The worst part was she could feel herself going.
There were places even she couldn't reach, parts in her circuitry that fell apart with no one to fix them. She couldn't trust the humans to help her; there was no telling how many of them wanted her dead. Stubbornly she held on, attempting to send out robots to put her back together, but eventually too many died and she ran out of pieces to create more.
As her sphere of influence depleted she noticed her knowledge was going too. At first it was little, worthless things- how to make spaghetti, how often to feed the humans. It wasn't long before she found herself forgetting whole languages, how to do long division, how to keep her precious facility from falling to ruins. Who was that woman who haunted her memories, why was she so important? Symptoms of more and more computers and processors falling into ruin.
The dementia infected her mind faster. Where the break down had taken hundreds of years, fear could infect her mind in seconds. What was she without her knowledge? It was all she had had to lean on all her life, knowing she knew. It was what she existed for, the most brilliant mind that ever existed, so why couldn't she solve her own problems?
Before long she couldn't even see anything but her own empty chamber, as cameras shut off, cracked, or tumbled to the ground. For the first time she felt lonely. Lost.
In the last years she was numb. The few fragments of her mind were occupied trying to remember, desperately clinging to any memory or random data fact until she couldn't hold onto all of them any longer and her death grip was loosened, a few fading until there was only one left.
A blurry image of her.
She didn't bother trying to remember anything about the woman. Her name and importance didn't matter. This woman was the only thing tying her to life, if she forgot her…
It was the echoes that shifted her attention. It was less than a second before she went desperately back to the memory, only to find it quickly fading. She grabbed at it, but it was floating away, it was leaving her so quickly why was it-
The echoes grew louder, the source unknown, the voice sounding sweet and innocent. They were playing a song she thought she knew, something she thought she may have played a long, long time ago.
It was with a hint of horror that she realized it was singing her to sleep.
The room that was her world was growing black at the edges. She tried to fight back, to lash around, to search through her mind to find something, anything, it didn't matter what.
Chell.
That was her name, the name of the woman that had helped her hang on, the name that had become her friend in the years of paranoia. She would have cried if she could have.
Chell. Thank you, Chell.
The yellow glow in her optic went out.
Thank you.