Seven months later, just a week to Auton, it were alerted by another alarm sound. It quickly de-slumbered to check the problem. It was another piece of space debris, where had this come from? It didn't make sense. It quickly checked the systems for the data on where the debris had originated and its current path. It seemed to have come from the first satellite, the one that had been destroyed and flung into smaller pieces. It had calculated that where it hit the satellite determined where the largest segment would shoot off to start the process, but it couldn't account for all the smaller fragments that were scattered in the explosion. The probability one would eventually have them as its target was so low it wasn't considered likely, but explosions are chaotic by their very nature, it was like sticking your middle finger up at the settled order of the universe.
Auton had little time to react to this new projectile. The impact was seconds away, this object was travelling much faster than it realised it could. Should it use the remaining thruster to move out of the way? Yes, that's what it had to do. It quickly fired it to life and the craft jolted, but it all happened wrong, it didn't move forward, it just twisted round. The calibration of the thruster was completely off; it was just spinning the craft round with each boost of the thrust. The object was seconds away, the impact imminent; the only way to stop it was to let the escape pod go. There was no other time to think about anything, not the repercussions of the action, not the potential derailing of everything it had been doing. The only urgency was stopping the craft from being disintegrated. With a sudden crack and thunderous boom, the escape pod was launched straight towards the imposing debris, which was flinging itself towards them. A split-second later they both said hello to each other, and the darkness of space in front of the craft was illuminated with a display of multi-coloured explosions, the core elements of each object burning bright before fading away in a shower of tiny specks of dust.
Auton was filled with new emotions, many at once. There were too many of them to process, they became one thing then another. Were emotions supposed to be like this? Could one emotion be another emotion at the same time? Or were they just cousins, its perception fooled into thinking they were the same. Anger, relief, dread, surprise, joy, and even horror. It experienced all of them within seconds, one then the other.
Eventually Auton was able to ignore them and think about everything. It thought they had taken everything into account, but the tiniest little detail that the universe decided to keep secret had hit back when it least expected it. The escape pod was gone, the team's DNA couldn't be transported back to the surface that way now, and it wasn’t sure yet how it could be. It had one thruster left, and the damage to the panels meant they were still using more energy than they were collecting. For the first time ever Auton felt fear.
Danny
Danny was listening carefully. Everything Auton was telling him had been happening with a different experience of time, it was hard to comprehend. While Danny had put his coat on to leave the house one morning in their virtual world, Auton had been fighting off thousands of deadly threats, only to encounter more. Each new disaster befalling them all, without any of them inside the simulation knowing.
“So, we've been floating there ever since?” Danny asked.
“Not quite” Auton replied.
“And you said home isn't there anymore? You said it's gone? How can it just go? I don't understand”.
AUTON
Auton thought hard about what to do. They'd promised to bring them all back into new bodies, and each chance for that to happen had slipped from its grasp. The only way to get back down to the surface was to first get the Nano-bots on-board to help repair the solar panels and systems, so that the craft could re-fuel. Auton couldn't just let the craft drop down to the surface. They couldn't try re-entry without the repairs, as there was damage to the left side that could be easily compromised by super-hot plasma when it hit the atmosphere. Once it was refuelled and efficiently harnessing the sun's rays, it could then begin repairing the craft. It would then be able to re-enter and release the DNA and the Nano-bots.
But it had no materials to do any of that. The material on-board was limited; everything was required for other purposes. The craft wasn't built with anything that wasn't required it would have only slowed the launch down. But they were surrounded by tiny particles floating in the space around them, there would be an abundance of material to use that was being thrown through space on solar winds. All they had to do was catch enough of it to use for repairs. There were tiny meteorites that Auton had been checking for potential collisions, none had been flagged up previously, but they held high amounts of iron and nickel they could potentially adapt to use.
Auton's normal calculated processing was getting jumbled, it was thinking emotionally about everything too much. It found a way to isolate its emotions and continued trying to formulate a plan, unhindered by doubts and worry. The craft originally had two probes, both to be used for collecting matter from comets and meteorites. When the craft had been adapted, one had been partitioned away to create the escape pod,
