It is the year 3048 and you still hate your job.

In the past eight hours since landing on this wasteland planet, you fended off two rogue mechas, hacked the building’s access code, and decapitated a droid—all to recover a rusty motherboard from the wreckage. The hazmat suit itches but the air is too poisonous to take it off. You glance at the circuit—an antiquated iridium-powered device that went obsolete at least two centuries ago—and feel a familiar sense of puzzlement. You have no clue what Olympus Corporation Ltd. needs that device for; but then again, you never question the missions they send you on.

Afterward, with the starship charging by the light of two waning moons, you stroll through the empty metropolis. The inhabitants have no doubt perished or fled to better climes, but you’re surprised that much of the metallic architecture is still intact. Giant suspension bridges hang like ribs, caging junk-clogged, waterless rivers. Lonely high-rises pierce the pinkish-gold sky like the jagged, decaying teeth of a leviathan’s carcass. Perhaps this is one of the plague planets. You spot a cleaner robot half-heartedly sweeping the silent streets and something tugs at you.

You look away.

An old diner glitters at the end of the lane. Its graffitied signboard has fallen off, the windows coated with dust but the faint red-blue neon lights announcing THIRTY-FOUR HOURS OPEN remind you of a planet that you can never return to. By your holo-watch, you still have twenty-seven minutes to kill before they demand an update or lower your rating by a percentile. Shrugging, you walk through the revolving glass doors like a portal to the past.

You almost expect the smell of oily French fries and moldy burgers to greet you. Instead, you are accosted by another droid. Startled, you yelp and take a step backward, reaching for the stun gun.

But it does not attack you.

It simply stands in front of you, as if awaiting an order.

You remain silent, staring at it. Its paint has flaked off, baring its corroding metal body. You feel a tinge of embarrassment. You look around, to the empty chairs and tables. The blue walls are still plastered with faded posters of early space travel—a cruise through the Kuiper belt, budget-friendly tours of Saturn’s moons, and an all-expense-paid trip to the Venus observatory for a lucky couple. The wall clock has slowed down but its hands still tick, pointing to the three local planetary times and the Galactic Standard Time that the holo-watch and spaceship are correctly calibrated with. Any liquid in the dispenser machine must have since dried up, yet it glimmers with the neon-bright labels of fizzy drinks and energy shakes.

After a few more minutes, the droid limps back to the counter on its rusted wheels and fiddles with the dispenser’s buttons. In between loud, hissing bursts of static, a faint synth-jazz tune whistles from the stereo. You take a seat by the window, wiping the dust off the table with your suited arm. You fight back the temptation to trace your name in that dirt—the way you did, some four centuries ago.

The droid returns, depositing an empty tray and glass. You carefully touch the glass, lift it to the pinkish light filtering through the windows, squinting for a rainbow. There are none. You put the glass down, disappointed.

The droid waits at the counter. The world is eerily silent.

You close your eyes. You can almost imagine the bustling voices that must have once filled this place—humans, cyborgs, and robots, all gathering to exchange gossip, check each other out, make seditious plans, or grab a quick, greasy meal. A nostalgic hunger claws at the pit of your stomach. But it isn’t exactly hunger. The mandatory training had subjected your body to multiple modifications. The first and the mildest of sacrifices was your appetite, since nutrients and stimulants are now pumped directly into the blood. An inert casing replaced your skin to protect it from toxic elements, while nano-bots attached themselves to the maintenance of the internal organs. You cannot afford to upgrade them, just yet; nevertheless, they have tripled your lifetime, as well as your indentured servitude.

You clear your throat. You wish to speak something, anything, but you don’t quite know what to say. Besides, you need to leave soon. The motherboard must be duly deposited at the nearest recycling station, so that you can knock off a couple of credits from your debt. Yet, you are seized with the rebellious desire to linger by the counter. The holo-watch tings warningly, on cue.

As you walk towards the doors, the droid limps to your side again. It stretches a thin, rusty arm toward you.

You’re confused—does it wish to shake hands, or is it expecting a tip?

A low, harsh laugh escapes your lips. Despite the exhaustion, you marvel at the novelty of this lonely thing, still doing its rounds in a decaying world. You search for a spare coin or a metallic chip, but your hands come up empty.

• • • •

Through the endless centuries, you visit the droid at every chance you get.

It isn’t easy since Olympus Corporation Ltd. barely offers any paid holidays. Most of your co-workers usually spend them by signing up for free preview tours of luxury ateliers in the wealthier sections of the galaxy. They attend them in low-grade VR, of course. You don’t particularly get along with them, but it doesn’t matter since you only bump into them while waiting in line at headquarters, weighed down with cartons full of equipment. Sometimes, they rent customizable geisha-bots for a night or two and politely ask you to join. You politely decline the invitations. On Earth, you had little interest in sex, and after the rampant bio-modifications, the appeal of orgasms decreased further. You aren’t sure how you can explain that to them. So, in between missions to nearby planets or taking expensive leaves that leave you more debt-ridden than before, your starship steers itself towards the diner of a decommissioned planet.

Each time, the droid welcomes you in like a familiar customer. It plops the dusty tray and glass onto the table before retreating to its favored spot behind the counter. You lift the glass, pretend to take a few sips, close your eyes, and begin.

• • • •

You tell the droid about your childhood on Earth. How on weekends, you’d catch up with your friends at the drive-in theater to watch movies about aliens and battleships, fingers sticky with caramel popcorn. How, on the way home, huge billboards on the highways dazzled with adverts for the latest luxury hotel on the newly-terraformed moons of Jupiter. How you’d wonder about which retirement satellite you’d choose when you finally made a fortune.

That was before governments and megacorps deemed that pollution levels on Earth were too inhospitable for human habitation.

You remember those final days well. The rich had already flown away in their glitzy space-jets, taking their chosen concubines and cadets in the cargo. Meanwhile, the poors were frantically bribing, blackmailing, and killing for passage—scrambling to get on freight-loaders only to be tossed out of the skies if the vehicle was too heavy to take off. Interstellar travel was so ridiculously expensive. By then, your father was already dead and your mother dying, and your three sisters were selling their bodies to collect enough credit so that at least one member of the family could afford a ticket to make it out alive.

You had been laid off for two years, stewing in shame and self-loathing until Olympus Corporation Ltd. offered an escape route for those below the poverty line—secure passage away from Earth and a minimum-wage job whose perks included a fair amount of galaxy-wide touring. You and your fellow factory workers, who had never even been on an airplane, were only too eager to sign the contract.

You put down the glass. Your voice cracks.

You know that you had no way of knowing what they wanted your bodies for, but you cannot forgive yourself for what happened after.

They sent you to the most perilous locations in the universe, to trawl through worlds littered with radioactive junk, abandoned apparatus, and sunken cities—the detritus of countless colonial conquests as mega-conglomerates swiftly spread their tentacles across galaxies. Like the graverobbers in the stories your father once scared you with, you searched for salvageable iridium, scrap metal, and obsolete devices and delivered them to the company headquarters for recycling.

The droid’s speakers do not work, but that doesn’t stop you from reliving your worst nightmares, over and over.

• • • •

There is a certain sense of routine to your slog. A typical seventy-two-hour work shift begins as soon as you receive the coordinates on your holo-watch. Then your starship charts a course across the endless reaches of space, auto-piloting all the way to the destination planet.

On longer trips, when you’re done sorting the junk paraphernalia into neatly labeled piles, you can lounge back as pulsating galaxies and quasars skid past your enhanced field of vision through the pressure-resistant glass. They throb, like the many constellated hearts of the universe. Each time you pass a nebula, glimmering like a shrine of some eldritch entity, you search for the shape of some animal or monster in those variegated, slow-twirling, giant clouds. You remember a game played with your sisters—on nights when the pangs of hunger kept sleep at bay, the dance of shadows on the plaster-peeling walls of the condo offered a different, mesmerizing tale to each one of you.

Once, while stuck in traffic in an asteroid belt, you witness a gas storm swirl through the surface of the planet like a painting by an invisible hand—a plume of reds and golds mixing and coruscating in a spiral pattern. With shaking hands, you film it on your holo-watch, turning the majestic vista into a mosaic of grainy pixels, and permit yourself the mercy of a smile.

You will show the footage to the droid and then delete it, of course, to avoid suspicion.

• • • •

You don’t know why you do this, risking your life and livelihood to come here, for these one-sided conversations. You don’t even meet the droid that often—perhaps just a handful of times in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t redemption that you seek, although this is certainly easier than visiting your one surviving sister and her child who are eking out a meagre existence in a reservation base in a frigid corner of the solar system, several light years away from the section of the galaxy where you are authorized to fly in. In over half a century, you have seen them exactly twice. Although a fraction of your salary (after numerous processing fees) still trickles towards them, it isn’t enough to afford the latest vaccines or nano-bots. Ensconced in that pinkish-gold light, you lament about the passing of one of your sisters. She’d died a slow, painful death after contracting an infection from an artificial virus. There are so many of those now—an insidious means of population control in refugee colonies that are always attributed to some new-fangled scientific accident or the other.

The droid stands behind the counter and makes no comment.

You didn’t have enough savings to attend her funeral in person—but that is a detail you do not say aloud.

You turn the topic to your other sister—the one who had taken up scavenging like you. Recalling her tragedy now, you stifle a wry laugh. She was tasked with retrieving a soldier-bot from the rubble of a war-ravaged planet when a stray bomb detonated beneath her feet.

But that isn’t the worst bit, you clarify. When you’d filed an insurance claim, the officer vociferously argued that the accident was her own fault and charged you for the loss of valuable property on her behalf.

You shake your head ruefully inside the helmet, and absent-mindedly reach for the glass, so thirsty for a drink. The droid neither speaks nor nods but it saunters towards you. It takes the glass back to the dispenser, ostensibly to refill it.

• • • •

During the long voyages from one hazardous planet to the next, you wonder whether cyborgs are closer to humans or to droids. You’re certain that all your colleagues have similar tragic stories, and so you’re not astonished when most of them voluntarily agree to forget their past, happily upgrading themselves to a full android interface. You wonder if the droid is full of stories like you, but unable to speak. You wonder how much of the droid’s actions are mere functionality programming, or sentience manufactured from code. You wonder if the droid will ever get mad enough to smash itself against the windows, a last fuck-you statement to an indifferent world.

Back on Earth, you were a champion of cyborg and droid rights. You had marched in protests and signed petitions, even though most people in the neighborhood complained about automated labor stealing their jobs.

Back then, you had been so much braver.

After each mission, the holo-watch reminds you that you’re eligible for the upgrade, that you can forever say goodbye to any painful memories and the inconveniences of the human body, that these surgeries are free of cost.

You decline the offers, realizing that you aren’t ready to transition yet.

• • • •

Once, in a moment of vulnerability, you blurt out about that fellow worker who had asked you out. That was back in the glory days when you both had just dropped out of the radioactive mining training institute, desperate to find quick work to support your families. Both of you took up jobs at a nearby factory, assembling cleaner-bots and grading their builds.

After a tedious shift which included some yelling from the manager and accidentally cutting your hand on a rusty nail, you’d shared dinner in a quaint diner like this. For a few stolen hours your heart was aglow, talking and laughing over a plate of fried chicken crumbs and watery coke. Things never progressed beyond that single date. You never saw him again nor recalled his face but you still remember the sensation of warm, bandaged fingers entwined in his, tapping your feet to the beat of a folk song playing on the radio, tracing your names in the misty glass, the sounds and blinking lights of the city washing over both of you like a spell.

The robot’s eyes blink softly, and you shudder at the eerie sensation of being understood.

• • • •

In one of the retrieval missions, your suit gets damaged. Normally, you’d notify your manager right away for a replacement, but you take a detour to the diner, bursting with news. The droid moves a little shakily to greet you.

You plunge into an account of navigating a network of tunnels, deep beneath the planet’s surface, without a holo-map. While wading through shimmering streams of lava, searching for slops of indestructible alloys, you stumbled upon a rotting seed vault. You salvaged whatever you could.

Smug, you spread out the finds on the table.

There are no claps nor cheers of applause; the droid makes no effort to even refill the glass. You’re dimly aware that the overseer at the headquarters will take credit for this momentous discovery, but it still doesn’t stop that lovely feeling coursing along your veins. You’re so eager about the possibility of lost flora being resurrected on newer and stranger soil, you feel lighter than ever.

Then you notice one of the wheels of the robot is missing.

The holo-watch registers your elevated pulse and begins playing an ad for a new nutrient serum. You turn it off.

You realize that you don’t know how old this droid is, for how long it has silently waited at this derelict diner, staring at the almost peeled-off posters of places it has probably never been to, listening to the ticking of the clock that is slowly but certainly slowing down. You do not know if it ever strolls through the empty streets, on the lookout for a certain cleaner-bot. You do not know if more mechas wait beyond the city borders, like dormant volcanoes waiting for the right moment to erupt. You feel so afraid for this droid, lest anything should happen to it while you are gone.

Yet you know with the same certainty that you’ll never pay off your debt to Olympus Corporation Ltd., that the robot is dying. The synth-jazz music plays softly on, and night falls upon the diner with a sickening urgency.

• • • •

When you visit next, a few months later, the robot is having trouble moving from one corner of the diner to another. Within the next fortnight, the movements of its arms turn jerky.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. You’re a scavenger, not an engineer, but you make a mental list of parts that you would need to repair the droid—a change of arms, frictionless rollers, possibly a new motherboard to reconfigure its pathways. Thankfully, your job is the perfect excuse to scour entire planetary systems to find what you need. You do your best to cover your tracks.

While collecting the company-mandated equipment, you pilfer other outdated devices and gadgets that catch your eye. You store some of them in the hull of the starship; meanwhile, larger components such as a mecha’s disjointed arm and cyborg trawlers find a home in the diner’s backroom. With the spare parts, you craft small metallic critters and set them loose in the city’s gutters. You install motion sensors onto the larger cleaner-bots that roam the streets like spectres, and gift them a limb or two so they can wave at each other.

But this diner droid is unique. It requires specialized parts that aren’t so easily available. In the long voyages, you are either busy fiddling with antiquated automata or browsing the galactic ethernet, learning whatever you can about the robot and barely glancing when an ice comet or a space-jet whizzes past.

From a single research paper published in an obscure journal that speculated whether soldier bots could suffer from PTSD, you slowly piece together that the droid was formerly a foot-soldier bot. It was employed in neo-colonial warfare and built to withstand even nuclear fallout. Later, the company that had once made trillions selling them as weapons of mass destruction went bankrupt and shut down, never manufacturing those models again. While the ginormous mechas were later decommissioned, the bots were repurposed into household servants and shop assistants. A few decades later, most of the bots began malfunctioning. They were quickly discarded in favor of new-fangled sentient robots.

The droid must have gotten lucky to have survived this long.

• • • •

While you are away on some other planet, or being appraised at the plush headquarters of Olympus Corporation Ltd. the droid must have figured out that the dispensers did not work and had beaten them into a pulp, losing an arm in the process. You have not witnessed this act of metallic carnage.

But it makes you wonder if the droid is haunted by memories of war, just as you are still overwhelmed by the fragments and scents of your former life on Earth. Perhaps, the bot was part of a larger garrison that had ingeniously plotted the execution of enemies. Maybe, the corroding metallic arms that now existed to serve had once killed humans and other lifeforms. When the diner had first opened, perhaps for a split second, the droid had hesitated, confused by the influx of hungry guests they’d once been programmed to kill.

If you tinker with the bot’s circuit board, perhaps, you can awaken that killing machine and set it loose in the offices of Olympus.

This thought strikes you more than once, filling you with guilt. Each time, you look away and rush out towards the starship like a trespasser unwilling to be caught.

• • • •

With each visit, the music steadily becomes fainter, then a hiss of static.

The day it stops altogether, you linger at the doorway, reluctant to return to the starship. Illuminated by the blue-pinkish glow of two orbiting moons, the diner is transformed into an unreal and magical space, a relic of the past that is somehow still alive because everyone else has forgotten about it.

The robot waits beside you, holding you back without uttering a single word.

Usually, you’d drop an old coin or a tiny bolt into its outstretched palms, happy to see a red light blinking in the visor. But on some days, you can offer nothing. You clench your cold fingers and unclench them again, and after a brief nod, walk away from the deafening silence.

• • • •

Eventually, the droid loses the tray and offers you only a single empty glass when you visit. Yet, you’re nowhere close to locating another arm or a compatible circuit board.

You try to be more talkative in the childish hope that the company might heal the droid’s malaise. You and your co-workers aren’t permitted to ask questions or disclose the sensitive nature of the missions to anyone, but here, you can voice doubts and conspiracies without restraint: Why are companies so eager to retrieve outmoded components from abandoned planets? Perhaps the whispers are true—that multi-planetary conglomerates are slowly running out of resources. While standing in line, one of the co-workers had once made an offhand comment—that these old pieces of scrap metal and junk equipment were actually auctioned off by investors for billions and trillions. But your personal theory is more insidious—that the latest iridium machinery that Olympus claimed to manufacture is possibly and very probably recycled from the salvaged remains of the past.

The droid cannot answer these questions. The red lights in its visor no longer blink.

You choke back the frustration, and go on venting about all the ways Olympus Corporation Ltd. have repeatedly violated your body under the pretext of enhancing its functions and boosting productivity, turning you into an empty husk. You question if you’re still human or cyborg anymore.

You look up helplessly at the droid’s face, searching for your own in the visor’s reflection.

You confess about the two times you’d tried to engineer an accident to end your existence. Yet, unlike your father who’d hanged himself after the police had broken into a union meeting and shot down his comrades, voluntary suicide isn’t permitted in your semi-machine build. You feel envious of the sister who had died in the bomb blast. Your voice, through the helmet, comes out rough, laced with regret and bitterness.

What a tragedy, you spit into the glass.

The droid jerks, swings its lone arm at you. You duck, powered by the nano-bot reflexes. It misses and hits the glass, instead.

It falls to the floor, splinters.

You stare at the mess, horrified.

It doesn’t move when you kneel down to clean up the shards. It doesn’t move when you promise that you’ll find a way to repair it, that one day, you’ll take it out of the diner and show it the many wonders of the universe from the starship. It doesn’t move when you confess your deepest fantasy, of rooting the ship’s navigation system and steering it towards a rebel colony you’ve only read about on the ethernet, that may or may not exist but is still worth a shot anyway.

It stands immobile as though it cannot register your presence at all.

It is only when you’re outside by the window that it moves jerkily to stand on the opposite side of the dusty, dirty glass.

• • • •

In your haste to repair the droid, you become careless with your official work. The sudden absences that aren’t logged by the holo-watch, which turned increasingly frequent in the last decade, have aroused suspicion among your superiors.

Soon enough, they punish you for negligence: your license to update the nanobots is permanently revoked. You can never completely heal from the many injuries you sustain during the missions. Corrugated iron missiles pierce your outer casing, searing and infecting the muscles beneath. The fumes you inhale find their way to your thin lungs; you cough up blood and spittle, straining to breathe. The missing circuit board haunts your dreams.

Yet, you learn to laugh, louder and coarser.

The prospect of your impending death does not frighten you in the slightest. Instead, what fills you with more dread is the fact that one day, soon enough, you’ll arrive at the diner only to watch the droid sputter and become motionless forever.

• • • •

That day arrives earlier than you expect.

To repair the droid, you need a specific motherboard, powered with an iridium chip that is no longer manufactured anywhere. After months of fruitless searching across the black markets of half a dozen planetary systems, you recall the fight with the rogue mechas the first time you landed on this world. When you’d retrieved the only functional circuit board from the rubble and proudly handed it over to the bosses.

Unless you can break into the company vaults located on an icy moon in the Sagittarius belt, there is no hope for you.

You think about the robot’s open palms when it first saw you. You had always assumed that it was hoping for a tip or something, but now you wonder if it had sensed that treasure you were carrying that day. Perhaps, all this time it was simply waiting for you to return what you had so unwittingly stolen over two centuries ago.

Resigned to your gloom, you spend all the remaining credits to ask for a leave, so that you can at least be there for the droid’s final moments.

Perhaps you can apologize for dooming it, so thoroughly.

The request is promptly declined. Yet familiar coordinates blink on the holo-watch, announcing your latest mission: retrieve model MS-271, see coordinates. When you click on the attachment, a grainy photograph of your diner robot, standing next to the dispensers, pops up.

You are non-plussed as to how Olympus Corporation Ltd might have secured this image. Then you remember a gas storm filmed almost a lifetime ago that you had excitedly shown to the droid on the holo-watch one windy night and deleted right after.

You gasp. Had they really been tracking your movements all along, or had some other scavenger on a mission taken this photograph?

Bile rises to your throat, but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

Nothing will ever matter for you have been allotted exactly seventy-two hours to deliver the droid to the headquarters for recycling.

• • • •

When you arrive at the diner for the last time, you see through the dirty glass that the droid is already sputtering, like a creature trapped inside a cage, doomed to repeat its movements until the last gear stops turning. You rush forward and pull the bot close against your beating heart.

The lone, corroding arm flinches at your touch but does not fight back. The red lights in the visor blink unintelligibly. After a few jerky movements, the droid becomes still. You curse loudly, nervously adjusting the bolts on its neck; the visor blinks back on again.

You take off the helmet, and cradle the faintly-twitching droid in your arms. The poisons in the air cannot kill you—just yet. You open your mouth and close it stupidly, the apology dying on your parched lips. Pressed against the metal, you hear the sound of a still-beating heart and the tick-tock of an immortal clock. Then you carry the droid back to the starship and turn on the engines. With trembling fingers, you override the ship’s controls and manually enter the coordinates.

You take a deep breath, and allow yourself a mercy that you have been denied your whole life—a hope for the impossible.

Perhaps, the patrols shall find you before you escape. They will rip apart your body for any salvageable nanobots and then incinerate all organic components. The diner robot will also possibly be stripped for its parts, or be granted a new lease of life in a luxury hotel planet under a different model name. Or maybe, if the stars align and you are very very lucky, you shall somehow dodge the police shuttles and escape, just in the nick of time, to a rebel colony in a forgotten corner of the universe.

But before all that can happen, you shall watch the stars for one last time with someone you love by your side, and there is no power in the universe to steal that away from you.

It is the year 3271 and your seventy-two-hour work shift suddenly feels very short.