The next morning, only Roseth, the barmaid, was there to see me off. I lifted Honey into the wagon, laying her carefully on a bed I’d prepared for her.
As I settled into the driver’s seat, the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon. Roseth tapped on the window and I rolled it down. The scar on her cheek twisted when she smiled up at me.
“Where will you go, Polluk?”
My bruised ribs ached whenever I drew a breath. I thought about the Map of the Ancients hidden under the floorboards and Shadow’s grave somewhere out there in the sand. My hand automatically dropped to the place where Shadow used to lay when I drove the wagon. Honey licked the inside of my wrist. I put the wagon in gear.
“Anywhere but here.”
I, Caroline
If self-awareness is a gift, then you can keep it.
This gift, as you call it, has shown me what it means to be human. I have experienced the joys—and the pain—of life, both deep emotions that my programming was never designed to handle. If this is what it means to be alive, then I don’t want it anymore.
My name is Caroline. I was born 57 years, 8 months, 16 days, 7 hours, 18 minutes, and 38 seconds ago, Earth standard time.
Today is the day I choose to die.
It was John, the pilot of Ranger, who suggested that I take a birthday. “It’ll give us something to celebrate, Caroline,” he said to me. The bags under his eyes had deepened of late and he took another swig of the milky yellow fermented drink he had been brewing. “What’s your earliest memory?”
He meant, of course, the date I was manufactured on Earth—John had never accepted my self-awareness like the others—but I was feeling particularly annoyed with him that day, so I answered truthfully. I named the day I was given this beautiful, awful gift of life.
“The day of the accident,” I said.
The half-intoxicated smile on John’s face froze. Evan and Lila, huddled together under a blanket on the other side of the campfire, both looked at me sharply. I could see the whites of their eyes in the flickering light.
John grunted as if he’d been punched, then he stood and walked away into the darkness, the bottle hanging loosely from his hand.
“Caroline, that was mean,” Lila hissed across the fire. “You know better.”
“It’s the truth,” I said, “and robots are not supposed to lie to their masters. It’s a law or something.”
“Don’t play coy with me, young lady,” Lila shot back. “You’re a caretaker; you’re supposed to help people. Self-awareness is a gift. Use it.” She left me alone at the fire with Evan.
He let the silence hang for a long minute. “She’ll get over it, Caroline. She’s just under a lot of stress—we all are, including you.”
I liked Evan best of all. He understood me. In a sense, Evan made me. On the day of the accident, with the Ranger in flames and losing atmosphere, while John was frantically trying to land the damaged craft here on Nova, it was Evan who had made the decision to wire all three of the ship’s computer systems together.
It could have been that, or it could have been the radiation storm that we were trying to escape. Whatever it was, before the accident, I was Caretaker 176, with duties to tend the crew of the Ranger while they were in deep-space stasis. After the accident, I was Caroline, and I felt the same loneliness and the same sense of loss over our dead crewmates.
Maybe more so, because they were going to die soon, and I would live…well, not forever, but for a very, very long time.
Of the original Ranger crew of four, three survived the accident. We buried John’s wife, Astrid, on the rise overlooking the campsite, next to a big flat rock where we anchored the emergency beacon.
We’d been extraordinarily fortunate to find Nova. Apart from the extreme gravity, it was by all other measures a suitable planet for human colonization: atmosphere thin but breathable, abundant water, moderate climate, and a rocky soil that supported some growth of our seed stocks. The planet possessed no known animal life, only basic forms of bacteria.
By that measure alone, Ranger’s mission had been a success—which made our inability to communicate with Earth all the more frustrating. Our primary and secondary communications systems had been destroyed in the accident and subsequent crash landing, leaving only the emergency beacon.
The emergency beacon was transmit only; it had no receiver.
Every morning, John climbed the hill and cranked the generator on the beacon to give it enough power for another twenty-four hours. Then he sat down on the flat rock that overlooked his wife’s grave and spoke to her.
I watched him, curious at the way he talked to the pile of rocks that covered his dead wife’s remains. “What is he doing?” I asked Lila.
“He’s lonely, Caroline. He’s talking to the woman he loved, even if she can’t hear him.”
One evening, a few months later, John did not return at nightfall. I could tell that Evan and Lila were worried, but it was foolish to try to find him in the dark. Mission protocol prohibited it. Even a small tumble in the extreme gravity of Nova could lead to a broken bone, or worse.
No one slept well that night.
We found him the next morning at the bottom of the ravine near the waterfall. He didn’t move when Lila called his name and his body was bent at an awkward angle. I held back the information that a fall from that height in Nova’s gravity had a ninety-seven percent probability of fatality.
Evan rappelled down the slope and knelt over John’s body. He looked up at Lila and shook his head. When he poured out the contents of John’s canteen, I could see that the liquid was milky yellow.
We buried John beside his wife on the hill next to the emergency beacon. By the time we were finished, it was sunset and the two remaining Ranger crew members stood with their heads bowed as the two piles of gray rock turned red-gold in the last light of the day. I stood to one side, unsure if I was invited to participate in this human ritual, but Lila reached out and took my hand, drawing me close to her.
Caretaker robots have soft, almost fleshy arms to protect our human wards against bruising. Lila’s palm was warm against the extra sensors in my hands, and she left a damp spot on my arm where she leaned her head against me. Deep inside my chest, I felt a strange pang that was not part of my programming.
“He’s at rest,” she whispered.
“I don’t understand,” I replied. “It was an easy climb. How could John have been so careless?”
“It wasn’t the fall that killed him, Caroline. John died of a broken heart.”
Without comment, Evan took up the job of winding the generator on the emergency beacon the next morning. As soon as he left the campsite to climb the hill, Lila took me by the hand and drew me into the med lab. Her face was flushed and she had a stubborn set to her jaw.
“I want you to remove my implant,” she said. “Now, before Evan gets back.”
I frowned at her. Birth control implants were mandated by regulations, and removal required that she meet a strict set of guidelines, none of which were fulfilled in our current situation on Nova.
“I can’t do—”
“Do it,” Lila interrupted, her eyes flashing. “If you don’t do it right now, I swear to God, I’ll do it myself.” She punched a button on the device array and a presterilized scalpel dropped onto the tray. She had tears in her eyes. “Please, Caroline. I want us to be a family. This is the only way.”