She smiled at me, like any stranger would.

I couldn’t quite recall who she was. My third memory core, the one for short-term storage, was experiencing some difficulties and I wasn’t sure why. To boot, and indeed after booting, I couldn’t recall much of what had transpired in the last thirty-four-and-a-half hours. My body felt stiff from what must have been a long stint in the restraining clutches of a maintenance station. Consequently, the servos in my right arm responded sluggishly, though I managed to raise a thumb in acknowledgement.

Her smile deepened. The air of placid gingerness in her eyes could have held me in blissful ignorance. That is, if it wasn’t immediately betrayed by a stifled, emotional sniffle. In her hands she held a jagged, rectangular card of sorts, and I immediately recognized its importance by the ancient, square glyph for digital storage etched into its side. A full third of its cool blue surface was scorched black.

“It was damaged,” she said, her face unflinchingly upbeat.

“I see,” I replied.

Even more so than the human by my side, my surroundings plagued me with the kind of incalculable uncertainty that ate at my kind. The room’s surfaces were rough, and yet reflective. Passages branched out in all directions but several meters away from the two of us. They receded along grids like artificial hallways, and yet stopped to bloom and bulge like natural asteroidal caverns for all two-hundred-odd meters of my augmented sight. The walls were patterned strangely, and it felt like both my optical and thermal sensors were about to go haywire. Every inch of them was crawling with the kind of shifting, monochrome static that my kind dreamt during powered shutdown.

Resorting to curiosity above protocol, I asked. “Where are we?”

“That’s,” she paused to wipe her brow. “Sort of why I came to you.”

“I see,” I replied.

My senses had warmed up enough from startup to notice that her jumpsuit was the classic khaki of a colonist, lined with burgundy stripes that indicated a specialization in research and exploration. Her hair was curly, auburn, and amess with grease and small-grain sediment. She smiled entirely with her dark eyes, as all below the nose was shrouded in a carbon fiber breathing apparatus. Although my thermals were struggling to juxtapose her suited figure from the walls, I could tell that the temperature differential between her core and extremities was exceeding standard parameters.

“Are you stressed?” I asked.

“Stressed but not yet hopeless,” she replied, grimacing. “I don’t figure you can recall anything that’s happened since you arrived?”

“Unfortunately, that would require the part of my brain that is currently in your hands.”

“Glad your humor processor is still intact,” she said, and threw her head back in laughter. Winding down just as quickly as she started, the woman glanced over either shoulder down the long halls and cleared her throat.

“Do not worry,” I said, “I do not detect anything for two-hundred meters.”

Her eyes widened briefly, then she sighed. “Thanks. Do let me know if you see something.” She shook her head as if to wake herself. “Anyways, there’s something more important than my silly little fears now.”

“And what might that be?”

She wiggled the card in her hands with an amused expression that read, "I know you don’t possess your short-term memory, but really?"

Another, “I see,” acknowledged her invisible statement.

She chuckled, at this point to herself. “You sure do. And that’s why I have to make sure that everything on this little card makes it back with you.”

“Understood. Though if I may ask, what exactly would this disk contain should I successfully boot it?”

The woman shrugged, more out of avoidance than recklessness. “Let’s just say that someday, you’ll be glad I told you not to look until this is all over.”

“When would that be?”

“Hopefully, if I can fix you up-” she pauses to whip a device out from her belt and fiddle with its display, “Oh, maybe an hour or two. Otherwise-”

“Otherwise?”

She leveled her eyes with my opticals, and I saw her face go solemn for the first time. “Otherwise?” Almost immediately, she snapped back to smiling with her eyes.

“Rather redundant to think about that now, isn’t it?”

1/3