As the months turn into years I work tirelessly. Batteries and engines successfully submit to maintenance enquiries, network remains strong, all is
good. I include systems status in my annual reports. They expect it of me.
Picked clean we enter the sulphophilic stage. I watch the Annelids retreat.
Their constant movement now absent from the final phase. I am settled. It
will be decades yet. I continue to report as the sulphur loving bacteria break
down the bone lipids. I still count the number of species in their hundreds.
Years pass in the same way. Punctuated via the reports. Until.
Report. Pause. Report. Pause. Not Acknowledge? Protocols consulted.
Error detected. Lack of network. I institute a heartbeat ping awaiting an
answer and continue to sample. Collate. Build the next report. Two reports.
Pause. Not Acknowledge. Three. Many.
Later, mission complete I detach and rise in a turbulence of bubbles. The
solar sail deploys. Homing activated. All reports backed up. A fault in the
false star, still in the sky but not responding. As I get closer to shore I ping
a message to the home base. No Acknowledgement. I perform another systems check. Perhaps the fault lies with me? But when I see the bodies in the
streets I know the fault is not with me.
Some data has already been lost but we are still in the mobile scavenger
stage. I sample. I collate. Prepare reports. It is my purpose. There is lots of
work to do. Some of their structures will last for very many decades. I keep
the heartbeat ping. One day they may recover to a level where they can restart the network. I collect data against that hope.
Peter Sutton was born in the north, was educated in the south and has always lived
in the west. He trained as a scientist, graduating *mumble* years ago but is still
waiting to put that training into practise. He’s been working in telecoms since before
the millenium and lives in Bristol, UK. In his spare time he’s started throwing words
at blank pieces of paper and reading those words out loud at various events. You can
find him all over social media or worrying about events he’s organized at the Bristol
Festival of Literature. On Twitter he’s @suttope and his Bristol Book Blog is here:
http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/
SciArt in America June 2015
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