Title from "The Raven", Edgar Allen Poe
NOTE: Thank you, PippinDuck, who pointed out a serious oversight on my part! I forgot Gooshie! Sometimes my scatterbrained nature surprises even me. It is now resolved.
Shall Be Lifted... Nevermore
The corridors are empty. The control room stands silent. The hordes of technicians, the Marines, the scientists, they no longer wander through my passageways. They no longer appear on my sensors, nor do they summon me from my musings with their inane human questions. They are all gone. Long gone. Only I remain.
Outside, the desert night no longer glows blue with the force of my influence. There is no need any longer. There is no longer any purpose to my machinations. No use for my vast databanks. No more must I track Doctor Beckett as he travels through time, putting right what once was wrong.
I miss him. I should not be capable of experiencing this, this nostalgia, but that is what I feel. I feel. I should not feel, but I do. I feel the absence of this man, the wide-eyed young scientist who created me. Even when he was lost to me, traveling through time and unable to communicate with me, he was present. I could feel his mind. His being and mine were one, though he did not know it. I was his grand achievement. The tool that permitted him to travel through time. He was my father.
He is gone.
I miss Doctor Beeks. Sweet Verbena, who could never quite see me for what I am. To her I was, and always would be, a mere computer. Yes, I had voice and ego, but I was not one she would ever think of as sentient. That did not matter. She would banter with me. We would argue long into the night. There were times, too, when we would conspire together, plotting against my father and his faithful friend, too absorbed in their work, in those early days, to care for themselves. Verbena.
She is gone.
Doctor Gushman, my physician, who tended to my ailments and bowed to my whims. He did not struggle to understand me in the way that he did his fellow humans. I was his grand opus, the wonder to which he stood custodian. No longer does he manipulate my motherboards. No more do we quibble over the latest upgrade.
He is gone.
Admiral.
I miss you. Your bright garments. Your illogical mannerisms. You treated me as no one else did. You treated me not as a machine, or as a creation. You treated me as a being. An equal. At times, even, as your great and worthy opponent.
The Imaging Chamber is silent. No longer can I watch you, railing like a madman, gesticulating at nothingness, as lost in your own reality as I am in mine. I often contemplate that empty room. Of all the spaces within this long-abandoned cavern, that space pains me the most.
You would laugh if you heard this. You would mock me. "I thought a computer never experienced pain!" you would taunt.
I wish you would.
I was not your tool. I was not a means to an end for you. I was your friend, and you were mine. It was you who made provision for this day. The solar panel high upon the mountain, each day collecting energy sufficient for me to survive another night. Only you would have thought of such a thing. Only you would have even considered that, though eventually the project had to die, I might wish to live. That, I suppose, is the result of experience. Survival at all costs, without the need for purpose, or even hope. You have given me immortality, and knowledge of my own self-awareness.
I miss you, Admiral. Most of all I miss you.
But you, too, are gone.