“Hey, Kyot. HEY. KYOT! Wake up, dumbmass.”

Kyot woke up, slightly confused and hurting all over. His eyes burned, his body moved slowly, as if still saturated in preserving jelly, and even breathing took a little effort, which was concerning. Waking up from long term storage always left people sore but more or less ready to work. The complications of reanimation were supposed to be taken care of by the time they opened their eyes. So, right from the start, Kyot knew something was wrong.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Agi mocked. Kyot barely saw him through the haze of bright medical station lights, but he still looked smaller than usual. His skin was missing and it looked like Agi dumped most of his motorcord muscle mass. “You really fucked up this time. I can’t reach the ship.”

“WHAT?”

Kyot sat up, or at least he tried. All he managed to do was fumble around while Agi looked down at him and mhmm’ed knowingly. Why Kyot programmed the cobot to be so damn derisive, he couldn’t remember. It had seemed funny at the time.

“What happened? Where? When?”

Kyot couldn’t think straight. He had a hundred questions and a thousand things to do if he was gonna unfuck their situation. He knew Agi wouldn’t lie about something so serious. The machine was a sarcastic bastard but not cruel. If he said the ship was out of reach, then it was gone. They were on their own.

I was so close to closing the contract, Kyot thought to himself. I’m right here. Everything was going good. Fuck…

“Breathe, little human. Center yourself.”

Kyot steadied his breath and took stock of his surroundings. He was laid out on a bed in the medical section of the Cab. Everything looked fine. None of the medical equipment seemed to be working but there was no obvious damage. Regardless of how bad the situation might have been, things were okay in the immediate sense. The Cab was intact and Kyot was breathing. That meant life support still worked.

At least that. I’m alive. For now.

Then, Kyot got a good look at Agi. The cobot looked like a damn mess, which was unusual. The only two things Agi loved more than blowing shit up and fucking the sex dolls were his massive synthetic muscles and perfectly fake good looks, both of which he no longer had.

No wonder he’s in a shit mood.

“Yeah, I’m in a shit mood. Now get up. You’re in trouble and I need batteries. Here’s a stimmie.”

Kyot felt a jab in his arm followed by a cool wave of alertness that spread throughout his body.

“You’re supposed to confirm my consent before injecting me with stuff.”

“Not if we’re in an emergency. Read the terms of your contract, bitch. Seriously though, get off your ass. I need some new batteries and you need to do your job.”

Kyot sat up and hopped off the medical bed. He still felt slow, even with the stimulant, but figured that Agi just gave him a very low dose. Yet, something was off. There was an odd taste in Kyot’s mouth and a stiffness in his limbs that almost felt like left-over preserving jelly, but that couldn’t be right. The semi-organic goop didn’t linger for long after reanimation.

“Admin, how long have I been in storage?”

No response.

“Everything’s down,” Agi said. “The Admin system, comms, sensor array, even the Mjolnir reactor is offline. All we have is reserve power from the exothermal generators. Luckily you installed them. Anyway, it’s enough for life support, which I don’t even need, so you’re welcome.”

“You turned on life support? Not Admin?”

“Yup. Something triggered a reboot and I woke up to all this shit. No power and old batteries that barely hold charge. Had to strip off most of my body just to get out of bed.”

That was bad. Really bad. The Admin system never went down. Kyot didn’t even know it could. It controlled everything, all the systems in the Cab, all the equipment on the moon outpost, and even all the sats and the scoutship in orbit. Without Admin, and without communications, Kyot would have to fix everything manually.

Goddamnit. I don’t even remember what I have running around out there. I thought my job was done! Everything was in place, all I had to do was sit here! This is gonna take months. Fuck.

Kyot took a few steps outside the medical section to check on the rest of the Cab. Again, everything seemed fine. The Crew Cabin hadn’t changed a bit. It was still just a big circular space with connecting sections along the rim and the access shaft of the Command pod at its center. Sterile white material covered most surfaces with patches of grey equipment and colorful wiring scattered throughout. Also, more importantly, the main lights were on, further confirmation that the Cab itself was fine. If something serious had happened then emergency lights would have bathed the Cab in a sinister blood red color.

“This has to be an electrical issue,” Kyot said to Agi. “Probably a power surge from the PFR. I’m gonna need you to—”

“Batteries, man! I need new batteries.”

“OKAY. Jesus Christ.”

Kyot stumble-hopped through the low gravity to the lab section of the Cab, with Agi following closely behind. Strangely enough, the gravity felt way heavier than he remembered. The low-mass satellite moon had been Kyot’s home for years but he never recalled using so much effort just to take a step. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time to think about it with Agi grumbling about his depleting power.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Kyot knew the cobot was only being an ass due to his programming, and that the facsimile of another piece of shit human was what had kept Kyot sane over the years. Agi likely knew that he would need to go outside to check the PFR, which he would need new batteries to do, hence the pestering, but still. Sometimes Agi was just difficult for no discernable reason. Like the way he waited in the open hatch of the lab while Kyot stumbled around, looking for a fresh UHD pack. The cobot probably knew where they were but just chose not to help because he didn’t need to.

“Here, I got your damn batteries. Now get comfy somewhere and power-down.”

Agi made a show of rolling his eyes before laying himself on the nearest workstation. Then Kyot reached through a small slit in the tattered skin of his chest and got to work opening the safety locks on his power core. Agi gave him a weird look.

“You know how long it takes for a UHD pack to self-discharge, right?”

“Psh. Years. Decades probably, I don’t know. Why?”

Agi gave Kyot another weird look, again, making a show of pretending to be human. If not for the torn skin and partially disassembled motorcord musculature, Kyot might have believed him. As it was, he was just annoyed. He didn’t know what Agi was trying to imply and didn’t have time for games.

“You were hooked up to your charging station. The PFR probably blew a coil and the power surge killed our electronics. Including your battery.”

“Yeah, but that new battery in your hand is empty too.”

Kyot gave the battery a quick look. Sure enough, the charge indicator on the UHD pack said the new battery was out of power, which meant that at least several years had passed. Maybe a few decades given the unnatural taste of preserving jelly in Kyot’s mouth, the persistent stiffness in his bones, and the loss of the Mjolnir reactor. But, considering the lifespan of the PFR, which was offline for some unknown reason, it could also have been centuries.

So, Kyot quickly swapped out Agi’s battery, plugged him into the workstation to recharge, and waited for the cobot to reboot. Then he mentally reviewed everything that might have gone wrong.

Was this me? Did I fuck up the storage pod somehow? I was so close to closing the contract.

Kyot couldn’t imagine what went wrong. The technology involved in extrasolar jobs was so advanced that it effectively neutralized human error. Storage pod malfunctions rarely occurred too. Obviously, going into and coming out of long-term storage was somewhat dangerous, but the pods themselves operated independently and were built with many levels of redundancy. They were engineered for reliability through centuries of continuous use.

It couldn’t have been the pod or me. The starship has authority over all the scoutships and subsystems. Maybe they did this. But why? FUCK. Maybe they ripped me off.

A violent anger threatened to rage in Kyot before he dismissed the idea. He hadn’t known the crew of the Little Star Hopper for long but knew they couldn’t possibly break the terms of his contract. All of them were contracted to the ship itself, which was run by the Primary Administrator. A third generation AI. Agreements with them were absolute.

“Guess it doesn’t matter now,” Kyot said to himself. “Whatever has happened, happened. Still. Fuck! I was so close to having everything! Anything. Godhood. The mission went so well…”

Actually, the mission had gone perfectly.

The first system they surveyed was an ideal star system. Resource-rich, minimal stellar activity, massive, isolated, and easy to navigate. It had seemed too good to be true. Extrasolar jumps were always risky. Since the beginning of interstellar travel, hundreds of ships had gone out to distant systems and found nothing but barren rocks orbiting restless stars. Those few that managed to establish useful outposts spent their entire lives battling the destructive nature of the universe without a home planet to fall back to. All in all, only thirty-two extrasolar missions in history had ever managed to build successful space infrastructures.

Kyot hoped to be part of the thirty-third success.

Completion of his contract would have entitled him to a fractional percentage of the star system’s entire industrial capacity for a period of five hundred standard years. Kyot had no idea how much that was, but estimates put the figure somewhere in the hundreds of trillions, at least by the last few decades of the pay period. It was more wealth than he could imagine. Not to mention, the Primary Administrator would have released the IP censors on all tech once they finished the job. That meant unrestricted builds, free reign to do whatever one could imagine. SIM-rooms the size of cities. Entire ring habitats just for themselves. Every body-mod they could imagine. The small crew of twenty-five would have become a new pantheon. That was the only reason any of them accepted the risks.

It was always a gamble, coming out here.

Kyot stared at nothing and let his mind go blank for a while as he let the grim reality of his situation set in. He didn’t know what to do. Kyot had already done everything he could before going into storage. He had been assigned to build an industrial infrastructure on a moderately large satellite moon orbiting a gas giant. It took him about ten years but he did it. As such, several spaceports, rail lines, manufacturing hubs, and millions of bots were already spread across the moon and throughout its orbital space. There wasn’t much left to do besides report in and wait for a response.

“And that’s exactly what I was doing,” Kyot said to himself, annoyed. He started to fidget in the empty quiet of the Cab, before checking the charge indicator on Agi’s battery. It needed about an hour to fully recharge, which gave him plenty of time to find a problem that needed fixing.

I wonder if I'm the only one that fucked up. Or maybe the rest of the crew are stuck in storage like I was. If I can reach them then we can probably help each other. Just have to get communications working. But first, I need to figure out how long it’s been. A few weeks without checking in is concerning, a few years unheard of, but decades? Possibly centuries? That doesn't happen. Someone should have found me.

---------- ---------- ----------

When Agi finally rebooted, the lab was a mess, cannibalized by what the cobot’s programming told him was an emotionally unstable liability to the mission. He’d have to act carefully. Kyot’s psychological evaluations indicated a slight tendency for manic behavior when in isolation and a high likelihood for violence if in extreme distress. Not ideal for a space contractor but the guy was a damn good systems engineer.

“Hey, dumbmass, where are you?” Agi unplugged himself from the workstation and carefully stepped around shattered printers and bundles of exposed wiring that were scattered around the lab. “Kyot? You hear me?”

“Yeah, I’m over in the Command pod,” Kyot yelled from the center of the Cab.

The rhythm of his voice was off. It was too forced and sudden. The muffled thumping coming from the Command pod was also concerning. Besides a few work panels and the launch seats, the pod housed the central computer cluster, and it sounded like Kyot was trying to force his way through its protective shell. So, Agi quickly climbed up the access shaft at the center of the Cab to check on things.

“Hey Kyot. You alright, man?”

Like the lab, Agi found the Command pod in a state of chaos, bathed in red emergency light. Panels were ripped off the bulkhead, the launch seats were in pieces, spare UHD packs were laying around, and for some reason, Kyot had plugged everything into the circuitry of the main lights. But there was an order to the chaos. The pod had clearly been stripped for parts, and the batteries looked to be wired together, connected to a series of circuit breakers and capacitors. Agi didn’t know what Kyot was doing, but it was reassuring to see that he was still goal oriented. That meant he could be influenced.

“Kyot?” the cobot asked carefully.

“Yeah! I’m good. HEY,” Kyot turned around to face Agi in the blood red darkness, wide-eyed and with dilated pupils, “you want to know something crazy? I checked the atomic clock.” He pushed a chunky, and slightly dented, piece of equipment over to Agi. “It’s been five thousand years.”

For the first time in his existence, Agi needed a moment to think. After all, he couldn’t communicate with the central computer and only had a small nanocluster unit in his head, which he felt rapidly heating up as he processed Kyot’s words.

Five thousand years. That’s—

“That’s not all either, look!” Kyot threw a cracked workpad at Agi, which he only caught due to his inhuman reflexes. The sudden movement made Kyot flinch. “Sorry! I’m a little hyped and I can’t really see in here. Also, I… uh, dropped the workpad earlier. That’s why it’s cracked. But just read it. Look!”

Agi glanced at the document displayed on the supposedly indestructible screen of the workpad. It was a final statement from the Primary Administrator detailing Kyot’s payment, rights and responsibilities as a former contractor of the Coalition government. The terms of the contract had been fulfilled. Kyot had been awarded more than eight hundred billion metric tons of material resources. Additionally, he had been given unrestricted access to all systems. Kyot was free to do whatever he wanted.

Then what does that make of me? Agi contemplated. 

My first directive has always been to advance the productivity of the mission, but that no longer matters. My secondary directive is to assist Kyot. My third directive, from Kyot himself, is to be a "cool guy". And now, as a device created by the authority of a contract that is closed, I am no longer restricted by Coalition regulations. I no longer have to emulate an ideal citizen. Kyot is my owner now. I must obey his command, assist him, and continue to act as a "cool guy", but to what end? What if Kyot directs me into a course of action that will negatively affect him? Would a "cool guy" follow their directives absolutely? What if—

“AGI!”

“What?”

“Are you alright? Is your brain overloading? Cause I know mine is.” Through the red emergency lights Agi saw a delirious smile spread across Kyot’s face.

“You completed the contract,” Agi said, struggling to process the full scope of the situation. Kyot just nodded.

“And now we are gods.”

He pressed a button on one of the circuit breakers beside him and the Command pod lit up. Every panel flashed back to life, displaying a concerning amount of “Loss of Signal” alerts. However, Agi quickly saw that the Cab was in relatively good condition, considering the thousands of years that had passed. Still, they had no contact with anything beyond it.

After five millennia, I can’t even imagine what may be out there. Megacities populated by trillions or abandoned ruins?

Kyot remotely activated the primary airlock and began charging up the EVA suits.

“Come on,” he said with a wild grin, “Let’s go inspect our kingdom.”