Tock rolled onto her back and pushed herself toward the wall. She pulled the emergency restart handle and watched the lights flicker on in Karen’s pod as it began to spin. “This whole existence has been one of misery and dread and servitude. I have no desire to repeat it.” She turned to look directly at the camera. “But I know you, Bezel. You’ll feel guilty if you don’t try. You’ll convince yourself that if I can be saved, I ought to be. I can’t prevent you from finding another bot system, but I can prevent you from fixing this one. Please, Bezel, don’t bring me back to this dead world.”
She held up a small length of wire so that he could see it. Opening the service hatch in her chest, she inserted the wire. It sparked, and she lurched backward. The hatch door flapped closed and Tock lay motionless against the wall, right where Bezel had found her.
The camera jittered and Bezel knew he’d missed the explosion while watching Tock. He cycled back to the end of the fight and switched feeds until he found Dr. Ficht. She was standing in front of his own motionless body. The camera only caught her back. He could see that the blood had soaked her jacket down to the sleeve now. She wasn’t dragging the axe any longer—she must have already buried it in the zoo’s control console. Instead she had an oxygen canister from the first aid kit tucked under her arm. She swayed, as if she heard slow, distant music.
“I had to kill Tock, Bezel. I’m sorry. I can’t leave you alone. It wouldn’t be fair to make you wake up by yourself.” She was slurring her words. “There’s no one left to raise the alarm, so you can just sleep. No need to wake up again.”
She tugged on a plug in the side of the recharge station. It fell to the floor and bounced. She stepped on the metal prongs, turned the plug, stomped on them again. Then she picked it up and snapped the metal off. Bezel was surprised. That would be easily fixed. He began to rise from the console with the feed still running. But Dr. Ficht placed the oxygen tank down and then reached into her pocket. Bezel sank back into his seat as he watched the doctor jam a long screwdriver into the port and twist. That would do it. The charger was permanently broken. There was no fixing it. And she had never meant for him to. Dr. Ficht had simply forgotten that he would reboot on reserve power when it got too low.
She picked up the oxygen canister. “Life was just an anomaly anyway,” she muttered, turning back toward the seed vault. “It was never supposed to be. Now we’re just like all the other dead planets. It’s better this way…” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared down the hall. Bezel turned off the feed. He didn’t want to watch her blow up the seed vault.
He sat in a chair next to Karen’s cot. She slept on. He wanted to think about what he’d just seen. He wanted to worry about the sinking power reserve. He wanted to read the data from outside again. But Bezel knew his time was no longer his own. He was existing to help Karen. He synced his alarm to her monitor and went into standby mode until she woke again.
Reboot
It was almost a month before Karen finally asked the question Bezel had been dreading. He’d wrestled with what he would tell her when it came up. At first he thought he might lie, at least until she was stronger. It was against his programming, of course, but he knew the workaround. It took a lot of resources. But something told him that wouldn’t be fair. Not even if telling the truth meant she lost the will to live and withered away again. Tock would have told her the truth.
But she hadn’t asked. For a while they hadn’t really talked at all. Bezel thought it must be shock. After a few days, she asked him about her physical therapy. And then she’d requested specific meals. Most often, she just slept or stared into space. Bezel went into standby as often as he could to conserve his power. She didn’t ask about that either. After a week, she asked him for a book. They’d successfully ignored each other for another few days, talking only between paperbacks and during therapy. But she’d asked at last, as Bezel had known she would.
She was sitting up on her own by then, but he hadn’t yet taken her into the rest of the vault. He was helping her with some leg exercises when she spoke. “Is there anything else I should know, Bezel? About what happened?”
He didn’t look up from her leg as she flexed it. “You have enough resources to subsist in the vault for several years. Perhaps for your entire life,” he said, trying to ease into it.
“My life? We were only supposed to hibernate for ten years. I remember you telling me the sensors are out, but surely after fifty years the surface should be habitable again.”
He lowered her foot gently to the floor. “I don’t know. The radiation was worse than expected. The information that Dr. Ficht examined convinced her that it wouldn’t be at acceptable levels for over a century. Even if the timeline is wrong, there is a strong chance that plant life has been severely reduced. The air may not be breathable.”
“But you can go out and plant more. I know we’re in the arctic, but they must have left some vehicles for you and Tock.”
“There isn’t anything to plant.”
“What do you mean? There’s an entire vault—thousands and thousands of types of plants, millions of seeds and bulbs,” Karen said, and then paused. “When you said the seed vault was sabotaged… I thought you meant maybe the temperatures were off, or a shelf was destroyed. You meant—is it all gone?”
“There was a fire. An explosion.”
“All of it? There must be some seeds that escaped.”
“When you are well enough, I will show you. We can clean it up together and see if anything viable survived.”
“And the zoo?”
“The power was cut to the nitrogen tanks.”
“Everything is dead? Why did we survive?”
“You survived because Tock saved you. She couldn’t save the others. I don’t think she realized that Dr. Ficht would destroy the rest of the vault. And I wasn’t activated. Dr. Ficht thought I’d remain on standby until my power ran out. She destroyed my charge station so that I would just run down.”
Karen was silent for a moment. Bezel lifted her other leg.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“That’s up to you,” said Bezel.
“Why is it up to me? Because I’m human? I can’t save the species. You can do more than I can. Why shouldn’t you decide what we do?”
“Because my power reserve will be depleted in a few months.”
Karen looked confused. “Your charge station may be damaged, but you can use Tock’s, can’t you?”
“I tried to recharge Tock, to see if I could fix her. But she was too damaged, and it shorted out her charge station. The wires are melted, and I don’t know how to fix it. Tock was the repair bot. I wasn’t programmed for that level of maintenance. Our memory banks aren’t infinite—we’d split the responsibility. Tock was meant to fix things like this. I was meant to keep track of the botany, decide the best place to resettle, manage husbandry.”
“So you’re—you’re dying?”
He unstrapped the weight from her ankle and looked at her. “I wouldn’t call it that. I’m just running down. One day I’ll stop. But the thing that’s me won’t be destroyed. It will just be waiting to reboot.”
“There must be some sort of extra battery around here, or something we could rig up. What about Tock’s battery?”