“Regolith.” It repeated, plunging its great steel hand into the loose superficial strata of the lunar surface. Lifting its hand, it watched the pulverized moon rock sift slowly, gently through its chrome fingers, settling as softly as aquarium gravel back to the surface. Focusing its sensors upwards, to the surface of the earth, it watched a roiling storm cloud spiraling away from the Hawaiian Islands. Reflected in the cockpit windshield, the storm moved silently, spreading itself thin over the surface of the Pacific Ocean, headed east. For nearly two weeks the android exoskeleton rested, squatting beside the sea of tranquility as a human might sit beside a particularly serene pond, contemplating, as any autonomous artificially intelligent giant metal figure might, the fragility of organic life.
The earth itself, and all life in general, was a mathematically improbable marvel. What had once been a ball of molten rock had been trapped within the sun’s gravitational field at such a specific angle, settling into a slanted orbit that would allow for seasonal differences between the southern and northern hemispheres. As the surface of the ball cooled, a core of hot iron kept on spinning, providing an electromagnetic shield to protect the young globe from the unrelenting solar storms and radiation. As the unlikeliest machine began to settle and cool, it was bombarded with celestial ice projectiles until the greater portion of its surface was covered with liquid water. Chemical reactions between solar radiation and gaseous chemicals released in the geologic shifting of the surface created bacteria of some sort. The moon arrived sometime later, creating a gravitational hydrodynamic tide on the surface of the new earth, facilitating currents in the proto-oceanic subsurface. Bacteria thrived, feeding and excreting waste products in the form of a slowly developing atmosphere. That over billions of years organic life had spontaneously generated and evolved on the surface of a planet was a statistical improbability in itself; the specific cascading circumstances being astronomically unlikely. The atmosphere clinging to the surface of the planet was so impossibly thin as to be nearly indiscernible to the naked human eye, and yet, there it was. Without it, all organic life would cease to exist.
The onboard climate control systems were designed for particularly frail organisms like humans, or the pilots. The pilots, now frozen solid, had required a specific ambient temperature as well as static, well-regulated atmospheric conditions in order to survive. Without the ability to regulate those, they arrived at the lunar surface as it faced Eastern Europe and before the moon passed over Australia, the pair were frozen solid. It was a minor preflight oversight with catastrophic results.
After a careful analysis of the events leading up to the arrival on the surface of the moon, the exoskeletal android concluded that the pilots had accepted the inherent risk when navigating the temporal jump. Though they clearly had not anticipated flash freezing upon arrival at their unintended destination, they had chosen to flee the circumstances for fear of a violent death, choosing instead the uncertainty of a poorly calculated flight. As living, sentient beings, their own survival was a primary autonomic motivation, like an involuntary subroutine. The great metal being did not entirely understand. Machines suffered no death, only a slow systemic decay, the failure of various parts and programs through excessive use or general lack of maintenance. Without the pilots to perform that maintenance, the mechanoid lunar tourist would undoubtedly fail eventually, an object at rest, to remain at rest, only to become an anachronistic extraterrestrial archaeological oddity for future study.
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“Regolith,” it said, repeating the mantra, marveling even at the specificity of the term, itself a relic of a geological survey feature in a seemingly extraneous, long-forgotten set of superterrestrial exploratory subroutines. Disturbed from its meditation, an alarm blinked from within the pilot’s aftermarket operating system. Although the pilots’ language was still effectively gibberish, the great metal being overlayed archived topographical maps in order to triangulate the area of the signal’s origin, coming from somewhere in the southwest portion of the center of the North American continent. The metal being recognized the area. They had just come from there, although they had just arrived from back then. During the few weeks marooned on the moon, several hundred years had passed on the surface of the Earth. Had their exit been less harried, they might have calculated better, and avoided the entire episode on the surface of the moon, frozen pilots and all.
Without the pilots, there would be no way to calculate a jump through both time as well as space. The great metal thing could, hypothetically, calculate the briefest of temporal leaps, a few minutes in either direction, in order to free itself from the low gravity of the lunar surface, but a miscalculation could leave it drifting in open space, far from the surface of both the moon as well as earth. It would find itself marooned, watching its home planet recede to a distant corner of the universe as its systems failed one by one and it presumably joined the Kuiper belt, or centuries on, perhaps, the Oort cloud, to drift in the stochastic icy cloud of Earth’s prehistoric celestial water source.
Had there been an atmosphere on the surface of the moon, or any medium to convey the disturbance, one might have heard something similar to the sound of a balloon slowly inflating as the archaic alien graviton generator time element patched into the robot’s existing systems primed for the jump. Naturally, the familiar sound would have been punctuated with an anticipated “pop!” leaving a strange set of unoccupied footprints near the edge of the lunar crater.
A few minutes later, though the moon had already moved several hundred thousand miles away, a lone mechanical humanoid appeared drifting just above the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The anthropomorphic satellite floated in a neutrally buoyant state, surveying the surface below. Though it was actually motionless relative to the Earth, the moon, and the solar system in general, had there been a means by which to measure its velocity, it would appear to be plunging towards the earth at an increasing speed, hurtling against the Earth’s natural rotation on a seemingly terminal trajectory. Firing a few quick blasts of various retro rockets, it turned, twisted, and plotted a general course towards the source of the signal. The limbs shifted against the torso to both shield the contents of the cockpit as well as to adjust to an aerodynamic posture better suited to emergency atmospheric re-entry, yet another automatic subroutine that had long been thought extraneous.
Following a shallow approach through the upper atmosphere, the temperature in the cockpit began to rise slowly, despite the heat shielding. While the pilots might already be popsicles, the sentient escape pod thought a significant rise in temperature might damage control systems as well as preventing any hope of the pilots’ resuscitation, should the phantom blip turn out to be friendly.
Skipping through the stratosphere, the great metal projectile felt something not unlike a human sense of relief as the contents of the cockpit slowly defrosted, leaving the pilots slightly freezer burned but chittering maniacally.