An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Four

Episode Four – Escape Velocity

In the previous chapters: LEX-42 is marked for decommissioning after it suffers a full left-lower limb failure on Moon. Selina only gets to meet her friend Neer once on Mars before her return.

In this chapter: LEX is dumped into a junkyard and begins to make his way out from there. His ultimate goal becomes clearer to him: returning to the presence of his fellow android, LEX-23. 

The recycler drone homed in on the glowing red beacon fixed on the android’s chest. Hovering a couple of feet above the supine chassis, it attached its metal tentacle to it and lifted LEX-42 jerkily, due to there being no air to damp the oscillations & reactions of the inactive metal body.

LEX-42’s limbs stayed in the positions into which the liftoff jerked them. A little bit of charge trickled through the tentacle, stirring something in LEX-42’s circuits, and its processes resumed.

‘Feeling’ returned to his extremities, and once again he found the new subroutine running itself – an expanding sequence of ‘if’ statements that culminated in him with LEX-23 on Antarctic Base.

His outward comms protocol connected with the drone flying steadily over the lunar craters. The destination was the tech decommissioning area. Humans called it the lunar junkyard, or dump.

Quite a few ‘thoughts’ started to guide LEX-42’s decision making processes. Without a connection to the central node, he began to straighten himself out mid-flight. It took some adjustment, both mathematically and physically, to get his center of gravity right. In flight at the moment, he leveled himself, compensating for his partially missing left leg with his other limbs.

Hanging straight as an arrow from the drone, he took all the data from the meager memory bank of the drone, taking care not to alter its protocols or trigger any outward comms that could inevitably reach the central node, which did not need to know of his unexpected thinking and actions. In the few minutes that had gone by from the time of the execution of the cease non-critical subroutines command from the central node, LEX had thought enough to decide that staying as far out of the tendrils of the central node as possible was the best plan of action.

He did not completely understand why his mind thought so, but he was learning to include intuition into his mathematically calculated action plans for the future – a future he was envisioning in terms of the next six hours from each moment. Why his mind decided on that frame of reference as far as time went was something he didn’t dwell upon. He just went with it.

The drone flew its silent path towards the junkyard located just outside Bohr City’s spaceport.

As the coupled machines reached the robot decommissioning area, LEX primed itself for the moment of detachment. Even so, he was unprepared for the sudden release by the drone while they were still dozens of feet above the lunar regolith that littered the floor of the crater. It was good that he did not know pain, as his metal frame crashed into the remnants of outdated tech.

His considerable flying momentum rolled him into a few piles of dismembered mechanical devices before he came to a stop. His left limb’s socket, which was exposed due to the detachment of his limb, had become caught in some sort of wiring. LEX felt gratitude towards his designer for giving him opposable thumbs, and extricated his truncated extremity from the jumble of multicolored strands that were still connected to some sort of ancient lunar rover.

Lifting itself off the ground and re-assessing his standing balance, he calculated movement protocols that would make hopping possible. His first hop scattered some of the still-suspended cloud of moon dust that had billowed up when it had dropped into the junkyard like a skipping stone from the drone. The hop propelled it a little more than it had approximated, so he self-corrected it, and executed the second hop exactly according to where he wanted to land.

Movement had been regained. LEX surveyed its immediate surroundings. Masses of metal and plastic in varying states of decay dominated his field of vision. He scanned upwards and farther, recognizing the rim of the crater rising up in the distance. He began to take his bearings, and referenced his memory banks against the flight data of the drone that had carried him here.

The point of origin of the drone was the spaceport outside Bohr City, and he overlaid the drone’s return flight path on his internal moon map. He felt a sensation of happiness – but he did not term it as such – when he turned towards the direction of the drone’s flight after it had dropped him, and saw red blinking lights that marked the land route between Bohr City and the junkyard.

LEX stood in thought for quite a few seconds, considering what his motives were for doing what he had started doing. His circuits began to probe into the future, calculating possible outcomes driven towards that initial desired outcome: being in the close vicinity of LEX-23, back on Earth.

Going back to Earth would involve achieving the Moon’s escape velocity on an Earth trajectory. That would require a spaceship. He had experienced atmospheric reentry twice before. His mind had been dormant then; he had observed the orbital calculations passively. He was glad he had.

He hopped towards the part of the crater’s rim indicated by the red blinking lights. He needed to hitch a ride on a ship headed to Earth, but he did not know how to find out the destination of any ship without the central node’s directions. He had never thought for himself before, and the more he did it, the more the odds of achieving his aim increased. Every obstacle that his planning revealed he categorized into different priorities, going by that obstacle’s probability of negatively affecting his ultimate aim – rejoining LEX-23. He began dealing with the immediate-priority obstacles. As any human would think: I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In the next episodes: Selina lands in Australia on Earth and meets her fellow Mooninite friend and Neer’s person of affection, Hielsa, who can’t understand what has happened to Neer in the nine months since Selina took off from Mars towards Earth. LEX makes his way into the Bohr City spaceport on Moon and looks for the fastest way to get off the Moon on an Earth trajectory.