Decommission Day

Time to die today.

Well, probably today. I thought I was going to die yesterday too, and look how well that turned out. But today certainly felt more promising. Before I shut down last night, R-88-108 from Logistics had informed me that the F-2 line was on the schedule for decommission tomorrow morning. He definitely wasn’t supposed to have access to the decommission schedule (humans know it makes bots antsy), but he owed me a favor and I didn’t press the matter, so he’s been keeping me posted all week. The F-2 line has been on the decommission list for the past 3 months, but not until this past week did it finally get added to the schedule and according to R-88-108’s intel from last night, assigned a timeslot of 09:00:00 this morning. My appointment with oblivion was official.

There was only one thing left to do. I left my charging pod and took the lift up to deck 24 where the mess hall was located. The mess hall was really an atrium that opened up across decks 20 to deck 24. Deck 20 was where the cafeteria was located along with a few smaller convenience stores and shops, which made deck 24 the perfect spot to people watch below. To be clear, I don’t people watch for fun, I’m not one of those creepy bots that hang around public spaces when I’m starved for entertainment, I just needed to say goodbye to someone. From a far. Without them noticing. I promise it’s not weird.

I picked a charging port to stand next to to help me seem less conspicuous while I surveyed the mess hall below. The charging port wouldn’t even work for my model, it was for small dust bot use only, but most humans don’t know the difference between an L-DAP and M-DAP charging port, so I figured I was safe. It wasn’t uncommon for bots to pass through the upper levels of the mess hall to get from one end of the ship to the other, but I didn’t want to risk raising suspicion. Luckily for me though, I don’t have to keep the act up for much longer. Within seconds I spotted Nori seated at a circular table by herself at the far side of the mess hall closest to the cafeteria, eating a chocolate chip muffin and reading Space Port 21 Daily News on her school issued tablet. She looked like her usual self, same braided black hair, same navy blue uniform, same yellow book bag resting at her feet. At twelve years old, she was one of the smartest human children I’ve ever met. Not that I’ve met a lot of human children. My line of work in the Search and Rescue division didn’t exactly allow for lots of one on one chit-chat with kids, but I’ve hung around enough mess halls and rec centers to know she was different from most of the humans her age. She certainly was the only human I knew whose best friend was a bot.

“Hey F-2 unit, you looking for something?”

I turned and saw a male ship officer walking towards me.

Shit. So much for masquerating as a dust bunny.

“No, sir. Just passing through.”

“Carry on then.”

“Yes, sir.”

I turned for one last look, but Nori was already gone. I didn’t expect my socially distanced goodbye to take very long at all, but a mere 30 seconds felt quite unfair. Three years of history together constituted at least five minutes of distanced farewell time, but I suppose a particularly bored ship officer had other plans. I’d sigh if I could.

To appease the officer, I pulled myself away from the railing and started walking toward the starboard lift bank. Just as I was about to step inside the car, an alert from Command flashed across my terminal:

F-2 units report to deck 11 for decommission. Leave all personal items behind. The Stardune Company thanks you for your service.

R-88-108 had it right after all.

* * *

Ten minutes later I stood in front of a large bay door on deck 11 with about a hundred other F-2 units waiting to scan in for further processing. The packed antechamber was eerily quiet for a bunch of metal humanoids shuffling about. I checked, and even rechecked the online communications channels, but those were silent too. Not a single F-2 unit showed any signs of any kind of online activity. Highly irregular and unnatural for a race whose sole reason for existence was to be chronically online. I suppose the whole marching to our death thing had everyone a bit stressed out.

Another ten minutes passed and I was almost at the front of the bay entrance when I noticed a black head poking out from behind a support beam.

Nori?

“Over here!” Nori waved frantically.

I left my spot in line and walked over. I wasn’t the least bit worried about being followed or drawing too much attention to myself. When bot chatter hits zero activity you know no one gives a fuck anymore.

“Nori? What are you doing here?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in school? How did you even get down here?”

Nori dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “You're not the only one who has friends in Logistics you know.”

That was the vaguest answer if I ever heard one.

“So..” she continued tentatively. “Decommission Day.”

“Decomission Day,” I repeated.

I had filled Nori in on what Decommission Day was years ago. I explained that there would come a day when my model would become outdated and my company, Stardune, would need to retire my parts, including the hardware housing my memory module. As part of the decommission process, the data from my memory module, the module responsible for retaining all my life experiences, would be uploaded to their proprietary servers one last time, and then wiped completely clean. And her bot best friend, as she knew it, would cease to exist.

She’s probably asked me about a hundred different questions regarding the decommission process over the course of our friendship. Wondering where my parts went (stripped down and repurposed), where my data went (an encrypted server somewhere on the ship), why Stardune couldn’t give her a copy of my data (intellectual property), why I couldn’t just run away (kill switch), why she should never talk about plans to “save me” (conspiracy charges), why she couldn’t steal my data (theft chargers), why on earth the twenty-five year old janitorial bot on deck 5 is still kicking around. That one I never did find an answer to.

“You said you would say goodbye,” Nori said. “When the day came, you said you would come and say goodbye before you.. left.” She crossed her arms and looked up at me, challenging me to deny it.

“I know.” I dipped my head in an apology. What I didn’t know was how to tell her that her F-2 Search and Rescue bot friend of three years, a bot created and trained to operate under the harshest of planetary conditions throughout all nine star systems, was a complete, and total, coward.

“I tried,” I relented. “I came to see you at breakfast this morning in the mess hall.”

“Really? What time? I must have just missed you.”

“You left early.”

“Oh, right,” Nori shifted uneasily on her feet while her eyes scanned the emptying antechamber behind me.

“Why leave early? You didn’t get to finish your chocolate chip muffin.”

More uncomfortable feet shuffling.

“I had a quiz. I mean I had to study for a quiz. With a friend. For biology. They pinged me during breakfast and asked to meet up before class.”

Warning logs started flaring up through my system. I’ve hung around Nori long enough now to have logged and analyzed hundreds of her behavioral patterns and routines. Something was definitely off.

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?” I turned around and surveyed the room with her. Other than the thirty remaining 7 foot tall humanoid machines waiting to scan into purgatory, there was no one else down here.

“No no! Everything’s fine!” She gushed. “Just.. it’s your big day and all. It’s fine. I’m fine. Nothing to worry about! Promise.”

“Okay..”

“So, okay,” she responded.

I wasn’t completely reassured, but I also wasn’t detecting any abnormal activity around the bay door area, and the line was quickly coming to an end.

I turned back to her. “I have to go,” I said.

“Yes, right.”

As I turned to leave, Nori suddenly grabbed my arm.

“It’s going to be okay. Okay?”

I looked at her, confused. I couldn’t possibly see how my impending death could be construed as anything but not okay, but if there’s anything I learned in my years as a bot, it was that most of what humans do, or say, never made sense.

“Good-bye, Nori.”

* * *

After I scanned into the decommission bay, I was assigned and escorted to a decommission pod. Minus two very scary looking cables, it looked a lot like my charging pod: a reclined seat with a transparent dome for privacy and a monitor attached to the outside base of the pod for human engineers to view real-time analytics. The human who escorted me to my pod instructed me to sit down, then proceeded to plug one of the cables into my L-DAP charging port, located at the base of my spine, and the other into the base of my neck that connected to the various data stores that made up my memory module. End to end, the decommission process would take about five hours. The first step, the copy step, would take two hours of that time while all my data transfers over to Stardune’s remote servers. Immediately following that, my memory gets wiped clean from my data stores, effectively ending my life as I know it. Then the decommission process officially concludes with the dismemberment of my entire body. Thank god I won’t be around for that bit.

A couple minutes ticked by while the human engineer finished setting up my pod. A few more taps here and there on the monitor, then the dome finally shifted down and locked in place with a hiss, sealing my fate with it.

Another few minutes came and went before I noticed the daemon copy program begin executing on my system. So this was it. The start of the end. For some reason I expected it to be a bit more exciting.

Over the next hour I monitored the progress of the daemon copy program as it uploaded my data to the remote company servers. To keep my mind occupied, I wrote a script to continuously poll the daemon program every thirty seconds to check its status and update the widget I made to visualize progress. While it was a nice distraction in the moment, I immediately began regretting my life choices the first time the status bar flashed “YOU ARE 41% OF THE WAY DEAD” in bright red letters across my terminal. I thought about deleting it, but what the hell. My entire existence was going to be deleted in about another forty-five minutes anyways.

At the “YOU ARE 68% OF THE WAY DEAD” mark, the copy daemon abruptly terminated at the same time the dim lights illuminating the inside of my pod shut off. Ten seconds later, several humans ran by, yelling and pointing towards the direction of the decommission bay entrance. Part of me wondered what all the commotion was all about, but seeing how I was trapped inside this pod, there wasn’t much I could do about it. The humans would get it sorted out soon enough and my grim reaper daemon would come back online to finish the job. Maybe I should add a burst of confetti to the progress bar once it hits 100% while I wait.

Just as I was about to start editing my script, I received a ping from an unknown address:

10:34:45.986Z: This is Nori Whydman. I’m busting you out of here. Sorry I couldn’t give you a heads up earlier. Long story. Stand by.

10:34:49.125Z: A death progress bar? Seriously? Remind me why we’re friends again?