Death of a Friend
Astro woke up with with a strange feeling of light headedness that slowly got more intense as the day progressed. He locked himself in a dark closet and placed his hands over his ears to block out the sounds of the outside world, and he thought he could feet the presence of an intelligence speaking to him. This strange awareness continued on and off throughout the day.
After the sun had set and night had fallen, Astro flew off to find a dark area far away from the lights of the city. He gazed up at the starry night sky and forced himself to listen while gazing up at the stars. Somewhere up on the ecliptic plane seemed to be the origin of the phantom voice in his head. Astro noted the the position in the sky where the presence seemed to be coming from.
The next day, he snuck into the network room where Reno maintained the Ministry's servers and routers, and he started a network search, entering the astronomical coordinates of the sky from where he had felt the strange calling.
The search engine found a matching data stream, which Astro opened. His computer vision latched onto the rapidly scrolling column of numbers and his electronic brain decrypted the code into an intelligence. "Somebody help me!, I need a friend, I'm scared!", it said.
Astro's fingers flew across the keyboard as he used one of Reno's hacking programs to tap into the data stream, and insert a reply. "I'm here!" he answered, "who are you?" About an hour and a half later, Astro got a response. He quickly realized that this level of communication was too crude, so he walked around to the back of one of the racks of computers, and yanked a spare high speed network cable out of its socket. Astro then carefully connected the cable to his own internal network, by opening the access panel on his chest.
The instant he connected himself to the main network feed, he felt himself being transported to a virtual plane of reality. Now he found himself flying though deep space, hovering over the gas giant planet in the sixth orbit from the sun. "Thank you!" the voice told him, "Now that I'm not alone, I am no longer afraid!"
Standing silently in the doorway to the network room, Reno had been observing his robot buddy. "What are you up to Astro?" he thought to himself, but he didn't disturb the boy robot.
"Have you seen Astro?", the professor asked.
"He's probably in the network room, Hakase," Reno replied, "He's been in there constantly for the past few weeks."
"So that's where he's been hiding," Professor Ochanomizu returned. "I think we should go and see what's gotten his undivided attention over there."
The Professor and Reno entered the network room carefully. This was the computer nerve center of the Science Ministry. The walls were lined with huge racks of high powered server computers, disk storage units totaling tens of thousands of Petabytes, and network switching routers with thousands of ports. Patch cords interconnected sockets between racks, many of them many meters in length with the excess coiled up on the floor making passage to the back of the room hazardous.
"We need to clean up this mess!", the professor complained as his foot got stuck in a large coil of CAT7 cable.
"I know, but no sooner than I organize things, a new project requires me to make new temporary connections," Reno answered, "I simply can't keep up with the demands around here!"
They finally made it to the back of the room where over a dozen 8K resolution large screen display monitors were mounted in several rows across the back wall. The displays were currently connected to live feeds from the JSA and NASA down links. One monitor was filled with multiple columns of data, streaming by at warp speed. Astro sat in a reclining chair, his eyes fixated on the numbers that were running quickly past on the screen. Although the display was scrolling too fast for him to make any sense of it, Reno was sure that Astro's computer vision was capturing every byte, and that the boy robot understood everything.
A fat network cable ran from one of the server racks a few feet away from where Astro was sitting, the business end of which was plugged directly into the boy robot's internal data bus though the open door of his chest panel.
"Astro, what are you doing?" Ochanomizu asked.
Astro blinked his eyes, and slowly rotated his head in the direction of his two visitors.
"Sorry, Hakase," he voiced, "I didn't hear anybody enter."
Astro's voice was a bit strained, the obvious tracks of tears from his eyes ran down his face, and had left a small puddle on the floor.
"You've been crying," Reno said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and drying his friends face. "What's going on."
"Sorry," Astro replied. "I've been following a friends final moments. An A.I. soul brother is about to give his life for science."
The professor looked up at the computer monitor screens. Several of them were hooked up to live video feeds from NASA. One of the video feeds was a direct relay from nearly 900 million miles in deep space, a view of the rings of Saturn seen from a vantage point in the upper regions of the gas giant's atmosphere.
"I'm tied directly into the Cassini probe," Astro explained. "For the past month we've been communicating and he's become a close friend. Cassini knows his energy is almost exhausted and he's been directed to make a final plunge deep into the atmosphere to take readings. It's like a final act of Seppuku, an honorable death. He was afraid, and I guess he just needed someone to talk to, before the end."
The image on the video screen suddenly became unstable as the probe entered denser parts of the atmosphere. The view became fuzzy as the probe descended beneath the clouds. Data still flashed by on the other monitor screens.
"I'm still receiving him," Astro sobbed, "But I know he's already gone."
"That's right," Reno replied, "The radio data signals take about 80 minutes to reach us from that far out from the sun."
Suddenly the data display went dark. The video feed disappeared. The look on the faces of the NASA scientists told all, contact with Cassini was terminated. The probe had burned up in the atmosphere of Saturn.
"Sayōnara," Astro voiced, slowly disconnecting himself from the network feed, "At least he died a Samurai's honorable death. If you don't mind, I think I'm going to go home now."
Astro got up and walked past Reno and the Professor.
"You know, I've never given any thought to how robots form friendships with each other," Ochanomizu said. "Mankind has sent many probes into deep space in search of data. Most of them have had some form of simple A.I., but we've never really thought of them as self aware."
"Maybe they aren't, but it seems that a robot with an advanced A.I., like Astro, can interact with them on their level," Reno answered.
"Sayōnara, Cassini," the professor voiced.
Reno quickly made his way towards the door. "I'm going to catch up with Astro, and drag him out for Pizza," he yelled over his shoulder.
"Good idea," Ochanomizu laughed. "That should cheer him up!"