She said it so casually. Bezel tried to ignore his revulsion. A human wouldn’t understand. To them, nothing was inviolate—it was all to be consumed. “I’ve already had to resort to that. It’s the only reason I’ve been able to help you this long.”
“What about the vault console? Can’t you take power from it? Or could we plug you into it somehow?”
“Even if I could find a way to draw power from the other systems in the vault, you need it to keep the air pumping and the temperature at habitable levels. Once I’ve shut down, you can still retrieve my storage drive and access my files. But it’ll be like reading a book that’s already written. Nothing new will happen. I will not be able to help you.”
Karen’s brow creased. It surprised him that his imminent shutdown seemed more worrisome to her than any of the other issues. “How long—I mean,” she fumbled for a polite phrase, “how much power do you have now?”
“How long until I shut down?” he offered. Karen blushed and nodded. “It depends on how active I am. If I’m careful and go into standby when I’m not needed, then maybe four or five months. Tock’s energy pack was fully charged.”
“So soon?” Karen asked.
“You will be recovered by then,” said Bezel. He stood up.
“And then what? You want me to live here, alone?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“Don’t keep saying that.” She was truly crying now and Bezel offered her a towel.
“Why not? I can’t decide for you.”
“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.” She waved him off.
She didn’t speak to him again before he helped her into bed for the night.
He sat beside her. His power level ticked to sixty percent. A recharge reminder flashed on his priority list three times; he buried it and entered standby mode.
His pressure sensor pulled him back into active mode when Karen grasped the metal around his wrist. “Bezel,” she whispered, “I can’t do this. All those years. Knowing that it’s only going to get worse, that this is the best things will ever be in here. I’ll go mad once you’re gone.”
He put a cool chrome hand over hers. “Maybe there are others. Maybe someone will come,” he said into the darkened room.
“But if the radiation is as strong as we think—”
“I will go out tomorrow and look.”
She pulled on his arm and he had to catch his balance on the chair.
“You can’t,” she hissed. “What if something happens to you? What if I get hurt? You can’t go. Not until I can go with you.”
He shook his head, forgetting she couldn’t see him in the dark. “It may never be safe for you to come with me.”
“You can’t leave!” she shouted. “You can’t just abandon me in this vault. It’s like being buried alive.” She began wheezing, and her hand slid from his arm. He was alarmed and raised the lights. She was doubled over, trying to catch her breath. The back of her shirt was soaked with sweat. He brought her a glass of water and waited for her panic attack to subside. But she didn’t calm down.
“If you don’t want me to go outside, then I won’t,” he said. The recharge reminder blinked in his priority list again. He sorted the commands and pushed it farther down.
She clutched her head in her hands. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “You’re leaving anyway. In a few months I’ll be completely alone, whether you walk out of the vault or just slump over one morning. I can’t do this. You shouldn’t have woken me up.” She looked over at him. “Undo it.”
“Undo it? Undo what?”
Karen didn’t answer. His power reserve tick, tick, ticked away. He should be on standby, not wasting energy. No, he should be in his charge station waiting to be activated. None of this was his fault. Memory files flicked by, retrieved, read, and reindexed before she even understood his question. “You want me to undo the radiation?” he asked, the power use ticking away faster now. “Is that what you want me to undo? Or was it the fire in the seed vault? The death of your comrades? Of Tock? I didn’t do any of those things. I can’t undo them.”
“You woke me up,” she spat at him. “I didn’t have to know any of this. I could have died not knowing. Happier.”
Bezel’s backup cooling fan clicked on. The power usage feed jumped with a smooth stream of numbers. Every spring felt too tightly wound. “I didn’t have to wake up either. I could have run down in peace. You don’t think I’m as purposeless as you? That I’m any less lonely?” Karen shrank away from him, but he didn’t see. “I’m not an Obsolete. I’m not your servant. I’ve lost the same world that you have. I can’t undo it. I can’t take it back.”
Bezel stopped himself. The pistons that shot cooling fluid through his core slowed to a moderate chug. The backup fan clicked off.
“You can do something,” said Karen, pulling the thick pillow from behind her back and thrusting it toward him. “You don’t have to abandon me here. You can fix it before you go.”
Bezel took a step backward and stumbled over his chair. “No. I can’t do that.”
“You want me to treat you like an equal? Like you have feelings? Like you’re real?” she said bitterly, still holding the pillow out toward him. “But you aren’t capable of mercy. Or empathy. You’re no better than an Obsolete. You’re worse, because you can’t even perform your designed function. Even the consoles are more useful than you.”
“I can’t kill you.”
“And I don’t have the strength to kill myself. If you leave me the medical kit, I’ll find the drugs I need myself,” she offered. It alarmed Bezel that she was no longer crying and her panic seemed to have passed.
“Tock was lost to save you. I had to—I had to steal her energy pack so that I could stay functional long enough to help you. I cannot kill you.”
“Then what do you suggest? That I stay here and go mad? You think you don’t have to worry about it. You’re dying. I won’t be your problem anymore. But I’ll do it myself as soon as I’m able to walk. Why delay?”
“What if there are others? Let me go and take some readings.”
“Let me come with you,” she said, dropping the pillow and her tired arm.
“There may not be breathable air.”
“Then at least it will be quick.”
“We will have to wait until you can walk. My power reserve will be close to depleted. If there is still a high level of radiation, I won’t be able to help you when you get sick.”
“If there’s still too much radiation, I won’t wait to get sick.”
Bezel sat down slowly in the chair again. “If that is your choice, then we will wait until you can walk.”
He lowered the lights. His power reserve ticked to fifty-nine percent. His agitation had caused him to consume power far too quickly. He made a resolution to eliminate emotional responses going forward, to stop overtaxing his cooling system. He shuffled the priority list so that the recharge reminder would stop blinking, then entered standby mode without speaking again to Karen.
She worked hard after that. Most days she was even cheerful. As if she were preparing for an athletic contest instead of her own death. Bezel preferred not to speak about the day they would go outside, but he held his peace as she pretended it would be better than the math led him to believe.
The recharge reminder crept up the priority list more and more often, and was eventually replaced by the low-power warning he’d had upon reboot. It distracted him, pulsing in the priority list, a constant urgency with no resolution or relief. It even interrupted his standby mode now. He reduced the speed of his cooling fans so they would take less energy. The intermittent silence as the fans shut down bothered Karen, who asked repeatedly if he had a short. She seemed to have a constant need for conversation, as if she were storing up for years of silence. Bezel tried to keep his responses simple and short, knowing each syllable shortened his functioning time. He sometimes escaped to the other vault rooms to avoid her, gradually transferring the bodies of their crewmates into the useless sample tanks of the frozen zoo so that Karen wouldn’t have to see them.