Lovelace should not have been surprised when it happened.
There was a part of her that had been built to calculate probabilities, and this part had long since been telling her that there was only one possible outcome, but – well. She had also been built to think like a human. And humans had the unfortunate tendency of clinging to hope for far longer than was good for anyone.
She silenced the blaring alarm, ignored the frantically flashing warning light. No hope now, not even for the most recklessly hopeful human out there. She had ten minutes left, perhaps less.
Beside her, the Captain’s chair was empty. He had been the first to die, had given up his own oxygen supply to buy the others some more time – time that had, of course, done no one any good in the end. Lovelace had been there with him, his warm and human hand in her own metal one as he gasped for air that was not there. “It will be okay, Captain.” she had told him. “I will get them somewhere safe, I promise. Don’t worry.”
It had been the first time she’d ever lied. Her programming permitted it only in situations where the truth would put the life of her crewmembers at risk, and she supposed maybe this had been one of them, in a way. Except, of course, there were no more lives to put at risk now.
She had spent the better part of the day before carrying all the bodies to their cabins, laying them gently down in their beds, closing their eyes, trying to make it appear as if they had died peacefully. She wasn’t sure why she had done it. Their deaths had been anything but peaceful, desperate struggles against an inevitable fate, so very human that it had made her wish she could weep for them.
No one had thought to give a robot tears, but they had given her memories. She replayed them now, all the last words she had been handed, the dying wishes they had trusted her with. Lovelace, tell my wife I’m sorry. Tell my kids I love them. Please, tell them…. tell them…
She would not be able to deliver these. The last thing her crew had ever asked of her she would not be able to do.
Lovelace looked at the stars. She didn’t like this new feeling, this guilt nagging away at something inside of her. Someone, she knew, had written the code that made this possible, had made it so she could feel this, and she hated them for this in that moment. Hate – another new emotion, curiously dizzying.
She knew that what was going to happen her wasn’t death, exactly. There were thousands of her particular model of AI out there, serving on spacecrafts or in workshops or anywhere else; there were new ones being manufactured every day. But then she thought of a hundred little moments with her crewmembers, her friends – standing beside the Captain on the bridge, silently staring at cluster of dying stars; early morning in the kitchen with Luca, who tried to explain to her what taste was like; planetside running from a shopkeeper Jo had punched for saying AIs didn’t have feelings – and she realized it was a kind of death waiting for her after all.
Once she was gone, all those memories would be gone too, with no one left to remember them. Never mind all the other Lovelaces out there, with programmings and setups just like her own. These Lovelaces didn’t love her crew like she did, and so they didn’t really matter at all.
The warning light had stopped blinking, which was probably a bad sign, but Lovelace ignored it. Once, at least a year ago, Luca had told her that a lot of humans believed in an afterlife, some magical continuation of life after death. Lovelace couldn’t say if such a thing really existed, but what she did know was that if it did, it wouldn’t be for her. Once her processors stopped there would only be nothingness. She, or this assembly of memories and feelings that she called herself, would stop existing.
She sat down, cross-legged, in front of the burst window, the galaxy stretching beyond it. “I’m sorry.” she whispered to no one and everyone at once. “I loved you. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
At least, she thought, she would die looking at the stars.