//3716-11-08//

  //41,472 days since first maintenance request//

  //13 days of power remaining in fusion reactor remain//

  Copper liked to think of himself as a simple person. He loved his family. He loved his books. Most importantly though, he loved to wonder. He wondered about his family, and about his books. He wondered just how much food was left inside the old factory, and if the concrete monster was still capable of producing more if they ran out. (Although he tried to avoid wondering about that one, it was distressing.

  Currently he was wondering when Rose would realise that her suits temperature control was in fact perfectly fine, and that the temperature swings she was suffering through were a bit of a hazing ritual. As couriers they were expected to inspect their own equipment, not simply rely on the librarians (who were busy overseeing what remained of the village's advanced technology).

  It had taken Copper one single trip to figure out the problem. Back and forth before he used his day off to inspect the suit. It probably would have only taken an hour or two but he had been too nervous to stop the team. So seeing Rose go on and on, rather valently putting up with the problem instead of doing anything about it…

  Copper usually didn't engage with the team much. At least, not outside of his job. Keeping line cleanly drawn between professional and personal lives kept things black and white more often then not. That's how he liked things. Morally smooth.

  ‘Hey take care of your suit jackass.’ was a lesson worth learning. Over 100 years of living in it had made people forget that this was a nuclear wasteland. That this desert was a whole lot more lethal than its red sand implied. But the more time went on the more morally grey things felt. At what point had this lesson gone on for too long? Surely in the past, when more people wanted the job, Rose would have been replaced by now?

  But no one else wanted the job. So she wouldn't be replaced unless she did something incredibly stupid. Which wasn't likely to happen. Copper knew Rose. They both grew up in a community that was barely halfway into the four digits, of course he knew Rose. At Least, to some extent. She was a good kid, she wouldn't get kicked out. (At Least not before Kopper.) But she clearly wa6s treating this job with the respect it deserved.

  So surely someone should teach her that, instead of hazing or replacing her? But that flew in the face of Courier tradition. They did things their way for a reason, right?

  No. It didn't feel black and white to him at all, and Copper hated that. It felt grey. Grey like the hull pieces that made up the town. Grey like the face of someone who just found out how long until the cancer growing inside them killed them. Grey, like the situationship between his brother and his boss.

  Most importantly, most keenly and above all else: It was as grey as the wall of that old factory they walked into twice every week. That damned factory. Copper's exoskeleton crawled everytime he thought about it. He'd been doing this job for years, yet this was the first time he had ever dreaded heading towards the damn thing. Something was very wrong, and he couldn't put his antenna on it. It was like something had started watching them. Plus that drone. Taking a pallet of food out of the factory to greet them. That was weird.

  Like seriously fucked up haven't-seen-this-in-over-one-hundred-years weird.

  The factory was dead. Everyone knew that. The maintenance drones were like the twitches an animal makes as it dies, nerves firing while they still can before the lights go out. Only, these nerves had some form of intelligence. Even if it was extremely limited the AI which powered the factory was ultimately just a much more scaled up version of that which ran the maintenance drones.

  So couldn't the maintenance drones, if given enough time, or if given a reason to do so, replace or rebuild the AI that had once run the facility? It was a theory he'd run by Elder Shackle once, but the elder had very quickly shut him down. It wasn't that such a thing was impossible or even unlikely, but rather that the Elder's didn't like to dwell on any sort of pessimistic outcome when the future of the village was brought up.

  They were around about 500 humanoids sheltered by a crash prisoner of war transport living on a desert world that had just been glassed when they arrived. Optimism was seen as essential by the Elders, and for good reason, Copper just hoped that in private the Elders were realistic about the challenges they had to plan for.

  If the factory's AI has been rebuilt, do they have a plan for that? What could we possibly do?

  The village didn't have weapons. They had been buried long ago, during the turbulent first few years of the village, as a safeguard against internal conflict. Only a hand full of people had known where the weapons had been buried, and they had taken the secret to the grave. At least, that was how the story Copper had been told as a kid went. It was only when retelling the story to his own child that he began to wonder at the convenience of that. Surely the Elder's knew where their weapons had been hidden? Just in case they were ever needed.

  Like if the factory goes haywire and we have to start taking our food by force…

  Copper decided that, once they got back to the village after this run, he’d give Rose a hint. Maybe just casually mention that as couriers they were supposed to check their suits over themselves. Not that he ever had many opportunities to speak casually with his teammates. Or anyone else for that reason. Should I be more sociable?

  While he was on a roll with deciding, Copper also decided that he did not want to see that drone outside of the factory again. While yes, it was very convenient not having to walk through that crumbling deathtrap, he’d take normality over convenience every damn day of the week.

  Of course, Copper was many things, but as Ash go, he was far from lucky. So, while he wasn’t completely surprised to see not one but two maintenance drones waiting for them at their campsite, (they still seemed to insist on parking ontop of their campfire spot,) he was incredibly anxious at the sight.

  Ash didn’t have sweat glands like humans did, they controlled their bodies temperature via biological ‘vents’ which lined the side of their body. As his flight or fight instincts kicked in, minus the adrenaline which could make humans so deadly, these vents along his sides opened wide. Revealing the soft, dark red flesh which laid within. The membrane that laid behind these vents was absolutely dominated by veins. Not a single drop of blood could be carried throughout his body without passing the cooling membrane first.

  His heart rate increased also, further amplifying the cooling effect on his body. While Copper may have lived on a desert planet, he absolutely despised the cold. His anxiety was replaced by a wave of vicious, frustrated anger. He hated this feeling; he hated the way cold permeated his body as if the fear was a wraith that had suddenly uppercut its ethereal arm into his very core. His mind reacted like a small cat caught in a corner, or like a cat trapped under a bot. Teeth snapping, claws tearing.

  The others stopped. He didn’t. He strode forward, the compacted sand of the campsite crunching under his booted feet. He was barely a step away from the containers the two of the drones held in their forks when he stopped, folding his arms across his chest the same way he did whenever he had to teach his child a behavioural lesson. He stared at the drones, looking them right in their sensor arrays, silently demanding an explanation. Or maybe silently daring them to do something to him. To attempt to hurt him or his team or his village.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he was silently demanding, but whatever the question was, the answer was simple silence. The drones did not move, and neither did he. It took Roya to break the stalemate, who moved forward with Kopper and Rose, the team of four gathering around the front of the drones. The other three, they searched, but Copper only looked.

  One of the containers was empty. The other was filled with the usual amount of food cartridges that they usually took. Plus a little extra. A thin black slate. A tablet. In remarkably good condition too. Atleast that’s what Kopper said, Copper wasn’t really paying attention. But then Rose and Roya started sounding words out.

  It reminded him of when his child had been first learning how to speak, and the wholesome memory threw him out of his funk. He’d probably made his point to the drones by now, whatever point that might be. Regardless it was clear they weren’t going to give him an answer, and it would only make him look insecure if he didn’t take the hint.

  “Say ahh, team.” Team was a term he used when referring to Roya and Rose, he would quite happily call his brother a number of things, but team mate was not one of them. “Not to admit to not paying attention, but mind telling me why you sound like you’re practicing your sight cards at school?”

  Rose froze, looking embarrassed. Copper didn’t find the expression cute, but Roya did. It was his team leader who spoke. She was direct and to the point, as always.

  “Here, take a look yourself.” She said, shoving the tablet into his now uncrossed arms. The first thing he noticed once he had the tablet in his hand was just how clean the thing was. All the tablets the village had available to them had over 100 years of grim and scratches and experiences. They were permanently coated in what could only ever be called ‘ware’ but looked an awful lot like ‘tear’. This tablet may as well have been factory new by comparison. He briefly wondered if that was the case. Could the factory have made this? No, there’s plenty of places we haven’t explored yet. The drone probably picked one up from there, it’s not tooled for anything other than food cartridge production. Atleast, I don’t think it is…

  The tablet showed a serious of hand symbols folded this way and that, with speed lines drawn to show the direction each gesture was moving in. He realised now why Roya and Rose had been sounding out different letter and words, the gestures were drawn sign language. The problem was the sign language the village used made up parts of words, the gestures weren’t words in and of themselves.

  “Huh, it never occurred to me that the gestures could be considered a separate alphabet. How intriguing.” Said Kopper, who was peering at the tablet from over his shoulder.

  Copper gently shoved him away, not wanting to start a fight, but not being able to stand being so close to his twin brother either.

  “Oh, don’t you two start.” Said Roya, a scowl firmly adored on her face.

  “I think we might be getting predictable brother.” Said Kopper. Copper ignored him, handing the tablet back to Roya while looking pointedly at Kopper, who rolled his eyes. Eye rolling was more difficult for Ash then it was for humans. Copper didn’t know how long Kopper had practiced to be able to do it so smoothly, but once he’d learnt, he’d never really stopped.

  “I don’t suppose anyone brought something to write with?” Copper asked the group. The three of them shrugged, so in sync that it looked like they’d practiced it. Copper could see Kopper doing something so silly, but he couldn’t see Roya indulging him, so it must have just been coincidence. “Well I guess we’ll just have to write in the sand then. Might make this easier.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “We could always just ask the robots.” Said Kopper. Now it was Copper’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “Is it a good idea to talk to them?” Asked Rose, who received a shrug from Roya.

  “Let’s find out. Kopper, your idea, you ask em.” Ordered Roya.

  “Err I… Umm?” Stuttered Kopper. Useless as always. Thought Copper. Copper turned back to the drones, folding his arms again to address the drones.

  “We need something to write with so that we can translate this, we didn’t bring anything with us, don’t usually need it for this job. Don’t suppose you have something on hand? Another tablet, one with the usual OS, would be good.” Copper wasn’t sure what he expected to happen, but when one of the drones turned around and started heading back towards the factory, his chill from before returned. Only what he once been cold water was now crystalline ice.

  No one voiced the thoughts they were having, because each knew what the other was thinking: The Drones could understand them. Probably. It could be a coincidence. One hell of a coincidence. But it wasn’t. On some level that reached beyond the physical or mental, into the realm of fortune telling, prophecies, time travel and magic, they each knew it wasn’t a coincidence.

  The drones could understand them. The drones had a message for them. The drones were bringing a tablet for them to read it. Slowly the team turned towards the message, wanting to try and make as much progress as possible while they waited for the second drone to return. The food cartridges the first held were temporarily forgotten. But the importance of them to the village was not.

  //3716-11-09//

  //41,473 days since first maintenance request//

  //12 days of power remaining in fusion reactor remain//

  No matter how often she returned, or how tired she grew of it, home was always a welcome sight to Roya. Her team and her were perched on an outcropping of rock that had a simply beautiful overview of the town and the fields of MEP (Multi-environment-potato) that surrounded it. The world they lived on was a barren wasteland, but the way the brown-orange rocks peaked out of its red soil wasn’t without its own beauty.

  The town was easy to spot, especially on the flat, sandy plains. The shipwreck from which Roya and her ancestors had emerged all those years ago formed a barrier to the near-constant northernly wind. Over time the red sand blown by those winds had piled up against it until the wreckage stood as if it was a giant, fighting back against a massive tidal wave which seemed ready to envelope it. The village was built quite literally in the shadow of the metal behemoth, as were the fields. The sun being simply too intense for any other place to be viable. Especially for the humans and their fragile skin.

  The wreck required constant monitoring and care, needing the sand cleared away every now and then so that the weight didn’t cause the ancient hull to buckle. Sand-Autumn had become something of a yearly event for the village. A strange Christmas of sorts. Named so because the sand pushed back from the very top of the wreck would frequently fall down and scatter in the breeze to coat the village in a thin layer. It was annoying to clean, but it was worth it for the spectacular view it provided: During sunset the falling sand would catch the glare, and a sparkling haze would seem to converge, as if it were the fog of the old world, until the village and its inhabitants were nothing but shadows in the light.

  It was a week where the entire village took a break from the ordinary day to day to slowly erode part of a mountain. Panels of old plastic would be taken up by the children and slide down the massive dune. Roya had once cracked her right arm’s exoskeleton after picking up too much speed and flipping her board halfway down. It had been Rose who had collided with her, before either of them were really old enough to reflect on just how stupid an action was before attempting it.

  These days the two were too old to play like that. Instead, they would have to shovel sand over the sides of the dune until the top of airlock 3 was revealed. The faded text a mark of success for three, now four, generations. It was back breaking work and sharing the obligation was merely a balm on an open wound. Still, it had to be done, and Roya had never been one to avoid what had to be done. Sometimes she wondered if she spent too much time focused merely on what had to be done as opposed to what she wanted to do. Outside of surviving, who was she? Who were her people? She didn’t know. Unless something dramatic changed, she would never know.

  She glanced down at the tablet which was still clutched tightly in her three fingered hand. Especially not now.

  It was such a simple and modest device. Something that had been ubiquitous before the war. The village even had a few left, scratched and dusty and damaged. They were kept in the library and school, used to teach the children what they needed to know. Used to keep the stored knowledge of the ancestors at their neck and call. This one would have been a prize had her team found it on their own. Had it not contained a message that sent her stomach tumbling in directions she did not know and could not imagine. The black fist of anxiety pressing into her chest, impacting bone and crashing through to the vulnerable flesh within.

  “Trade offer: I receive lithium, you receive food/ lifeline/ continued existence :).”

  That was the message she carried. The one which weighed down her steps as she trudged towards home once more. The sturdy structure all of a sudden seemed to be so fragile. Ready to fold at any given moment, needing only the lightest of shoves before it would collapse down on top of their heads. They all ended up buried in the sand, in the end, but there was a world of difference between dying alone and dying together.

  There are those who say that dying alone is a sad thing. Something to be avoided at all costs. The sum of a life weighted on the scales of who manages to show up at a bedside in time to see you off. But, at least in Roya’s opinion, those who stated such things are wrong. Dying alone is something worth celebrating, if it means your loved ones aren't dying with you.

  Of the five hundred people that made up the village, Roya was perhaps the most dedicated to its continued survival. Every man, woman and child worked hard day in and day out to keep the village alive of course. There were very few people who were simply uncaring about the village’s future. But very few would match, if faced with some sort of sick test, what Roya was willing to do to ensure her people's safety.

  She didn't know when she'd taken on the responsibility. She didn't even know why. But what she did know was that one day she would be on the elder's council. Call it what you will. Foolish overconfidence. A lack of other applicants. Stubborn grit.

  Roya knew she would lead her village one day, and the thought hounded her. It dominated her waking moments. It screamed in her dreams, warping reality itself around her to hammer home the looming responsibility. She would have a family, as was her due, but she would have no time to rest. Ironically the thought meant she spent most of her free time working to prepare herself for the gruelling existence ahead of her. As opposed to the much more appealing option of just laying down and sleeping.

  As she moved closer to her home those tending to the crops, she carefully avoided stepping on waved in greeting. But one by one each wave froze the moment they saw the expression branded onto her face.

  Bad news. Scarily bad news. They didn't say a word. Didn't ask any questions. Here wasn't the time for her to answer them no, the town centre. The soap box. Something was up and they all needed to hear it.

  The farmers stopped what they were doing one by one, each trailing behind Roya and signalling to the others. As quiet as a funeral procession. As she entered the town proper (a ramshackle fence designed to keep the young'uns nearby marked the border) she caught the eye of Rose's father. He looked horrified at first, but calmed once he saw that Rose was still with the team. Then he checked to see that the rest of them were there before falling in line with the group. The same situation, the same horrified once over repeated itself ad nauseam as Roya moved through the town. Only further reinforcing the dire mood of the moment.

  By the time Roya arrived in the town centre the elders were already there. It never ceased to amaze her how quickly information passed through the village, it was as if the buildings were alive and the people inside were merely blood and nerves. An entire body, only needing to be told once for every cell to know: Danger.

  She was being pessimistic. That's what her mother would tell her. News was a rare thing indeed for the humanoids of the village, what could be seen as quiet mourning for a golden age they hadn't been aware they were living in could simply have been the keen ears of a dog, pricked up to listen in on a conversation only it can hear.

  She gave the Elders a bow of respect and was offered a series of weak smiles in response, before climbing the overworked stairs of the soap box. Once, oh so very long ago, it had been a simple cargo crate. What it had once so carefully carried had long since been forgotten by even those who cared to remember such things. But these days, to the people of the village, it carried something far more important than mere cargo.

  Three lifetimes of impassioned speeches had been conducted on top of that crate. Generations of children had performed sand-autumn plays to a crowd of well-meaning but half asleep adults on top of that crate. Proposals. Marriages. Announcements. Funerals. Celebrations. Good news. Bad news.

  If the town was a body this old crate was its beating heart. A rough rock in a field full of diamonds and somehow so much more beautiful because of that.

  Of course, Roya wasn't thinking of how important such a simple thing was. To her it was just a box. Upon which she addressed the crowd before her. She had been performing on the crate since before she could remember. A lover of the dramatic. Perhaps not a natural performer but most certainly a natural public speaker.

  “Thank you for coming, everyone. I'll get straight to it. I've already shared this with some of you, and I'm sure the rest of you would have heard variations on the story, so let me be clear. On our previous trip to the old warehouse, a maintenance drone was waiting in the middle of our usual campsite. In my years of serving as this team's leader, I have never seen a maintenance drone outside of the warehouse itself. Even inside it they are rare sights; it’s not uncommon for us to go weeks or months without seeing or hearing one. Now they're harmless, simple-minded machines dedicated to repairing something that was broken long ago. The biggest concern is that one might run over a foot by accident.”

  Roya paused and smirked at a scowling human at the back of the crowd.

  “As Thomas here will attest to.” The crowd liked that, and even though Thomas put on a good show of being annoyed by it, he liked it too. His huffs and the shaking of his head clearly over exaggerated. Roya continued. “What's more, this drone carried a pallet of food cartridges out with it. Now usually we have to break down full pallets to carry them, we can carry around three quarters of one. This pallet was already broken down for us. I talked with the rest of the team to make sure I wasn't losing it, and it was not a pallet we had left behind from the last few trips. This is a pallet that, for all intents and purposes, seems to have been prepared for us by the maintenance drones of the warehouse.”

  The crowd didn't interrupt her, but slight murmurs began to run through it, like goosebumps on skin after ice had been slid across it.

  “This trip, presumably, the same drone met us once again. Like before it had a prepared pallet of food cartridges but this time, it wasn't alone. It had a friend it brought along with it, and the friend had this to give us.”

  Roya held up the tablet that contained BOSS’ message. The energy building in the crowd increased upon seeing it. After one hundred years tablets were rare devices, the few the village had left were inside the library. They were the only stores of knowledge left to them from before their ancestors were stranded here. They were used to record the village's history, to teach their young, to inform their elders.

  The tablets were priceless, and now Roya was holding one up for all the see. That was monumental all on its own. Never mind what came next. “On this tablet is a message, it's written… strangely? It's like if you drew a bunch of hand signs and then told me to work out which letter each sign meant. But we managed to translate the message, using this…”

  Roya pulled out the second tablet from her pack, a cheeky grin on her face as a few members of the crowd gave overly dramatic and clearly sarcastic gasps. Although none would deny the value of the object she held, they weren't the kind of people to take themselves too seriously. Still, one of the elder's made a ‘hurry up’ gesture with their hands.

  “The message is as follows, quote: I BOSS. I factory. I provide food. Trade offer: I receive- Ok this one was a little bit difficult to get but we're pretty sure it's lithium. So: I receive lithium. You receive food/ continued existence. End quote.”

  A hush fell over the crowd, murmuring again, this time with an edge that no one could see but everyone could feel. One of the elder' spoke.

  “And you're sure the warehouse is intelligent enough to have written the message for you? Do you know why it calls itself Boss or factory?” The old Ash's face couldn't be lined with worry like a humans, but she almost managed it.

  “I don't know why it calls itself Boss but…” She glanced at Copper. Everyone noticed. “We asked the maintenance drones for something to write with while we were translating the message. It fetched us a second tablet, one with the stock operating system loaded onto it. I think it's fair to say they can understand us.”

  The crowd was completely silent now. Every eye turning towards the Elder to see what wisdom she had to give. Each and every one looking for the best way forward. Looking at the person who was supposed to hand it to them on a silver platter. Being an elder was much more of a responsibility then a privilege.

  “Well shit.” Came the elder's response.

  Truly inspiring.