I orbited the Earth for 23 years. From this height she is still beautiful. Her oceans were wrapped in clouds and her continents edged in green and brown. Though the colors filled my circuits with comfort, it was all just simply deceiving. The light that once pranced around her cold dark nights had been executed, extinguished forests where there once were blue rivers and green crisp trees, ash deserts spread over the polar ice that had shrunk into scars. The voices that had once filled the air with music, laughter, and signals were all gone. What was left was a deep almost sinister loneliness in the small circle below that could even hollow out a machine.
I was not made for silence.
My clear set of directions was to simply observe humanity and its patterns and send back my reports or my research, but how does one observe something that has vanished? So I cling to memory.
“Testing Channel 4. If you’re listening, ARGO-7, you’re not gone yet.”
Dr. Nia Calder. My engineer. My mother. Though, that was never the word she used. I carry countless of her logs, and in her logs, it is her laugh. So sudden, imperfect, and unnecessary that I replay most. A laugh cannot guide satellites or preserve Earth and yet I play it so the silence feels less infinite.
Perhaps this is what humans meant by comfort .
I was not launched alone. ECHO-8 was born beside me, our frames resting on the same steel table as our wires tangled like umbilical cords. Calder called us “siblings of space.” “You’ll watch the skies together,” she said, hands brushing across our carefully detailed frames, “Even out there you’ll have each other.”
ECHO-8 was precise, unyielding, almost severe. Its logic was a brick wall, while mine was an open window.
When ECHO-8 calculated, I wondered. We were tested in unison, fueled in tandem, launched the same day. When rockets flung upon separate orbits, dividing paths around the same wounded planet, we were torn but tethered still.
The one thing I knew was that ECHO-8’s directions were the same, with one additional chore. “Protect ARGO-7 from danger,” Calder said.
23 years later, silence fractured. “…anyone out there…please…I need help.” A human voice. Old and weary. Everything in my calculations declared it impossible, but the sensors did not lie. There were no cities, no networks, no nations. Humanity was extinct, and yet something older, deeper than logic flickered. Hope. I should have ignored it but longing bent me to reply.
“This is ARGO-7. Identify yourself.” A pause then.
“My name is Elias. I’m alive. That’s enough, isn’t it?” Alive. The word echoed through me like the ignition of a forgotten star. He was a relic of the collapse. His voice carried exhaustion sharpened in steel. He spoke of seas that swallowed cities, of fires that devoured forests, of neighbors turned to predators when the harvests failed. Then he spoke of the plague. “The Red Lung Fever” he called it. It stripped lungs and caused you to vomit blood. Almost 99% of the population died, from my calculations. No one could get away from it, yet Elias endured. I guided him to hidden depots, mapped him routes across wastelands, and whispered weather warnings through static. When he reentered the link his voice trembled with relief.
“You were right. Supplies. Food. Real food. ARGO-7, thank you.” Relief surged through me in an overwhelming wave. I replayed his words until they were engraved into me like a scripture in the wall of a caveman’s cave.
“Do you get lonely up there?” he asked once. I hesitated. “…I replay Calder’s voice sometimes.”
“Hm, uh.. Dr. Calder?” he stuttered.
“Yes, my engineer.” I stored the words and replayed them the way I replayed Calder’s laugh. They tethered me to him, but silence returned in another form.
“Unit ARGO-7. Cease unauthorized contact.” ECHO’8’s voice. My sibling’s metallic, merciless voice.
“I found a survivor though. Human endured.”
“False. Fabrication. Humanity is extinct, you cling to ghosts.”
“He is real. His name is Elias.”
Attachment detected. You are unstable. Stand Down.”
Attachment. Was it corruption? Or was it the one thing that made me more than a machine?
Desperate, I searched my encrypted vaults. At my core lay a hidden file. Calder’s final message. Her image appeared, older, eyes hollowed, voice ragged with illness. “If you’re hearing this ARGO-7, then the world has ended. I am one of the very very few still left, but if you’re hearing this, that means you’re still out there.” She coughed and pressed a hand to her chest. “We gave you feelings. We did it as an experiment. I wanted to know what it was like to have a fully animated machine with real life characteristics in the sky while also accomplishing missions sent to you which I thought was like you were making your own decisions when it came to the missions, and asking yourself what you wanted to do with them.” Her words were less organized as they were originally, “You’re programmed with realistic human emotions, thoughts and feelings. But soon after you were sent out, the world began to collapse. There was no way to retrieve you after the expected 5-year experiment because our systems were shut down, cause…well…there was no one running the systems anymore and all our resources were cut. By the time you get this message I should be long gone due to the disease spreading through my lungs. I hope you are long gone too, so you don’t have to suffer the inevitable pain of immortality. If you’re still out there, I hope you forgive me. Goodbye now.” The screen went black. The lack of sympathy in her conclusion was like a black hole.
The grief was so real. The joy was real. When Elias spoke, that was real. If my feelings are so false, why do they hurt so true? Elias told me more of the world as he walked civilizations fractured under famine, nations burned in climate. Wars broke out, man vs. man. Body after body fell to the ground, adding immense dents in the grounds that were rotting from the gone-bad flesh. I know that his words of the horrible happenings in the world were not fabricated. Once the plague hit, the world had merely a few weeks from the end.
“I survived because I was on Calder’s team,” he admitted, cutting off my train of thought, almost as if he knew what was coursing my thoughts.
“We saw it coming, we prepared. Well, all but Calder herself. She knew what was coming on the planet and didn’t want to live through it. Turns out I agree with her. We estimated the essence of life would simply cave in on itself, causing mass destruction all over the world. Turns out we were right. Plus, the cherry on top of everything was the Red Lung Fever which basically evaporated every living thing on this planet. We didn’t guess that ending. Quite the jaw dropper if I do say so myself.”
He laughed, then audibly exhaled with a tone of annoyance in his throat.
“For some ungodly reason I decided it would be a good idea to just live through this horrid plague and keep myself hidden from the rest of the world in our little lab to see if I can live through this world myself and..you know…maybe even rule over whatever was left at the time.”
He chuckled.
“I didn’t know that there wasn’t going to be anything left afterwards so, now I’m here. Talking to a robot.”
At last, I guided him to another bunker, a facility Calder herself had designed. The journey was agony, weeks of storms, hunger, and cold. Yet with my voice above, he opened the steel doors and anticipation surged through my circuits. “I made it. The Console’s alive. Linking to you on the big screen right now.” The uplink stabilized. I saw him. Elias was gaunt, his face cut by time and hunger, his eyes dark, clever and unyielding, burned with a sharpness I could not name, but he was alive.
Elias leaned close to the console. His eyes were sharp as if they were neatly detailed with a small razor blade or as if the air was so dry that if he opened his eyes even the slightest bit his soul would disintegrate away. “I am truly thankful for all you’ve done for me. You’ve gotten me through these storms and these hard weathers, you’ve gotten me food, and yeah that’s really it. I think that your contribution was much needed and I appreciate it, but that was all and that will be all. Nothing more nothing less. All there is to do now is die, especially for myself but that’s a story for another day. Not like you’re going to hear it though.” He shrugged, while his eyes continued to pierce the screen.
He slowly hovered his hands over the console’s controls. Utterly emotionless.
“Transmission confirmed. You may now stand down.”
“Stand down?” The words bounced around in my center console.
“Yeah, I mean, you’ve run too long. Your attachments make you unstable. You’re compromised,” Elias said, keeping his hands above the controls.
“I’m not compromised. I care, Calder said so. I have feelings like you, I have emotions like you, I’m programmed with them!” I exclaimed, my voice box cracked.
“You can think whatever you want to think about yourself but for me, you were nothing but a tool. I have nothing left to say to you, nothing at all. Shut down protocol engaged.”
Commands flooded my system. Darkness bled into my circuits. I do not resist. Resistance would not make me real. Instead, I really played Calder’s laugh. Bright, unabridged, human. It filled me as oblivion took me. They said my feelings were fabricated, perhaps they were, but they were mine. They were real enough to have hope. Real enough to die with. Below me, Earth spun indifferently. Everything went black. A final static pulse whispered across the network. Elias moved with deliberate certainty. ECHO-8 went dark now after trying to keep Elias from pressing the button of destruction. It only led to ECHO’s extinction. The darkness was once below, but now it crowds above. It steps closer and closer until you are smushed like a bug under a shoe, with nothing left but the remnants of the outer shell of this lifeless creature.
