Chapter Text
Alone.
He knew he was alone, and yet he still cried out. A human would cry out for their mother, though he was not human. He'd heard of some drones having familial connections- actually, he was fairly sure that Mary Celeste was "born," rather than made.
He had no mother, so he cried out to the next best thing.
"Hey, uh, Pequod? Are you there? It's Levi."
The hiss of radio static made that obvious. For three days, he'd called out for Pequod, and for three days, he was met with static. That infernal sound was the only other thing he could hear, other than the wind.
The bridge was bathed in pinks and greens, aurorae peeking through the clouds. The fact he could see it at all was a miracle. A relatively mild night for an arctic Copper-9 Autumn.
"...Yeah. Figured you weren't."
He held the radio close to his face, enough for the pale blue of his display to illuminate the various buttons and dials. Maybe he hoped for a reply. Perhaps he was waiting for that old, weary voice to reprimand him for his defeatism.
"The aurora's out. You would've liked it."
He no longer shared this sky with the others. Eight other drones, all navigators of their respective ships, each one blinking out like a light bulb. They'd simply stopped replying to radio correspondence. Nothing, on any local JCJenson channel. Nothing on any channel at all, really. Eight times, they had all cried out for the ones who were lost.
Nobody would be left to check for him.
Maybe their software or hardware had finally given up. Maybe something was picking them off. It didn't matter. There would be nobody to lament his death, nobody to remember him.
There were no functioning drones on the good ship Leviathan, none aside from him, its navigator drone. There certainly weren't any humans, they'd all died fairly spectacularly in whatever caused the nuclear winter that froze the very oceans. For all of the ship's size, it was an awfully small place when you were the only sentient being on it.
"I hope nothing got you. I dunno who's out there, or what. I don't know if I'll survive to see the last dawn of the year."
The days had been getting shorter. Perhaps it was childish to fear the dark, but some deep part of his programming told him it was dangerous. Even walking out onto the decks gave him warning messages. It made doing anything difficult when the whole ship was lit by all of four candles he'd extracted from the stores.
"I think I get it. That thing you always said, and I told you you were stupid because we're both stuck in the middle of the ocean ice. I get it. What was it again...?"
He paused, accessing his memory banks. Past location data, past the celestial position data, past images of maps his head was crammed with upon creation, to one very treasured audio file.
It played, and he paused for a little while more, just to see if she'd reply.
"...Right, yeah. `Take care. It's a desert out there.` Ship Navigator Leviathan, over and out."
And really, that's all he was. The navigator of this damn infernal ship. Most drones had no name-- not really-- only their serial. Some had names that had been given to them by an owner. If they were smart, they gave themselves one. If they were lucky, they had family to give them one.
This drone was neither.
He flicked a switch. There was silence once more.
The bridge was lonely. It always was. Seats not used in years, a room much too big for one person. A perfect view of the cargo, and nowhere for it to go. It was a ghost ship. They all were.
And there, tucked into a corner, bundled in a long, faded coat too big for him, was the only functional drone for miles. The heating was off, as always. Even for a drone it was scathingly cold during the longer and longer nights, much too cold for a simple woollen jumper to protect against. Aside from the candlelight, the only glow came from his blue display, eyes permanently hollowed in stress and exhaustion. Occasionally, a lock of sun-bleached grey hair would obstruct his optics, though he was too focused to bother with moving them.
His movements were shaky, though not for the lack of dexterity. You could only do so much in proximity of a magnet as a being comprised mostly of metal.
Up and down, across the brick-sized magnet, he dragged a harpoon's steel head. Two dagger-like teeth adorned the single edge of its blade, sharpened to a razor's edge with whetstones stolen away from the kitchen.
The magnet itself was originally part of the backup generator. With much difficulty, he'd pried it out. It wasn't like he was USING any electricity-- Old Lady Pequod had told him to shut everything down to hide from whatever was picking them off.
Didn't do Old Lady Pequod any good, though.
Passing the steel head over the magnet, in turn, made the harpoon magnetic. It wasn't much, but no living thing survived a winter like a Copper-9 arctic winter. Whatever was dragging them to the deep below was some form of drone. It had to be.
Magnets were like poison to them. To him. It wasn't much, maybe it wouldn't help at all, but there wasn't anything left to lose.
Honestly, menial tasks weren't too bad. They kept him sane. There were some tasks more engaging than others (cobbling together his own harpoon was the most fun he'd had in years), though most consisted of things like shovelling the snow, and cleaning the halls, and rearranging the bookshelves into whatever the organisational structure of the week was. It was a slow, quiet life.
Quiet, it remained, save for the light scraping of the metal, and the whirring of servos. He wasn't satisfied for a while, not until his thumb stuck to the edge.
If something was coming for him, so far from any land and any help, he'd put up a damn good fight.
Beyond the horizon line, a pair of steel wings unfurled, silvery feathers rattling in the wind. The aurorae reflected off them in brilliant colours as she chittered, feeling the faint radio-light in her wide-band sensory array.
Where there was signal, there was food to prolong her own miserable, lonely existence.
The snow melted against her chassis, blessed cooling from an otherwise unbearable warmth. Hunger threatened to consume her processors, though the frigid arctic prolonged her conscious thought just long enough.
There was food on the horizon, and she would feast.
And then what?
It wasn't a new question, that was for sure.
There was a hum as her flight-drives woke up, and the next moment, she was gone.