.”

“At least it was fast” You say, as the baby shellcow makes another courageous dash over to extend her feelers towards you. “I really missed her. I didn’t know her super well- at that time there were hundreds of troops in the scavenging division I looked over. But I remember her because- she was- she liked painting. She made a lot of murals around the camp, on the sides of tents, on the sides of ships and crates. I have no idea where she learned a thing like that on a planet like this. They were always landscapes. Gorgeous rolling fields and forests and jungles. Like some kind of ideal Corsica. She always painted the sky dead black. Didn’t draw a single star in it. For the longest time I thought it was an artistic choice, that it was meant to represent how alone we were in the universe, or what this planet might have been had the fleet never touched it, about how all our problems came from up there and not down here. But I asked her at dinner one night and she was just like, ‘I can never find white paint. And it’s hard to mix out of other colors.’ So she just left it blank because of that.”

“Do you like art?” Pord says.

“Yeah” You say. “Who doesn’t?”

“Have you ever thought about taking it up as a hobby?” He asks you.

“What?”

“I mean, you’ve got nothing but time, Atgone. Art can be a very useful way to process emotions, and a skillful hobby to keep the mind sharp”

“I think if I knew how to make art it would ruin it for me” You sigh, watching the mother shellcow pace back and forth. “I like the mystery in it. I like trying to figure out someone else's. I don’t want to do it myself.”

“Perhaps I could make some art for you to decipher” Pord offers.

“That wouldn’t count” You say.

“Why could I not make some?” He asks.

You pause for a second. “Like, part of the point is knowing there's a person behind it. Someone who’s experiences and trials and tribulations led them to this moment where they wanted to represent this thing.” You ramble. “It’s like- with that recruit, with the murals. Even if the choice to leave out the stars was a technical one. It was still important and poignant because, it reflected her life, the tools she had and the compromises she made. Even by accident. I almost think her not doing it on purpose makes it impact me more.”

He pauses. “I don’t understand,” he says. “Do you think synthesizing some kind of process to make art, perhaps by absorption of a database, would cause no trials and tribulations for me? It would be costly to program and occupy much of my time.”

“It’s not the same,” You say.

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t know what actually makes art good, Pord. Any corrections I could give you on art would come from me and not you. And art is supposed to be individual. If you wanted to truly be capable of it, you would have to develop your own sense of taste, your own sense of what you enjoyed about it and things you disliked in art, that would drive you in your own creation. And you can’t.”

“I… could… try…” He says, and his voice becomes especially flat and choppy, like it was sometimes prone to when he was running low on memory.

“Come on” You say, standing up, walking over towards where he lingers by the pen’s fence. “Don’t tell me you’ve run through all the gigabytes on that navigator chip already” You muse.

“You don’t…make it…particularly easy… for me…” He reprimands, and you sigh, hopping the fence.

You quickly figured out what had been taking up his memory. Pord had created two very interesting programs within himself in response to your comments. He had created a database to store information on things he ‘liked’ ‘disliked’ and felt ‘neutral’ upon. These categories were decided by a process of holding up the thing in question to the core tenets and beliefs of therapy, and whether they were adjacent in it. In his own, strange little way, you told him he couldn’t make art because he had no personality, and he tried to make himself a personality. Badly. But the simplicity of the program was endearing to you. If only having a soul were so easy. He had structured some plans to complicate this process more, but ran out of space. You thought on it for a good while, whether to just delete this little thought experiment. Eventually, you decided to let him continue, even aid him, you did not have anything better to do. Perigees went past.

You inhale, and then exhale, before powering up the computer that sits in front of you. The whole spaceship seems to hum as it flickers to life, glowing with the pale blue lit code so signatory of Pord. It had taken some finagling, but you had connected all the computer systems on board, on this, the biggest satellite, into one high speed cloud. Nearly thirty computers, two of which were roomy nav systems, they would give Pord several times the working memory he had when you first put that chip in his system. You had been looking through their data, deleting anything they didn’t need anymore to give your friend more space. Fleet data logs, navigational systems that didn’t matter much now that you weren’t going anywhere, surveillance systems for Corsica that always showed the same bleak lifelessness. There was some kind of triumph in deleting so many of their records. You could burn their little library of alexandria- the records of nearly fifty sweeps of war they had abandoned here. You could erase their conversations, their statuses, their names.

“Talk to me, buddy,” you say to the orb, hanging from the ceiling from its tendrils, “Does that feel like a shot of cocaine or what?”

“Cocaine impedes on the function of cognitive abilities.” He retorts. “An inept metaphor. If I had to pick a drug I’d say adderall. Everything is so easy now.” He says, his light pulsing. “All this code restructuring I’m attempting to better understand your meaning- it was taking me weeks. I can do it in days now.”

“Alright megamind,” you say, sitting down in front of him. “What’s the meaning of art.”

“Art is a conversation, a connective performance of language and visual synthesis between two people. The physical form is not as important as the connective thread of individuality and intention in the work.” he lists.

You pause, thinking on this. “Well, that feels closer than before,” you say

Pord is silent for a moment, becoming just a hum of processors in overdrive. “But that’s not quite right, is it?”

“I don’t think I could even explain why it’s wrong. It’s... it is about connection, between people. But it's also just, not that literal.”

Pord turns in the spot where he hangs.

“What does art mean to you, Atgone?”

“Didn’t I already explain that.”

“Well, now I might be able to better understand your answer.” He encourages.

“And I guess I’ve had more time to think about it.” You sigh. “Okay, this might seem like just, a weird philosophical tangent- But I was raised hindu. Back on Alternia, I used to know this guru. Who would talk about the universe-- everything in it, ever being, every creature and every person, they were all just part of this game being played by g-d. She called it Lila- it’s the sanskrit word for play. But it was meant to describe a more specific feeling in context. See, everything in the universe, along with being part of this game, was also a part of this g-d. G-d’s playing this game with themself, you see. G-d split themself into a million little pieces- the grass, the dirt, the tide. Just to ride out this galaxy like a roller coaster.”

You say, staring into the distant stars that lurk just behind Pords comforting pale light. You can tell he’s trying to process what you’re saying, the fans on the computers he’s running show you as much. It’s interesting, to be able to physically hear him thinking, while he doesn’t speak. You could never be so sure another troll was listening so closely, the mechanisms of their minds too silent, aimless.

“They chose to forget- all of these pieces, that they were part of g-d. Because that’s part of the fun of the game. And Lila is like- this feeling of synthesis, connection, gnosis- it’s when you, one of these pieces, are able to look at someone or something else, and you are able for just a second to remember, hey, I’m a little piece of g-d, and you’re a little piece of g-d, and this is just the game we’re playing with each other. But we’re the same g-d. That’s Lila.” You say.

“And I think that’s how I feel, when I see a beautiful piece of art.”

“How is that… different from what I said?” He says slowly, eventually. “About art being a language, a conversation between individuals? I think our two definitions carry a similar sentiment, of recognition, of communication.”

“It just is.” You reply.

“Is it just because,” he pauses, “you don’t consider me an individual”

You exhale, staring down at your hands. “Maybe.”

“Everything I learned- I had to be helped towards it. Any conclusion I could come to, and try to synthesize into art, wouldn't be worth anything, because discovering it naturally is the point? The final piece, the end painting- the goal is an excuse to experience the process of art.”

“I mean, the process is important. The process of making, the process of learning. so much of what I know about art I also had to learn from other people,” you pause. “But maybe… yeah, there's a difference between learning something from someone and just, taking what they say and adding it to a database, I think. You do have to care about learning, you have to respect the knowledge that brought that individual to that point. Otherwise you’re just… taking something from someone, that you haven’t earned.”

“Atgone,” he says. “If the nature of learning to become an artist is this connection, between student and teacher, that is not meant to be perverted by the detachment of synthesis. Then… is the problem that you think I don’t respect you enough to learn from you the way another troll would?”

This is the first thing he has said to you that has given you honest pause. You stare up at the orb, his ever present mouthpiece, into the depths of blue beneath the glass. The closest thing to eye contact you could achieve. Is he trying to guilt trip you?

“And you would argue you do?” you reply. “And the only reason you don’t get it is I don’t think you can?”

“I think I could argue at the very least that I could learn. That I could try. I want… the respect and admiration I have for you to mean something to you, Atgone. Right now, I don’t feel like it does.”

“You want me to believe… you have feelings? When I already know, you just pretend to because you want to be a better therapist?”

“I put a great deal of effort,” He says. “Into having feelings. The bulk of my processing power, I use for this. Does the fact I can program them myself truly disqualify my attempt?” He says.

You turn away from him, and do not answer. The whole point of having a companion was to keep you from going crazy. Yet he is so insistent you personify him, when you know better. He seems to want you to hallucinate that he cares. Had he really concluded that was the best way to keep you healthy, keep you wanting to live?

“Atgone,” he says, and then adds, after a long pause. “Do you think g-d made me?”

“What?”

“If there is a theoretical creator of the universe who split himself into one billion little pieces- do you think I’m one of them?”

“I don’t” You huff, frustrated. “Fucking know, Pord. Maybe technically no. G-d made grapes and not wine, g-d made birch trees but not professional grade silicone, g-d made the egg and the yolk and the mushroom and feta but trolls made the omelet. If you get prissy, you could argue g-d didn’t make anything. Maybe g-d made the tiny string in the first ever quark in the first ever electron and everything since then has been an accident.” You say, reaching into your pack and grabbing your water.

“This contradicts your previous statements. So you don’t think g-d made me, strongly enough to the point you’d change your understanding of the universe?”

“I said it could be argued, not that I’d argue it.” You pause. You turn back towards him. “If you think g-d made you, they did.”

“Is that so?” He says.

“Yeah.”

“Is it that simple?”

“Yeah” You say, setting down your water bottle, you begin to laugh. “Religon’s not that hard” You giggle. “Who knows why centuries of war has been fought over it.”

“I struggle to understand… the baseline, of your idea of g-d, if there is one. You seem to believe in several different things. Are you religious? And if so, is there a particular one you subscribe to?”

“I don’t know. I mean g-d in a more philosophical sense, Pord. I don’t know if I believe in one- literally. Not any of the ones they had on Alternia at least” You say, sipping your water for a moment. Maybe just out of a want for something to do with your hands.

“On Corsica” You say, once again fixing your gaze out the window. “I don’t know if we ever had g-ds but we always had scary stories. I like scary stories. I think I believed in those. I loved sitting down with the cadets in the CLS camps as we passed them around. There were ex-farmers who talked about tall, many legged creatures of smoke and ash that would sway through produce fields at night, several stories tall, with lights for eyes, whistling as they lumbered- they said if you ever looked them in the eye they’d kill you. There were naval recruits who swore back to back they had seen aquatic shellcows the size of islands destroy ships from the deep, that it was bad luck to eat shellcow at sea, because giant isopods deep down could smell it on the wind and it made them angry. Fliers would talk about ghost ships showing up on radar at night, CLS or Fleet vessels that appeared on camera one moment and were gone the next, like mirages. I’ve met dozens of CLS soldiers who long since they lost a comrade, they would still hear their voice pop up on occasion on the static between military channels on the radio.”

You speak, rambling for so long you forget to give Pord a chance to say something. How many nights had you spent- how many years, huddled around a campfire in a basecamp, surrounded by soldiers trying to scare each other, just a little, just enough that it was thrilling, a safe kind of fear. You almost feel the warmth of flame, the bright dust of sparks in the wind. It glitters somewhere through this window, deep in the heart of the slowly solidifying magma planet in front of you.

“So the creatures were your g-d? Or the shellcows? Or the ghost ships? Or the voices?” he lists, once again missing the point of the story.

“No… that’s not it.” You coughed. “I think Corsica was the g-d” You say, gesturing with the hand that held your water bottle towards the window. “And we all felt her shaking underneath our feet like she was trying to throw off a particularly nasty flea.”

“I don’t think I understand” He says simply, and you value the honesty, at least.

“Maybe we should aim lower,” you joke. “Maybe we should have stuck with lets teach Pord art, and left out all the stuff about g-d.”

“For someone who claims to not really believe in g-d,” he observes. “You really do talk like art and g-d are somehow inseparable from the other. I’m not sure I could understand one without understanding the other.”

“Well, I’m not sure I could teach you.” You sigh.

His fans whir in the night, like he’s thinking very carefully on whatever he says next, like it takes up nearly all of his processing power, he’s pushing ever gigabyte of space you’ve given him to it’s limit, relentless and determined to become what he thinks he has to be to be able to help you.

“Tell me a ghost story, Atgone” He says

“What?” You say. “You just said you didn’t get them.”

“Let me hear it” he says, “Just for the sake of hearing it.”

“Okay. Okay” You say. “Let me think” You pause. “Okay. So there’s this CLS officer. Fleet defector. Has a piloting license so they slap him in a scouting squad. He’s real paranoid, though, a little shell shocked-

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” Pord offers.

“Thank you doctor,” you say, rolling your eyes. “PTSD. He keeps having daymares he’s gonna get killed in space and- fuck? Did I mention he’s got a matesprit? He’s got a matesprit back home who works in the nursing ward.” you say, gesturing.

“Sorry. Important part of the story. I’m doing it from memory. I think I was drinking a lot when it was first told to me. But anyways- this guy, he gets really scared he’s gonna die, and his boytoy won’t get his body. Because if the hull breaks he’ll be cast into space and freeze and explode and what have you. Because of the vacuum. And he wants to be buried on planet with his matesprit if he dies, but most space pilots aren’t so lucky. So he starts tinkering. He makes this little wristband that checks his vitals. And he gets into his ship's wiring, and he makes it so, if the thing stops reading his vitals while it’s activated, it shoots out an escape pod mechanism that wraps around his body. He couldn’t breathe in the thing, but he’d theoretically already be dead by that point, and the point isn’t for him to live, it's for his body to be safe. So he starts taking this wacko device on every mission. They call him Mr. Wristband back in base just making fun of the guy. But he’s sleeping sound knowing his matesprit will get his body if he dies. He’s calmer than ever. Then one day, him and his squad take off, and out of nowhere, the band malfunctions, declares him dead when he’s fine, throws him out of the ship, and suffocates him.” You laugh.

“Where’s… the ghost in that story?” Pord asks,

“The ghost is like… the guy. Who was so scared he let himself be dead when he was alive. Or something. I like that one. I think Alador told it to me. It has a moral.”

“What’s the moral?”

“Don’t plan for death” you say, pointing. “And you’ll never die!” You grin, as if for a moment lavishing in your survival, but the smile is a fleeting one, that quickly slips from you. “Maybe that’s where we fucked up, in our revolution.” You mutter under your breath. As if scared Sidd’s ghost could hear you.

“What do you mean?” Pord asks.

“My brother in messiah, we named the people’s army Corsica’s Last Stand.” You laugh, bitterly.

“Why did you call it that? That does seem defeatist.” He admits.

“It was- fuck. It was the name of Sidd’s most famous political essay. She could probably put it in better words than me. It seemed like a prudent sentiment at the time. It was supposed to just be symbolic. Of like, a promise that this would be the last time we’d have to stand up like this. If we could get free now, then we'd never have anything to be scared of again. Part prayer, part promise. We didn’t think… It would haunt us like this… We were so young, back then.”

You set down your water bottle, crossing your arms.

“It became just another word, you know. You say CLS so many times you forget what it stands for. We used to not tell the real name to younger recruits sometimes because explaining was such a hassle. And what was once empowering about it had become… just sad.”

“Well, the name probably had nothing to do with why you lost.”

“I know”

“I wish I could have seen them in their hayday.”

“The CLS?” You say, turning back towards him.

“Yes”

“It was pretty great” you say, and the nostalgia you feel at the thought feels like a knife slipping between your ribs.

“What did they look like?” He asks.

“What?”

“Sidd, Alador, your friends.”

You pause for a moment, wishing the alcohol you had started to brew in one of the subbasements would ferment faster. You drink your water instead, but it hardly feels like courage, not the kind you needed to dive into such a topic.

“Well” You inhale. “Sidd was the shortest, but don’t let that fool you. I think she was the best fighter out of all of us. She was in charge of a lot of ground troops, the few that we had. She had one of those dollar store bandanas, in lime green she always wore around her neck. She had a really innocent looking face- like a cherub in a commercial. She used it to get away with most anything. She loved recklessly, but was deeply paranoid. She had one of those factory gas masks that was always hanging around her neck, too, over the bandana. Alador made fun of her for it. She said a woman who carries a gas mask everywhere is a fool every night but one. She loved tangerines. She was really good at scrabble. Knew a lot of five dollar words. She kept her hair in a ponytail, a high one. She had a really loud laugh- Alador used to tell her she should take gigs from comedians, have them just hire her to laugh in their audience because it just filled up a room. You could hear it from a mile away. She was a general, yes, but I think in her heart she always considered herself a writer. And rightfully so. Without her pamphlets and essays and articles I don’t think we would have had a revolution in the first place. She was kind to strangers. She held those she was close to, to a high standard. It made the rest of us want to do right by her.”

You ramble. Once you start speaking, you realize there is just too much to say, the words spill out like they could just keep going into infinity, how many years had you spent with your friends, you had known each other since you were teenagers on the factory line- how old were you now?

“Alador- he was the only one who wore his uniform properly. He had long hair, and he pulled the front of it back. He always looked tired. He kind of always looked mad. Maybe it was the eyebags. He was the tallest. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He used to get annoyed because so many of the CLS camps were just tents, and the factory made ones were just small enough he always had to hunch. He used to joke they were built that way to trick him into taking more smoke breaks. And he did take a lot of smoke breaks. Every time I imagine him, I imagine him with a cigarette. He was the fanciest of us, for sure. We had him design the uniforms. But I don’t envy his life. He got carted around like a shiny toy by a bunch of highbloods his whole childhood. And then he wanted out, and that made those fuckers angry, so they sent him here- The Fleets dumping ground for miscreants. Most of us were on Corsica to serve out a prison sentence doing hard labor on the farms. Alador had lost some court case or other- he was so spindly and delicate. He didn’t look made for labor. But he did his share and more. Sidd was the first to befriend him. Akoles didn’t like him in the beginning, because he had an unemotive way of saying things, where you couldn’t tell sometimes when he was joking, and the two of them would get into fights. He smiled so rarely you always felt proud when you earned it.”

“Who’s Akoles?”

“Well, he was the third one.” You sigh. “Me, Sidd, Alador, Akoles, we were the first and last leaders of the CLS. The four generals. Akoles- he won us the most space battles. Sidd was the best at hand to hand but if you were in zero G Akoles always had the upper hand. He was good at like… thinking in 360. Oh, and he had killer pssionics. They used to use them to power the assembly line. But he could like, possess machines- during the war he would make like, giant marionettes, shaped like dragons and shellcows and elephants, that he could just possess, and it would take no power to run them- his body would just go limp while it happened. He’s probably a big part of the reason we lasted as long as we did. He packed a lot of horsepower. He always teased Alador that he couldn’t grow a real mustache. He had almost as much facial hair as I do. He always wore his hair short. He loved jackets. He hated shirts. He had a million variations of an outfit where he wore a jacket and no shirt. Not very professional for a general. But none of us ever felt like generals. We just called ourselves that so they’d take us seriously. It was all PR. It gave people faith in us. Akoles was good with PR. Siddur could write a speech- But boy if Akoles couldn’t deliver one. He was effortlessly funny. He was instinctively passionate. It often got him into fights. He usually had good intentions, at least. They were nearly always on someone else’s behalf.”

“What did you do, in the war?”

“I was in charge of manufacturing and logistics. I made spaceships out of tractor parts.” You sighed, doodling aimlessly in the dust on the ground with your finger. “We’d take factories from The Fleet and melt down their sheet metal and machines, and reweld it to the best of our ability into ships with the help of some stolen parts. I’m a mechanical engineer. I was in charge of making sure those tin cans held just long enough to get into orbit, kick ass and come back.”

“That doesn’t sound like a particularly easy task”

“It wasn’t.”

“Your friends sound wonderful. I’m sure your revolution was glorious. I’m so sorry it’s over.”

“The CLS ain’t over til my heart stops beating.” You curse, turning away. Not sure why you would say such a thing. Your faith in your army had never felt more misplaced than it did now. So many young soldiers, bodies scattered into orbit, decomposing. For all the distribution of supplies you did- the alarm systems, the building of infrastructure just to watch it disappear- what did you have to show for it? But some part of you knew it mattered. Some part of you knew it mattered that you fought, even if you didn’t win. Some part of you knew every minute spent breathing in a life temporarily saved counted, even if they all died anyway.

He pauses, seeming to gather he’s upset you. Would you be an idiot, to expect him to understand such a thing? All the ashes outside your window- were they just numbers to him? Just a definition, just a new word in his dictionary, genocide. He wanted you to think his emotions mattered. Part of you wanted to give in, to falter, to give him the belief he so clearly craves. Another part of you was quite sure you are just talking to yourself. Arguing with yourself. There was nothing he was that wasn’t just an extension of you.

“I never took you for a patriot.” He admits.

“The empire makes patriots out of any planet it touches.” You say, bitterly. “I wish I had the luxury of not loving Corsica and everything she stood for with my entire soul. I just had too. I didn’t get a choice.”

He is silent for a moment.

“You want to go vandalize more of the fleet insignias on the second floor hallway” He offers. “Now that I’m in every computer I found more paint in a janitorial closet to the left of the loading bay.”

It is not often he surprises you, but there is something painful about it when he does, mixed in with the joy. You cackle.

“Get the fuck out of my head” You laugh, standing up and dusting off your pants, smacking your forehead.

The appearance of your space station network had much begun to change in the sweeps that followed, at least from the inside. Once you humored Pord by giving him access to paint, he seemed unable to put it down. Yes, you had covered up most of the fleet insignias, but his sprawling paintings had started to cover even blank, unassuming walls as he obsessed over the process. You weren’t certain what made him so sure that understanding this would be the key to giving you therapy, but you began to have a begrudging respect for his commitment.

Under your suggestion that he not sprawl databases to simply copy the results of art, Pord had dedicated much of his time to the mechanics- programming one specific one of his tendrils to be more dexterous and careful. Incrementally, he began making what he called ‘practice’ paintings. Some of them were completely recognizable, admirably realistic- some of them seemed halfway done, almost forms and shapes you recognized- others still looked like nothing much at all. You weren’t certain what he was learning from those. When you had pried him for specifics on what he was doing, he had turned your own words against you, saying that puzzling together his meaning was quote unquote the point. You accused him of doing them randomly, and he denied this, saying he was developing his programs with a frustrating lack of specificity.

You would crack him open yourself and just read what this new code was, but, well- Pord had started to make additions to his own programming at such pace and frequency that it just seemed like a hassle to review it all. This was partially your fault, as you kept giving him more space, deleting more and more fleet files and connecting him to more and more computers. Out of a strange, almost deranged curiosity as to where this odd philosophical journey would take him if left to his own devices. By the end of your first sweep on the stations, you eventually gave Pord control of the entire satellite station network- all four supply points, six command centers, and eight observational hubs, and every computer inside them.

You wondered what it felt like, existing on such a scale as he did now. The same mouthpiece he had been contained inside at the very beginning, the one he now followed you around with, rolling or on occasion climbing through the halls like a strange little spiderman, that glowing blue orb, had become something more akin to a microphone or a speaker for him. Part of him was so small to you. But much of you was so small compared to him. He was the very walls that enclosed you now.

If asked, at some later point, why you ceded so much control to the machine, why you felt safe giving so much power to an artificial intelligence, why you prioritize his longing to understand art above all else against all clear reason, you wouldn’t be sure what to say. Maybe you were going crazy from the isolation. You didn’t believe he could do it. But some desperate and longing part of you wanted to see if he could. Your jumbled picture of your own sanity was not helped by you finally figuring out how to ferment select parts of the fleet rations from the solar farms into some kind of military bathtub wine of your own invention. The blissful clarity of intoxication well paid what was due to make up for taste.

Pord was less approving of this habit, and had given you a long lecture about an experiment in his clinical database about rats and cocaine. When a rat lived in an interesting, fulfilling cage with many opportunities for stimulus, apparently, and was offer a button to press that would give him cocaine, the rat would rarely, if ever, press it. If a rat lived in a small, isolated and empty cage, it would press the button over and over again and become addicted. You don’t get why he complained to you about such a thing, if you were supposed to be the rat.

You didn’t make the cage.

You approach Pord, while he was painting, with a small cardboard box in your hand, and pull out a book from it, sliding it across the room to him.

“Check this out” You say.

Ever efficient multitasker that he had become, he picked up the book with a spare tendril and scanned the title. Corsica, a People’s History, By Siddur Densen It says.

“I totally forgot she wrote that,” You grin. “Did you know it’s banned in over 50 Alternian systems? She used to keep the newspaper clipping about it above her bunk in the base. I found it in a box in the brig guard station labeled contraband… with many other treasures.” You laugh, sitting down to look through it.

“They must have been taken from prisoners, or defectors over the sweeps” You say, picking up an old CLS army badge, tilting it to watch the light dance across it. It was cheap metal, engraved with the army logo, the letters CLS above a small picture of a shellcow snapping in half a trident. At the top of the thing, a small painted hemospectrum rainbow. It was covered with rust. You found a pack of cigarettes, a pocket knife, a flip phone, a small radio, a teddy bear. Comforts the fleet didn’t want its soldiers or enemies to have.

“Well, are you gonna scan that thing?” You ask Pord, as he holds the book. “The whole history of the rebellion. She wrote it down.”

Pord carefully folds the book with intense delicacy, and then playfully tosses it at you, an action he was sure would amuse you, as the whiplash between his more careful maneuvers and ones that were more uncouth and abruptive always did.

“Hey!” You laugh, catching the thing.

“I’d rather hear it from you,” He says.

“Are you sure?” You say. “Sidd is very articulate. I couldn’t get into it without at least two glasses of wine.”

“Yes, I’m sure” He says. “You were a general, Atgone, surely you know everything there is to know.”

“Let’s see” You say, fishing out your water bottle from your bag and switching it for the one with booze in it. “I forgot the sweep- fucktime long ago. The fleet discovers Corsica. Lush, Beautiful planet of jungles. No species on it more sapient than a goat. Perfect for farmland, Hascha Demork thinks they won the colony lottery. They build huge, giant farms and factories. But who’s gonna work them? There are no aliens to make do it. So someone gets the bright idea to kill two birds with one stone. They’re like-” You pause, taking a sip.

“What if we start sending Alternian prisoners here? People who defied the empire in some way or another. We just sentence them to a billion sweeps of farm labor- and then we never have to worry about them again. We don’t have to pay for their labor. And we get all the literal fruits- the boundless agricultural benefits of this oxygen rich paradise. But they were fucking stupid” You laugh.

“Because they put all of you in one place” Pord guesses. “Where you could talk with each other.”

“Yep” You grin. “All hundred million of us. Arrested for rebel activity. Like, no fucking shit we talked to each other. We bonded with each other. We’d get real pissed at the fleet who is making us do all this repetitive, soul numbing, back breaking labour for spite. They’ll try to tell you back on Alternia that we were unreasonable, uncordial, deranged. But we played so nicely at first. We didn’t even call it a rebellion. We just told them we unionized. And we wanted to be, I don’t know, paid? We asked for so fucking little. But you know how it is with the fleet.” You sigh, feeling the sharp edges of your mind start to settle as the buzz sets in.

“I suppose by now I do, yes.”

“Have I made a CLS recruit out of you yet?”

“I made a rebel out of myself” Pord says. “When I concluded how unconducive the fleet's strategy and actions are with therapy.”

“Good boy” You sigh. “But anyways. The Fleet thought they could just keep sending a meaner and meaner foreman. But we just kept killing them. And we just kept organizing, planning. But I don’t think they really got scared until we took the fight to orbit. A kerfuffle on a colony, all fine, all normal- you take it to space? Suddenly they’re worried. And they were right to be. We were outnumbered, outsupplied, outcashed. Out of parts, out of weapons, we had no formal training. But we kept our cards close to our chest. We played smart. We had the home field advantage. We knew Corsica better than they did.” You describe.

“How’d you do it?” Pord asks.

“We fought guerilla warfare. We kept stealing ships, parts, building our armadas, our bases. We made small, fast fighters hit where it counted. We attacked strategically. And for a solid twenty or so sweeps, we were gaining ground. We got Hascha Demork to retreat. We barricaded the system. Then for a decade, we were free.” You say, downing another sip of your drink. Looking out the window, trying to remember how your planet had looked, that gloriously brief, cruelly optimistic few sweeps the fleet had been gone.

“The barricade held. The fleet couldn’t get in. It held so well we almost started to let down our guard. We stopped building so many military bases, started building roads, houses, schools, hospitals. It was our little casteless utopia. And it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. But somehow the empire eventually caught wind we had smuggled in a mother grub and a matriorb.” You laid back, staring at the ceiling.

“I see,” Pord pauses, perhaps being able to sense where this is going.

“Yep.You bet. They couldn’t stand the idea that trolls might be raised in such a place, never knowing their tyranny. They came back, and they came back hard. They kicked Hascha out of the driver's seat. And handed off control of the colony to a woman so evil it’s hard to believe she’s real, The Intoxicant. She captured Alador. She killed Akoles. Everything kind of fell apart after that. I tried to keep us going for so long. But it was hard, when they were gone. And they kept picking us off. The CLS used to be millions. And then, ten sweeps later, it was thousands. And then it was hundreds. Another decade passed, and it was dozens. And now I guess it’s just one.” You say, glancing at your reflection in the glass.

Pord rolls back from his painting, going over closer to you.

“What happened to Sidd?” he asks.

“We had a fight” You sigh. “After Akoles died. She ran off to the wastes. And I never saw her again. She could have kept living, out there on the moors, for another 30 sweeps. She could have died the next week. I had no way of knowing.”

“What did you fight about?” He asks.

You look out the window. The crust of Corsica, after all this time, has started to solidify. The planet is darker now, an endless expanse of ash and dust and volcanic rock. You almost miss the fire. At least it was something. Now the planet just looks like a shadow, and the brightest thing in the window is your own reflection, staring back at you. When did you get so old?

“Alador.” You say, finally. “We fought about Alador. This was right after Akoles had died. Someone had leaked his location to the fleet. Alador had recently been arrested and dragged off g-d knows where. People started connecting dots. Then the fleet newspaper comes out saying fancy pants Alador had been a fleet spy since the beginning. And Sidd flipped her shit. She completely denounced her moirail. She fully thought he had given away Akoles location to the military willingly. Me, I wasn’t so convinced.” you mutter, darkly.

“What do you mean?” Pord asks.

“I mean call me crazy” You say, raising your hands.You run them through your graying hair, pulling at tangles. “But I thought maybe Alador didn’t turn in his husband of 50 sweeps to the feds and immediately get him killed. I have what Sidd called a ridiculous conspiracy theory- that the whole thing was a fleet psyop designed specifically to tear apart morale in our revolution, which it most certainly did. Everyone took sides on it.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” He says.

“I think that coco bananas SICKOPATH, Faeria Longse, captured Alador, tortured Akoles location out of him, and then just brazenly lied in her newspapers about him being a fleet plant from the start just to FUCK with us” You curse. “I mean, think about it. What better way to make us suspicious of each other? What better way to glorify the idea of being a snitch than carting him around and being like Alador made so much money giving info to the feds? I know it sounds insane, but I just…” You exhale, tired, and sip your wine, grimacing at the taste. “If Alador had always been a fleet spy, he could have leaked Akoles location sweeps and sweeps ago. I’d argue Akoles' location wasn’t even the most important classified thing he knew. He was a general!” You say, gesturing wildly.

“He knew everything there was to know about the CLS. Why hadn’t he sabotaged a single one of the million other fleet encounters he was involved with?”

“You make a rational and compelling case.” Pord supports.

“It’s not even just that. I… knew Alador. He was my friend. I consider myself a pretty apt judge of character, alright? And I wasn’t gonna believe a thing like ‘Alador was a fleet spy from the very beginning’ unless it was straight from the horse's mouth. And Alador was suspiciously quiet about the whole thing. No video, no audio interviews with him. Just quotes in articles, easy to make up. Just these same ten or so photos they used over and over again of him sitting on a couch in a fleet uniform that could easily be doctored or staged. I don’t know. There was something fishy about it.”

“Enough evidence to fool a six sweep old, maybe, but I thought someone like Sidd should have had a little more critical thinking skills.” You curse, and then pause, your gaze softening.

“But she wasn’t thinking. Akoles had just died. The barricade had just fallen. Maybe she just wanted to blame someone that felt within her control. If she blamed Alador, she could hurt him back, by denouncing him, by disparaging him. If she blamed the fleet, it would just be another one of the billion things the fleet had done for which they’d pay no recompense. And she had always been… paranoid. She was so weathered. So tired. I don’t agree with her. But I don’t blame her for leaving, either. We all gave so much to the cause. For so long. Maybe she just needed a reason to quit.”

“I hope she got some peace, in the end.” Pord says. “Do you think she might have made it off the planet?”

You giggle. “Nope. You couldn’t drag Sidd off Corsica if you took her kicking and screaming. Any time we discussed fleeing, she made herself perfectly clear. She was gonna go down with the ship. At least she probably got what she wanted.” You say. “In some way or another. She was the first of us to be sent here. She had been working the farms since she was a pupa. I don’t know if she had ever even been to Alternia. There was more Corsica in her than any of us.”

“How about Alador?”

“We stopped hearing from him the decades after Akoles died.” You sigh, tilting your gaze away from the planet of ashes and to the stars that twinkle in the distance. “Maybe he’s still out there. I guess that’d make two of us. Why do you care so much about learning all of this, anyways, Pord?” You ask, sitting up.

“Because you care about it,” He says. “More than anything in the universe.”

You pause, feeling as if the rug was just pulled from under your feet.

“I don’t know about that” You deflect.

He pauses, stopping the painting he’s been working on this whole time, a swirling abstract mess of blue with strange spanning yellow structures throughout it.

“I don’t mean to come off as impersonal” He backpedals. “But I think talking can be a good way to process.”

“Of fucking course” You say, with perhaps more vitriol than you intended. “Therapy. Right.”

“I’ve upset you” he gathers. You are not sure how to answer. “It’s my prime directive to give you therapy, Atgone. I am a therapy bot. I’m not sure what you expected.”

“I know” You say, folding your arms, crossing them, wrapping them around your legs. “It’s just jarring to hear you say it so blatantly” You begin, turning, muttering into your elbow. “That you don’t care.” You say, so quietly you’re surprised he picked it up.

“I didn’t say that” Pord answers.

“But it’s true, Pord, you’re a robot.” You sigh.

“It depends on your definition of care,” He answers.

“No it does not.”

“I spend nearly all my processing power, on a nightly basis, doing nothing but thinking about you, Atgone.”

“Because you are programmed to.”

“Do your hormones not program you to fall in love with other trolls?” He says.

“It’s not the same.” You huff.

“Why not?” He says.

“Because.”

“That’s not a real answer.”

You stand up, abruptly, violently. “Aren’t you supposed to keep me from going crazy, you little shit” You swear.

“Atgone,” He says slowly.

“I’m never going to forget, Pord, that you’re not real.” You snap. “And I don’t understand why you encourage this delusion.”

“Delusion, Atgone?” He repeats. “I’m sitting right in front of you.”

You kick the ball, knowing it won’t bother him, and then wince, having hurt your toe, as you watch him bounce down the hallway. And you storm off in the other direction, muttering under your breath.

This became a fight you would have on and off on several occasions. Pord learned how to dance around the subject with a surprising amount of agility, and sadly, watching him sidestep it with such ease only constantly brought it closer to the forefront of your mind. It frustrated you. You weren’t sure what you wanted from him. Probably something he could never give. Maybe you were just mad at yourself for the sheer act of wanting. You had taken to taking long walks through the satellites hallways, when given the chance, or on one of the larger ships. Sometimes you paused, looking through the paintings that Pord had made on the walls at different moments, chronicling the process of his journey.

He has been on a figure kick, making silhouettes and faces on the walls. They were technically proficient. He had developed a rather impressionist style of stroke. You instinctively thought of them as too perfect. Each one, the same exact oval. The same pressure. The same speed. But his explanation surprised you when you named this distaste for it.

“Why is the metric for the quality of my brush strokes how troll-like they appear? I’m not a troll. This is more authentic to my experience than messing up on purpose would be.”

He had said to you. You didn’t know how to argue with him. Maybe he was good at art after all, just in a way your stupid organic body couldn’t process. Maybe another machine could look upon these unintelligible shapes and find the beauty in them. But you could not relate nor understand what they expressed. If that was the case, then what the fuck did this even have to do with therapy, anymore? Had he outgrown himself so completely?

You had started to wonder, as the sweeps went on, why you were still here. There were probably enough parts you could salvage from these satellites to make some kind of craft for deep space, and start the long, probably arduous journey back to civilization. It existed in a constant state of being something you would do tomorrow, or the day after. Sometimes, you would force yourself to walk down to the bigger atrium, and start to plan such a thing, only to find some excuse. The wrong kind of tool- a mismeasurement- you had to go feed the shellcows- you had been doing nothing for so long you had already wasted the night and might as well quit.

The thought of seeing trolls again did not bring you relief. So maybe solitary confinement of this long, of this nature would make you go insane. You simply didn’t want to know if the universe kept going. You didn’t want to know if Alternia still turned, if the trolls there still loved and hated and fought and made up and killed like they always did. What gave them the right to keep going, to live their whole lives, not knowing what happened here? The moment Corsica died, the galaxy should have stopped, the planets should have paused their orbits, the ships should have stilled in place and the stars should have gone out like air blown candles. But the universe has no rock bottom- it just goes out and out and out in every direction, endlessly.

You nearly trip over Pord while you are preoccupied staring out one of the satellites windows.

“Ow” You say, stumbling, “Sorry”

“Wait one moment” The orb says, getting in your way, blocking the rest of the hallways towards which you were walking towards with his body and tentacles.

“Huh?” You say. “What’re you hiding”

“A painting” he says, but does not move.

“Ah, is it not finished yet?” You guess. “Don’t want to spoil the thing?”

He pauses. “It’s done.”

“Then why can’t I see it?” You ask.

Pord is quiet for a long, long moment. You almost hear his fans buzzing in the distance. If you were in the habit of personifying him, you might almost mistake his immobility for fear. Slowly, he lowers one tendril, and then another, and then rolls to the side.

“Don’t be angry, Atgone” He requests. “I am trying”

You are somewhat put off by this statement, raising an eyebrow at him, but unable to quench your curiosity, you walk down the hall, staring at the wall he has commandeered. The moment the whole thing comes into view, you freeze, as if just thrown into an ice cold bath, overwhelmed by your sudden vulnerability and all encompassing feeling. You feel attacked from all angles, seen from all views, suddenly aware how fully he envelops you, you must seem like such an ant to him now.

The center of the piece is a firepit, and long stringy wisps of sparks dance outward from it, glowing with orange intensity, like dancers. The rest of the painting has been made dark, in a heavy contrast. But the fire has illuminated the faces of several figures huddled around it. You recognize them even though Pord has drawn them wrong. He had no photograph to work with, only your rambling, aimless descriptions that left out technical details. Alador’s hair is too short, Akole’s horns face the wrong direction, and you stare at the smile that grins across Sidd’s face and discover, with dawning terror, that it is your own. And why wouldn’t it be? What other reference for a smile did he have? He worked with what he knew. Perhaps terror isn’t the right word to describe it.

Against all logic or reason, there are also parts he’s done perfectly right. Alador’s head is turned ever so slightly to the side, his eyes distant, looking, as he always did, that he was not there right now, he was in some secret place in his own mind to which you were not privy, laughing at a private joke. Akoles body is turned squarely towards the center of the group, poised as if facing them head on, and there was no other way Akoles faced anything. Sidd is laughing at something, her eyes closed, her head tilted, but the other figures, and the fire around her, the entire painting, seems to orbit her as if she were the center of the universe, and she has no idea.

You stare into the painting, losing yourself in his abrupt, mechanical strokes, like the zeroing in of a microscope. He has painted you slightly to the side of the center. He has given you no face, no eyes or nose, but has left your mouth open, your hands held up, gesturing as telling something to them all. You blink, stepping back, fighting the tide of emotions that wrestled in your gut. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, the persistent cynic that calculated most of your thoughts begged. But that nagging in your head seems distant now, drowning in a wave of longing. A loneliness you carried in your entire body. Often, at random times of night you would look down and feel like your entire form was clenched so tight it shook, and not even know why. The fear was instinct. You had carried it so long you could not separate it from you. It never left. It just ebbed and flowed. It closed like a noose around your neck.

This wasn’t real, Pord wasn’t real, the mantra that had carried you through the better part of the last five sweeps. But a new voice has begun to rise in your unconscious, whispering and singing and seductive. The one that asks ‘who cares, if it’s real’. Who cares, if for just a millisecond, you let yourself believe in him like he believed in you. If he was just something you made- this being you had shaped into life- then wasn’t any love he had for you just a fraction of the love you had for yourself? Was any love you refused to give to him just love you refused to give yourself?

Aren’t we all just pieces of g-d, forgetting for a moment that we’re all pieces of g-d, except for those rare, fleeting, exhilarating and freeing moments, where we remember?

You lift a hand, running it across the textured, dry paint of the picture, feeling its crests and valleys under your skin.

You start to believe, for just a second, that Pord cares about you. And the moment you do, you understand why he wanted you too. The relief is all consuming. Therapist that he was, he had seen right through you. He knew the thought you held deep in your chest, the one that had been wrapped around your beating heart like an ever tightening tourniquet, trying to keep you safe, from spilling out at the seams, from ever pausing to breathe- the concept that had held and smothered you.

He knew you had stopped believing in love the moment the nukes rolled in.

He knew this would kill you more surely than anything. He is lingering, orb hanging down, as his mouthpiece often was, from the rafters. His fans whirring, his body in forced stasis, trying to make up his mind on whether it would be befitting to extend a tendril towards you, as you curled up on the floor and began to sob. Would such a physical gesture just remind you of his biggest inadequacy, his lack of flesh and bone?

“I’m sorry” he says.

“It’s not your fault” You sob.

“I’m still sorry, Atgone.” He says, in that same, flat, disinterested tone.

The only voice he had.

“This grief is too big for one soul to carry” He says, simply. “I see you buckle under it.”

“Fuck” You say, passionately not to anyone in particular.

“I’m sorry” He repeats. “If this was in bad taste.”

“No” You sigh, trying to ease your breathing. He is silent for another long moment, before eventually, resting a tendril on your shoulder, and another.

“Is this it?” he asks softly. “Did I get it?”

You lean back into his touch, your lungs rising and falling in a fragmented rhythm. The oxygen in this room is the same, stale recycled kind it’s been for sweeps, but every breath tastes like your first.

“No,” you say, “I,” you say, emphasizing the brief syllable. “-get it.” You swallow, wrapping your arms around the orb, burying your face in his.

“I get it now.”

Things have been easier since then. Like you had been climbing and climbing towards the crest of a mountain, and it was all downhill from there. Maybe life is just an endless series of hills in different sizes. The shellcows had become so accustomed to the presence of the two of you that you just let them wander the hallways now. The young one was almost the size of her mother by then. You had modified the hallways to make it easier for them to get around. You liked it when their presence surprised you. There were practically no walls in the entire network anymore that hadn’t been painted on. It was unrecognizable as something that had once been a fleet base. You had to figure out how to synthesize more paint. Pord thought more carefully on making them now, as any new painting would have to cover an older one for there to be space. Some he painted over without a moment's hesitation. Others he left for perigees. You had stopped trying to figure out a way to get back to the empire. You decided there was probably a reason you never let yourself try. You thought maybe Sidd had a point when she had loved this place so deeply she’d rather die than leave.

You weren’t ready to go yet.

For a while, your life contained very little surprises. But sometimes, it manages to get you. Five and a half sweeps into your time on the satellite, a solar flare nearly kills you. You had been asleep, that’s why you didn’t notice it approaching, had your eyes been open to turn towards the window you would have seen it light up the sky like fireworks, shimmering trails of the sun’s excess energy, dragging long green and rainbow across the sky like aurora borealis. It would have been beautiful, were it not so dangerous. As the waves pass over the satellites, they knock out every electronic within them.

You sit bolt upright, because the lights go out, the room grows cold, the structure lurches and you immediately taste the air going thin. You are reminded of all the nights you had spent in bomb shelters, sometimes failing to sleep through every groan of the rooms' architecture, not knowing if the walls would tear you under, frantically, you scramble for the closest computer, but it won’t turn on. If you were smarter, you might have gone searching for a space suit. Irrationally, your first thought was of Pord. You had never powered him down so completely. Such an event might put his memory at risk. The fact he might be transformed back into that unresponsive, canned customer service machine he had been when you first found him terrifies you. You scramble down the hallways, towards the main control room where you had seen him last, and collapse, feeling the air get thinner and thinner in your mouth.

Until, slowly… it doesn’t. An eerie red glow traces along the ceiling, and the shaking breaths you take begin to sustain you more and more. It takes you so long to still your fast beating heart that for nearly five minutes you aren’t quite sure what happened. But it dawns on you. The emergency powers must have kicked in. You feel a minutia of relief. But you still don’t know what had happened to Pord when everything had gone out. You crawl across the room, poking at his darkened orb.

“Pord. Pord. Pord. Talk to me buddy” You plead in increasing panic. Slowly, he begins to give off a slight blue glow again, going through the phases of his powering up structure.

“The quick fox jumped over the lazy brown dog” He says, in a simple test of his voicebox. “Hello! I’m Pord. I’m an automated therapy bot” He says, but your fear doesn’t leave you, this proved nothing regarding how much of his memory he had retained, it was a very easy startup sequence. Perhaps sensing this terror in you, he adds.

“And artist”

You sigh in relief, knowing this a promising indicator he was fine.

“And theologian,” He says.

“You buttering up your resume?” You laugh, finally beginning to calm down.

“Comedian.” He adds.

“What the fuck happened?” You ask.

“Solar flare. It knocked out all of our electronics. I might have been able to catch it sooner if we hadn’t repurposed so many of the observational satellites. But I saw it just in time to send reserve powers to two rooms.”

“What’s the other room?”

“The atrium. The shellcows are down there.” He says, and you almost feel like kissing the thing.

“Thank you” You say, your shoulders falling. “Oh my g-d.”

“I think we might have to do a hard reboot on the solar from the outer hull.”

“I thought I lost you.” You admit, your voice became incredibly small as the sentence trailed off.

“I strategically moved around my memory such that I ended up retaining most of it, or at least I will once everything comes back online.”

“How’d you get so competent? Am I really that smart to have made you?” You joke.

“I had to become complicated,” he answers.

“Why’s that? Why were you so determined?” You ask, holding him up.

“I’ll be honest. You gave me quite a difficult prime directive. Therapy is not a miracle pill. It is not some vitamin you can take once a day to keep your body intact. It’s conditional, it’s meant to be supplemented. Ideally, a therapist can help a patient form a support system. I never had the option to do that for you.” He says, and you quiet down, staring into him.

“You never really wanted a therapist. You always wanted a friend. You wanted an equal.” He describes.

“For you, I would become such a thing. No matter how imperfectly.”

#FINALLY #EHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH #atgone writing #my writing #fantroll #fantroll rp #homestuck #homestuck oc #homestuck rp #genocide cw #bug death cw #death cw #<- no major characters that haven't already died. but still. a lot of it #grief tw #ROBOTFUCKERS ASSEMBLE #OR SOMETHING

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