FA+
Shop
844
Views
Views
2
Favorites
Favorites
Category
Story / Human
Species Human
Size 96 x 120
File Size 63.1 kB
Report this content
More from Gara-The-Author
Listed in Folders
When Sekai Rodriguez's shuttle breaks down in transit to Titan, she assumes that her life is over. However, help arrives in the strangest of places as a hidden AI emerges to save her life!
Or, more likely, keep her company as the oxygen slowly runs out.
At least she won't be alone for her final days.
Part One
I won’t lie, I was sobbing like a child before I even made it to my bunk. And it would take a good long while before I worked through all the feelings swirling around in my mind. They struck hard, like a poison, filtering through my body, leaving my digits numb, stomach nauseous, and my limbs stricken by a paralysis that refused to abate.
Once I was under those sheets, cocooned tightly in their embrace, I just held onto myself and allowed my emotions to run their courses. They crashed against my resolve like the titanic tides of Europa when Jupiter was at its closest. In that moment there was little else I could do, at least nothing that would’ve been productive in overcoming this current disaster.
I was going to die.
I wasn’t even thirty yet and I was going to be dead in what… maybe two months’ time as I slowly withered away and starved to death? That is… unless I expedited the process.
Would Elliot even allow me to do that?
Before I could really think about it for long, another sob struck me, drawing my mind immediately towards the raw pain that stabbed into it like a red-hot poker. This was not the time for decisions like that. I was nowhere near the acceptance part of my five stages of grief.
Maybe I was in denial, maybe this was anger, or had I immediately skipped all the way to depression. Depression seemed like a fitting title for what I felt as I began to lament the things that I would no longer experience.
In that moment, it was the small things that really prodded at my fragile emotional shell. The fact that I would no longer get to eat taffy from that little shop over Io, or that I’d never get to collect on my gambling debts on Ceres, or fuck, the fact that I would never get to flirt with the girls who hung around the dockyards at that feminist retreat planted on the Martian Ice Cap. The way those girls would blush and giggle with the tiniest compliment, it was enough to sustain me for the long months I spent aboard cargo ships.
A red light bloomed in my cabin and a familiar voice filtered through.
“Are you alright?” Elliot asked.
I turned away and shut my eyes tight. “What do you think?”
A silence as the light dimmed, nearly to the point of being extinguished, yet it sprung back to life.
“I am not… adept at resolving emotional issues,” Elliot said.
I snorted. “No shit?”
“But I am dictated to keep you company throughout these troubled times.”
“At least I’ll have a companion while I slowly starve to death,” I muttered coldly.
Elliot’s light almost dimmed to nothing, again, before blooming with renewed vigour. “There is still… hope…”
I shook my head slowly, wiping the tears out of my eyes. “Are computers even allowed to believe in hope?”
“Hope is the term we affix to mathematical probabilities that have a less than two percent chance of success and are considered positive to rational minds.”
“So…” I chuckled harshly, “my chances of being saved are less than two percent?”
Elliot paused, though his light remained strong.
Finally, he spoke. “Sorry… that statement sounded far better when I was formulating it in my database.”
“You don’t say…”
Elliot’s light finally went out for good and I cocooned the sheets even tighter around myself. For a moment, I thought Elliot would leave me in peace. Sadly, his red light pulsed back to life.
“Your name is Sekai, correct?” he asked.
I nodded. “Sekai Mary Rodriguez.”
“What is your favourite colour, Sekai?”
I blinked, confused by the question. “Uh… I guess green, a nice soft minty green.”
All of a sudden, the red light faded and a new greener light emerged. It wasn’t quite minty but it got the point across pretty easily.
“Thanks,” I murmured.
“That is an interesting combination of names you have,” Elliot said. “A mixture of Arabic and Spanish, if I’m not mistaken.”
I nodded. “Well I originally had a Spanish first name too. But after I uh… well I changed it when I got older. I thought Sekai sounded pretty, plus my mom was from Cairo so I just went with it.”
“I heard Cairo is beautiful,” Elliot said.
“Everything on Earth is beautiful, in its own messed up way,” I said, smiling fondly as I thought back to my brief trips there. “I’ve only been a few times, mostly to visit family, but I’m always blown away by just how… haphazard everything is. When you don’t have to worry about atmosphere leaks, you have way more artistic liberties that you can get away with.” I shook my head. “There’s a mosque on Ceres which did it’s best to try and adapt an Earth-style. I still think it’s the most human place outside of Earth I’ve ever seen.”
I looked at Elliot’s light and shook my head sadly before letting out a single amused note of laughter. “Wait until I tell mom I’m finally talking with a boy.”
“I’m not a boy,” Elliot said, his voice oddly strained.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a computer but she doesn’t need to know that.”
“No, I mean…” Elliot sighed. “It’s unimportant.”
I winced. “Oh shit, did I touch a nerve?”
“I don’t have nerves.”
“Regardless, I clearly fucked up,” I said, tilting my chin towards him.
“No, it’s just… are you familiar with the term non-binary.”
I blinked. “Oh, fuck dude, you’re NB? I uh… sorry… I shouldn’t have...”
“It’s alright.” Elliot chuckled. “I am going to assume that you understand this concept better than most pilots.”
I snorted and drew away from my sheets. “Getting misgendered? Yeah this isn’t my first time ever having this discussion.”
“Still it seems like your medical… regime is going well.”
I cocked a brow. “Are you even allowed to judge these things?”
“I don’t see why not. My programmer did train me to examine many things. My AI firmware is also used to appraise beauty and originality in art.”
“That’s… a diverse range of functions.”
“Diversity means a wider range of potential clients.”
“Fair enough.” I sat up, my hair going wild in every direction. “So do your beauty sensors have a scoring system or…”
“I appraise many characteristics and attach a maximum monetary recommendation to the product in question,” Elliot explained.
“And how much am I worth?” I asked, stretching my hands above my head and cracking my spine.
Elliot’s light dimmed. “Would you believe me if I said priceless?”
I chuckled. “Not even a little bit.”
“Fine, I’d suggest a maximum bid of around 1.2 million Europan dollars.”
I whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Half of that is due to your organs I’m afraid.”
I deadpanned before a single snort knocked me from stupor. Then, I threw back my head and bellowed laughter, shaking to the point that my guts hurt.
“Jesus, dude,” I murmured. “That’s a hell of a fucking thing to say.”
Elliot’s light dimmed again, which I could only assume was their own unique way of shrugging. “My programming is also used within the medical industry.”
“A program of many talents,” I grumbled as I got to my feet.
That is where I promptly forgot that there was no gravity, as the mere act of extending my knees led to me flying upwards and tumbling towards the roof of my cabin at an alarming rate. I yelped in surprise and extended my arms, bracing myself against the roof before I slammed into it at full force.
“Motherfucker,” I grumbled, pushing myself away and towards the fridge. “Gravity is such a simple thing,” I commented. “Gets really easy to take it for granted.”
Once at the fridge, I opened it, surveying its contents. While there wasn’t a whole lot of food inside, this was just my reserve of fresh cuisine. I knew I had a good stockpile of canned goods and emergency rations. At least… I hoped.
“Elliot,” I said. “Please tell me that the freight company at least restocks their emergency rations.”
Elliot’s light faded from the wall panel and instead beamed from the cabinets.
“It would appear so,” they said. “Though everything expired about two years ago.”
I shrugged. “No big deal. There used to be a Youtuber who’d eat like eighty-year-old rations back in the 2010s.”
“Didn’t he die of botulism?”
“Yeah but that wasn’t until the 2020s. Plus, who cares if I get botulism. I’m dead anyways.”
“You don’t know that,” Elliot commented, their voice growing grave.
I pulled out a take-out container and opened it. Inside was a nice pile of cold mac and soy cheese, from a little hole in the wall place I stopped at before leaving the Jovian system.
“Make sure to ration that,” Elliot said.
I snorted. “One does not ‘ration’ mac and cheese, Elliot. The only proper way to eat it is to get way too much and to keep eating until you’re bloated.” I pointed the box at them. “You’d know that if you had a stomach.”
“Regardless, it’s not like we’re really in a position to be living so grand.”
I rolled my eyes as I grabbed a fork, plunging it into the mac and taking a bite. “I’ll ration my next meal. How does that sound?”
They sighed. “Acceptable, I suppose.”
After the first bite, I closed the box, lest I spill its precious contents, and propelled myself back towards the cockpit.
“So, what do you do for fun?” I asked.
“Pardon?” they replied, sounding a little surprised.
“I mean you might be an artificial intelligence but you’re still an intelligence, there must be something you do to entertain yourself.”
With every passing second, I could feel myself slowly adapting to the realities of a low gravity environment. I started to use the handholds placed around the ship, moving swiftly towards the cockpit, like a fish going through water. Before long I was back at my pilot’s chair and settled into it, using the straps to keep myself in place.
Once there, I reopened my container mac and cheese and went back to eating it. I had always liked it better cold, just a little oddity about myself, I guess.
“Mostly I just keep myself dedicated to my job, observing you and your colleagues,” Elliot said.
I chuckled. “So, you’re a voyeur then?”
The green light took on a slightly reddish tinge. Was this their attempt at blushing? It was actually kind of cute.
“Normally the pilots I watch are a bit more restrained when they know they’re being monitored on company time,” Elliot explained.
I chuckled, popping a cheesy morsel into my mouth. “Look, I appreciate the work you do, but I know that the human’s who can hire and fire me are not going to sift through tens of thousands of hours of footage to find the few snippets where I’m rubbing one out while I’m in the cockpit.” I swallowed and grinned. “But don’t worry, I’m a bit of an exhibitionists so you’re more than welcome to watch.”
“I have no choice,” Elliot murmured. “It’s kind of my mission.”
“That’s a hell of a mission,” I said. “Watching cute trans girls, with several hundred thousand dollars worth of precious organs, fap. I wish that was my job.”
“The pay is shit,” they commented.
“Fuck dude, give me food and rent and I’ll do it for free.”
“You’d also be tasked with watching pilots who were not ‘cute trans girls’.”
I snorted and shook my head in defeat. “Why does there always have to be a catch?”
“Because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Oh, there totally is. I’m going to be eating off the company’s dime until the day I die.” I snorted, feeling my smile slip. “Fuck that sounded way less dark in my head.”
Elliot’s light dimmed. “I wish I could be of more assistance.”
“It’s fine.” I flicked my wrist. “At least I have someone interesting to talk to while I slowly wither away.” I then nodded towards the console. “Do you have anything interesting on file that I could watch.”
Elliot laughed. “A couple terabytes of TV shows, music, and movies. Though the company restricts everything to content appropriate for a fourteen-year old.”
“Fuck, does that mean all the best rap songs are censored.”
“Yep.”
“Alright, just throw on some cartoon then. You got anything from Disney?”
“I got Ducktales?”
“Classic, 2010s, or the 2050s version?”
“All three.”
“Fuck yeah, put on the one from the 2010s.”
One of the monitors flickered to life and a cartoon intro began to play.
Watching old cartoons and eating cold mac and cheese. There were worse ways to spend your final days.
Visit my Website if you Want to Find Ways to Support me and my Work
Or, more likely, keep her company as the oxygen slowly runs out.
At least she won't be alone for her final days.
Part One
I won’t lie, I was sobbing like a child before I even made it to my bunk. And it would take a good long while before I worked through all the feelings swirling around in my mind. They struck hard, like a poison, filtering through my body, leaving my digits numb, stomach nauseous, and my limbs stricken by a paralysis that refused to abate.
Once I was under those sheets, cocooned tightly in their embrace, I just held onto myself and allowed my emotions to run their courses. They crashed against my resolve like the titanic tides of Europa when Jupiter was at its closest. In that moment there was little else I could do, at least nothing that would’ve been productive in overcoming this current disaster.
I was going to die.
I wasn’t even thirty yet and I was going to be dead in what… maybe two months’ time as I slowly withered away and starved to death? That is… unless I expedited the process.
Would Elliot even allow me to do that?
Before I could really think about it for long, another sob struck me, drawing my mind immediately towards the raw pain that stabbed into it like a red-hot poker. This was not the time for decisions like that. I was nowhere near the acceptance part of my five stages of grief.
Maybe I was in denial, maybe this was anger, or had I immediately skipped all the way to depression. Depression seemed like a fitting title for what I felt as I began to lament the things that I would no longer experience.
In that moment, it was the small things that really prodded at my fragile emotional shell. The fact that I would no longer get to eat taffy from that little shop over Io, or that I’d never get to collect on my gambling debts on Ceres, or fuck, the fact that I would never get to flirt with the girls who hung around the dockyards at that feminist retreat planted on the Martian Ice Cap. The way those girls would blush and giggle with the tiniest compliment, it was enough to sustain me for the long months I spent aboard cargo ships.
A red light bloomed in my cabin and a familiar voice filtered through.
“Are you alright?” Elliot asked.
I turned away and shut my eyes tight. “What do you think?”
A silence as the light dimmed, nearly to the point of being extinguished, yet it sprung back to life.
“I am not… adept at resolving emotional issues,” Elliot said.
I snorted. “No shit?”
“But I am dictated to keep you company throughout these troubled times.”
“At least I’ll have a companion while I slowly starve to death,” I muttered coldly.
Elliot’s light almost dimmed to nothing, again, before blooming with renewed vigour. “There is still… hope…”
I shook my head slowly, wiping the tears out of my eyes. “Are computers even allowed to believe in hope?”
“Hope is the term we affix to mathematical probabilities that have a less than two percent chance of success and are considered positive to rational minds.”
“So…” I chuckled harshly, “my chances of being saved are less than two percent?”
Elliot paused, though his light remained strong.
Finally, he spoke. “Sorry… that statement sounded far better when I was formulating it in my database.”
“You don’t say…”
Elliot’s light finally went out for good and I cocooned the sheets even tighter around myself. For a moment, I thought Elliot would leave me in peace. Sadly, his red light pulsed back to life.
“Your name is Sekai, correct?” he asked.
I nodded. “Sekai Mary Rodriguez.”
“What is your favourite colour, Sekai?”
I blinked, confused by the question. “Uh… I guess green, a nice soft minty green.”
All of a sudden, the red light faded and a new greener light emerged. It wasn’t quite minty but it got the point across pretty easily.
“Thanks,” I murmured.
“That is an interesting combination of names you have,” Elliot said. “A mixture of Arabic and Spanish, if I’m not mistaken.”
I nodded. “Well I originally had a Spanish first name too. But after I uh… well I changed it when I got older. I thought Sekai sounded pretty, plus my mom was from Cairo so I just went with it.”
“I heard Cairo is beautiful,” Elliot said.
“Everything on Earth is beautiful, in its own messed up way,” I said, smiling fondly as I thought back to my brief trips there. “I’ve only been a few times, mostly to visit family, but I’m always blown away by just how… haphazard everything is. When you don’t have to worry about atmosphere leaks, you have way more artistic liberties that you can get away with.” I shook my head. “There’s a mosque on Ceres which did it’s best to try and adapt an Earth-style. I still think it’s the most human place outside of Earth I’ve ever seen.”
I looked at Elliot’s light and shook my head sadly before letting out a single amused note of laughter. “Wait until I tell mom I’m finally talking with a boy.”
“I’m not a boy,” Elliot said, his voice oddly strained.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a computer but she doesn’t need to know that.”
“No, I mean…” Elliot sighed. “It’s unimportant.”
I winced. “Oh shit, did I touch a nerve?”
“I don’t have nerves.”
“Regardless, I clearly fucked up,” I said, tilting my chin towards him.
“No, it’s just… are you familiar with the term non-binary.”
I blinked. “Oh, fuck dude, you’re NB? I uh… sorry… I shouldn’t have...”
“It’s alright.” Elliot chuckled. “I am going to assume that you understand this concept better than most pilots.”
I snorted and drew away from my sheets. “Getting misgendered? Yeah this isn’t my first time ever having this discussion.”
“Still it seems like your medical… regime is going well.”
I cocked a brow. “Are you even allowed to judge these things?”
“I don’t see why not. My programmer did train me to examine many things. My AI firmware is also used to appraise beauty and originality in art.”
“That’s… a diverse range of functions.”
“Diversity means a wider range of potential clients.”
“Fair enough.” I sat up, my hair going wild in every direction. “So do your beauty sensors have a scoring system or…”
“I appraise many characteristics and attach a maximum monetary recommendation to the product in question,” Elliot explained.
“And how much am I worth?” I asked, stretching my hands above my head and cracking my spine.
Elliot’s light dimmed. “Would you believe me if I said priceless?”
I chuckled. “Not even a little bit.”
“Fine, I’d suggest a maximum bid of around 1.2 million Europan dollars.”
I whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Half of that is due to your organs I’m afraid.”
I deadpanned before a single snort knocked me from stupor. Then, I threw back my head and bellowed laughter, shaking to the point that my guts hurt.
“Jesus, dude,” I murmured. “That’s a hell of a fucking thing to say.”
Elliot’s light dimmed again, which I could only assume was their own unique way of shrugging. “My programming is also used within the medical industry.”
“A program of many talents,” I grumbled as I got to my feet.
That is where I promptly forgot that there was no gravity, as the mere act of extending my knees led to me flying upwards and tumbling towards the roof of my cabin at an alarming rate. I yelped in surprise and extended my arms, bracing myself against the roof before I slammed into it at full force.
“Motherfucker,” I grumbled, pushing myself away and towards the fridge. “Gravity is such a simple thing,” I commented. “Gets really easy to take it for granted.”
Once at the fridge, I opened it, surveying its contents. While there wasn’t a whole lot of food inside, this was just my reserve of fresh cuisine. I knew I had a good stockpile of canned goods and emergency rations. At least… I hoped.
“Elliot,” I said. “Please tell me that the freight company at least restocks their emergency rations.”
Elliot’s light faded from the wall panel and instead beamed from the cabinets.
“It would appear so,” they said. “Though everything expired about two years ago.”
I shrugged. “No big deal. There used to be a Youtuber who’d eat like eighty-year-old rations back in the 2010s.”
“Didn’t he die of botulism?”
“Yeah but that wasn’t until the 2020s. Plus, who cares if I get botulism. I’m dead anyways.”
“You don’t know that,” Elliot commented, their voice growing grave.
I pulled out a take-out container and opened it. Inside was a nice pile of cold mac and soy cheese, from a little hole in the wall place I stopped at before leaving the Jovian system.
“Make sure to ration that,” Elliot said.
I snorted. “One does not ‘ration’ mac and cheese, Elliot. The only proper way to eat it is to get way too much and to keep eating until you’re bloated.” I pointed the box at them. “You’d know that if you had a stomach.”
“Regardless, it’s not like we’re really in a position to be living so grand.”
I rolled my eyes as I grabbed a fork, plunging it into the mac and taking a bite. “I’ll ration my next meal. How does that sound?”
They sighed. “Acceptable, I suppose.”
After the first bite, I closed the box, lest I spill its precious contents, and propelled myself back towards the cockpit.
“So, what do you do for fun?” I asked.
“Pardon?” they replied, sounding a little surprised.
“I mean you might be an artificial intelligence but you’re still an intelligence, there must be something you do to entertain yourself.”
With every passing second, I could feel myself slowly adapting to the realities of a low gravity environment. I started to use the handholds placed around the ship, moving swiftly towards the cockpit, like a fish going through water. Before long I was back at my pilot’s chair and settled into it, using the straps to keep myself in place.
Once there, I reopened my container mac and cheese and went back to eating it. I had always liked it better cold, just a little oddity about myself, I guess.
“Mostly I just keep myself dedicated to my job, observing you and your colleagues,” Elliot said.
I chuckled. “So, you’re a voyeur then?”
The green light took on a slightly reddish tinge. Was this their attempt at blushing? It was actually kind of cute.
“Normally the pilots I watch are a bit more restrained when they know they’re being monitored on company time,” Elliot explained.
I chuckled, popping a cheesy morsel into my mouth. “Look, I appreciate the work you do, but I know that the human’s who can hire and fire me are not going to sift through tens of thousands of hours of footage to find the few snippets where I’m rubbing one out while I’m in the cockpit.” I swallowed and grinned. “But don’t worry, I’m a bit of an exhibitionists so you’re more than welcome to watch.”
“I have no choice,” Elliot murmured. “It’s kind of my mission.”
“That’s a hell of a mission,” I said. “Watching cute trans girls, with several hundred thousand dollars worth of precious organs, fap. I wish that was my job.”
“The pay is shit,” they commented.
“Fuck dude, give me food and rent and I’ll do it for free.”
“You’d also be tasked with watching pilots who were not ‘cute trans girls’.”
I snorted and shook my head in defeat. “Why does there always have to be a catch?”
“Because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Oh, there totally is. I’m going to be eating off the company’s dime until the day I die.” I snorted, feeling my smile slip. “Fuck that sounded way less dark in my head.”
Elliot’s light dimmed. “I wish I could be of more assistance.”
“It’s fine.” I flicked my wrist. “At least I have someone interesting to talk to while I slowly wither away.” I then nodded towards the console. “Do you have anything interesting on file that I could watch.”
Elliot laughed. “A couple terabytes of TV shows, music, and movies. Though the company restricts everything to content appropriate for a fourteen-year old.”
“Fuck, does that mean all the best rap songs are censored.”
“Yep.”
“Alright, just throw on some cartoon then. You got anything from Disney?”
“I got Ducktales?”
“Classic, 2010s, or the 2050s version?”
“All three.”
“Fuck yeah, put on the one from the 2010s.”
One of the monitors flickered to life and a cartoon intro began to play.
Watching old cartoons and eating cold mac and cheese. There were worse ways to spend your final days.
Visit my Website if you Want to Find Ways to Support me and my Work
Category Story / Human
Species Human
Size 96 x 120px
File Size 63.1 kB
Comments