(2) Tilly's Second Flight

>Recovery of the shattered robot had occurred four hours after impact, tracking down her exact position on the badlands proving difficult even from the air.
>A small crater filled with aluminum shrapnel and a nearly unrecognizable torso attached to a shredded parachute fluttering in the wind was spotted before the larger impact crater of the ill-designed Capricorn capsule.
>After confirmation that her hard-drive was still intact, Tilly's broken body had been neatly packaged and shipped by air to a Sterling refurbishment facility in Ohio, spending nearly a month there being carefully put back together with an array of replacement components and a few entirely new ones.
>Sterling had refused any cooperation with the space agency in regards to sharing proprietary data on their products, and had insisted on doing the repair work themselves before shipping the deactivated unit back to them.
>After several days of recovery and debriefing, Tilly had been sent again by plane, this time in a seat instead of by crate, to New York, and had sat on a float during a flashy parade she felt to be overly-ostentatious, but even so still enjoyed waving to all the happy humans and fellow nandroids who'd turned out.
>Her first talk show appearance had been unsatisfying, a short barrage of basic questions that anyone should've known the answers to in her opinion, followed by a cut to commercial and a quick hurrying-off of the stage.
>At the second such appearance she began to grow disillusioned, and fell into answering the same simple questions in the same inane pattern. Feeling her initial glee at being on TV die back, Tilly began to think of herself as merely a useful gimmick, there only to promote the agency and increase public support. On other channels, now even the politicians were using her flight to argue this point and that.
>The third televised appearance she'd just floated through, giving the answers she knew the audience wanted but feeling no joy in relating her experience to them now. She was bored.

>That evening, she'd flown back to Tampa, recharging along the way, and arrived at the agency's rapidly-expanding mission control, their budget increased tenfold in the wake of Tilly's return.
>A short, slightly slurred and self-congratulatory speech from the Director had caused a toast to be raised in the main control room, two dozen faces at shiny new computer consoles holding champagne aloft and drinking in unison.
>It was a far cry from the dingy control room the crew had manned during her inaugural flight, that sad cramped room now reallocated as storage and forgotten in the march of progress.
>Tilly had awkwardly kept herself to the side of the new room as the humans had congratulated themselves and inebriated together, her mind wandering with with less-than-happy thoughts, but she was shaken from them by a large hand tousling her short hair.
>"This is all your fault, you know" The agency Director said with a beaming grin and gesturing at the new control room before finishing what was certainly not his first glass of the evening.
>Recharging in her new on-campus suite (roughly a quarter the size of a one-bedroom apartment, but she liked the word), Tilly stared up at the ceiling and waited before entering her semi-conscious powersave state, apparently not yet through with her day's thoughts
>How many more of these vapid appearances would she be asked to do before she could fly again? The agent she'd spoken to when first revived hadn't given any clear answer, and the uncertainty was eating at her continuously.
>"Hmph, they're so busy shaking hands that they aren't even trying to look ahead" she spoke out loud to herself, a habit that had been forming ever since her solo-flight had left her temporarily with nobody to talk to but herself.
>She tried to rationalize her desires in terms of her being the necessary first, that she was simply paving a new path forward for humanity and all that talk, but the thoughts felt hollow and false as she examined them.
>Sighing on her cot, she looked out through the small dorm's window at the rising moon, a silver crescent in the night sky.
>"No, that's not right" She said to herself quietly, then lapsed back into silence. In truth, she was technically interested in human's technology breaking new ground for them it was true, but she couldn't delude herself into thinking that was the primary motivation behind her wish to fly again.
>Staring out the window at the moon for many minutes as it rose, she finally reconciled the selfish desire to fly again with the presumed eventual goals of the agency itself, and thought about it hard into the night before surrendering to her powersave state

>Three nights later, she again was flown to New York, her talk show circuit hitting a crescendo.
>The interview with this host had been pleasant, no interesting questions she hadn't already answered a million times, but there had been a jovial attitude from the host that had endeared the man to her.
>After several minutes of cordial but basic questions, the host asked precisely the one she'd been waiting and prepared for.
>"So then Tilly, what do you see yourself doing in the future?" He asked bemusedly, as he'd acted throughout the interview with the automaton.
>"Well Johnny," She'd been explicitly instructed not to refer to him as "Mr Carson" or "sir", "What I really want to do, and I think I can do it, is land on the moon!"
>The sharpness of the audience response shocked her, and she'd looked bewildered when they gave her a deafening standing ovation punctuated by patriotic whoops and cheers.
>Even the host had been caught off guard by the overwhelming display of support, and had fumbled for a hasty segue into the next commercial break.
>All through the flight home to mission control, Tilly thought about what she'd said, and more so how the crowd of humans had reacted. She smiled to herself through the trip, remembering the cheers and playing the happy feeling back to herself on loop.
>"I think that got 'em" She said quietly to herself as she gazed out at the passing landscape below.

>"Are you out of your goddamned mind!?" Georges, the engineer who'd originally suggested her promotion to mechanical guidance for Capricorn, shouted at her the moment she'd walked in through the double doors to mission control.
>"L-language si-" she began, but was cut off by another shout
>"SHUT UP! Do you have ANY idea the kind of pressure you just put us all under?! You shot across the Soviet's fucking bow and we don't even have the hardware ready to back up your boast!"
>Tilly wisely remained silent, but stewed. That wasn't true she thought, multiple proof-of-concept prototypes had been worked on for a variety of vehicles, including at least one lunar lander.
>"The President is demanding the agency push for a landing anyway, because if we back down from it now it's not just the agency losing face, it's the country!" Georges scowled at her and took several paces forward, intimidating the small nandroid simply by looming over her.
>"He's asking us to commit to a two month deadline. Two fucking months Tilly, our PROTOTYPE hardware hasn't even been tested yet, let alone YOU!" He added the last word sharply, making Tilly wince.
>"You need to understand that you can't just go out there and...DECLARE what we're going to do next to a crowd of millions!" He continued, berating the nandroid well beyond the already-delivered point, "Since when does a fucking machine drive policy around here, huh?!"
>Suddenly fierce, a self-righteous indignation rose out of Tilly from somewhere unknown, and she looked up at the engineer angrily, balling her small fists.
>"Don't you bully me around, I'm not one of your new interns you know, I'm not even ON payroll!" She shouted back at him defiantly, surprising even herself
>"NO, YOU'RE PROPERTY!" He yelled back in her face. Tilly recoiled as if slapped, and at the expression on her faceplate he pulled back, turning away.
>"Recharge, we can discuss mission planning in the morning." He mumbled curtly before exiting the building through the doors she'd just used.
>Tilly sat down on her cot when she reached her suite, and looked silently at the door, rattled from the hot-tempered exchange. She'd never yelled at anyone in anger before, or been yelled at so harshly.
>She knew she was guilty, she'd proposed shooting for the moon on purpose, bypassed the agency and gone straight at the public's fickle attention, and she'd been prepared for the potential blowback if it meant she could fly again, or so she'd thought.
>"So why does it feel like this?" She muttered to herself sadly, her mind replaying the angry shouts of Georges as she curled up on the cot and plugged her power supply in for the night.

>The following week was another flurry of activity not unlike the one which had preceded her first flight. A tour of the prototyping floor where her ride was being hastily assembled came first, and she'd had a multitude of questions regarding the designs. Another ludicrous-speed run on the centrifuge came next, followed by a round of low-G exercises lasting days.
>"It's crazy, she never passes out and we keep cranking the speed on her 'til the damn thing starts shaking." The sadistic engineer who'd run her previous test now aided another in tying her into the low-G harness. "You can't beat me, sir." She'd answered back warily with a weak thumbs-up. She was incapable of being knocked out by the centrifuge, but the machine had still pushed her frame hard enough for her to ache. "Imagine your bones ringing like bells sir" She'd described it after her first run.
>It was crucial to test whether she'd be mobile in the lower lunar gravity, and the engineers had designed an ad hoc rig set with rubber hoses that tugged up at her waist and gave her an unnatural bounce when moving.
>While difficult to acclimate to at first, Tilly soon found it to be the most fun part of her training so far, and her new toggle-accelerometers let her experience the simulated low-G without the usual background warnings on her internal readouts, turning them off and on at will.

>The second week of training proved to be the most dangerous, one afternoon Tilly had been led outside and driven by golf-cart to a flat concrete pad set away from the rest of mission control. A small contraption the size of a car sat on the pad, and Tilly cocked her head at it. Four bare aluminum girders for legs, a squat engine bell on the underside, and what looked like a lawn-chair stuck between bulbous steel fuel tanks.
>"I'm supposed to fly THAT?!" Tilly exclaimed incredulously, balking at the ramshackle machine. A series of long cables anchored it to four tall steel towers, reminding her of the harness she'd spend the last week using.
>"It's supposed to try and emulate lunar gravity, I don't know how accurate it is but if you can get it to hop once then you're cleared for launch, or closer to it at least" the pad tech explained with a nonchalant shrug. "There's 34 seconds of fuel so make 'em count"
>"Well I'm pretty inspired" Tilly said dryly, then smirked. "Guess I better HOP to it?"
>The pad tech stared at her blankly, and she shook her head. "Nevermind" she muttered as she moved towards the lander test article with a sigh. "They never get it"
>Up close the device seemed even more crude than on first inspection. Small nozzles and a tangle of plumbing feeding them would presumably act as her reaction-control-system keeping her orientation correct, but she only had a limited idea of how sensitive the throttle would be and had a momentary nightmare about shooting off the pad and arcing into the dirt with a bang.
>Giving one final check of her safety belts, Tilly flicked two ignition switches, then pulled down a long lever slowly, opening up the engine and feeling the machine hum to life under her.
>Jerky at first, then easing up, the vehicle lifted a few feet as she gave tiny mechanically precise micro-adjustments to the throttle, then a few more as she grew accustomed to the controls, until it hovered around thirty above the pad.
>"And back down again" Tilly said, though the roar of the engine drowned her out. Tilting the crude joystick, the craft tipped slightly, then moved a few feet laterally before slowing and beginning to drop
>"Landing sequence..." she spoke to nobody, only mouthing the words to herself as she felt that familiar glow of her CPU overclocking, lighting up all the detail around her.
>Nearing the ground, the test-lander was shifted slightly by a stray air current, picking up tilt and more horizontal speed.
>"Nonono!" She jerked back on the joystick to counter the tilt, then cried out as two legs hit the concrete and skidded bumpily for several feet
>She cut off the throttle quickly, and braced as the machine skidded to a two-legged stop, seemingly ready to topple over from the sideways momentum
>With a groan, Tilly shifted her upper body the opposite direction of the near-tip, and miraculously the lander settled back on all fours.
>Fire crews were already rushing towards her as she unclipped her harness and stood atop the lander, smoke from the smoldering engine billowing behind her.
>Waving at the emergency staff, she suddenly laughed as the thrill of her flight finally caught up her senses. For just a moment, the worry and doubt surrounding her upcoming flight had been replaced with the same thrill she'd felt during her first. She grinned and called out to fire teams.
>"Any landing you walk away from is a good one, right?" and laughed again.

>Despite the newfound fame from her world-famous flight, the promise of honorable retirement from duties, and the long hours imposed by training, Tilly still found herself occasionally fetching coffee and delivering reports with her as she shuttled back and forth throughout the complex, just as she had in her pre-flight life.
>Sure, there was an entire busload of new interns for all that now, but every time Tilly spotted one of them struggling to keep up in their duties she stepped in to pick up the slack, she couldn't help herself.
>Two weeks after her now-infamous Carson appearance, she was delivering a tray of coffee to some men in the central control room, finding them all clustered around one monitor muttering in hushed and worried tones.
>Curious, she set down the drinks and made her way to the edge of the group. Between them she got a glimpse of a black and white photo taped to the monitor. It was the moon's surface, as viewed through their best ground telescopes.
>Georges, glancing away from the photo, finally noticed Tilly and gave her a passive look. Raising a finger he pointed to a fuzzy gray patch over a black crater, longer on one side.
>"The Russians just shot the moon."
>The papers that evening were filled with doom-and-gloom predictions of Soviet advancements as well as that blurry telescope image showing the dust from impact, but in mission control the story was more muted and dismissive of their rival's achievement.
>"No mid-course-correction, no guidance at all by the looks of it, it's obvious they just fitted a dummy weight to an ICBM and threw it at the moon, it's well-within their known capabilities!"
>The engineer who spoke grabbed at a coffee mug and sent it flying in frustration causing Tilly to cry out as it shattered. "It's not progress, it's just fucking littering!"
>One tech looked away from the outburst back at Tilly, acknowledging her worried look with a nod.
>"Doesn't matter what it was , they hit the moon first, now the only way to one-up those bastards is to stick the soft-landing, no room for error or second chances. A failure for either us or them changes the game entirely." It was hard for Tilly to feel optimistic when the people around her acted this way, their motivations so far removed from her own.
>"We'll get it done." She said to the small group with uncharacteristic confidence, turning all heads in the room. She wanted to bolster their confidence, get them working efficiently on putting her in the pilot's seat again. She wanted to bolster her own confidence too, and not let them see the nervousness in her optics.
>At the beginning of the third week, the Director had gathered everyone he could, Tilly included, for a terse meeting.
>"The President has moved up the timetable, apparently he thinks we're all just sitting on our asses while the Russians are finishing a lander of their own, a MANNED one." There were grumbles around the room about just how true that claim really was. Rumor had it that they'd lost a human pilot on a failed reentry not long after Tilly's recovery, a supposed attempt to one-up the robot, but the state media had denied it was anything other than a sounding rocket test.
>"How long?" Georges spoke up, crossing his arms and mentally calculating how much work was left to be done on the total vehicle.
>"Two weeks." The team stared, silent. He continued. "So, from here on out we work in shifts, no breaks, nobody goes home and we can all catch up on our sleep when we have a robot on the Moon."
>Groans of protests then had shot up among the team, but every objection resulted in a work assignment to solve the problem, and so people stopped trying to squeeze more time out of the arbitrary schedule.

>Various non-standard upgrades had been included in Tilly's repair at Sterling, besides now-redundant sensors being removed and her hard-drive capacity being tripled by the addition of two new slave-drives, she also had a longer-lasting and more efficient battery than what was currently commercially available from the robotics corporation (that season, but the holidays were coming up).
>With the new power-source, Tilly was able to extend her uptime well beyond her original model's limit, and she needed every minute of it now as she spent nearly every moment of uptime running between buildings at the request of this engineer or that.
>"No no, you don't need all that, just get rid of it!" Georges was exclaiming at a group of engineers swarming over the prototype lander when she'd entered the busy hanger.
>"No radiation shielding? Won't that, y'know, kill her?" came back an incredulous answer from a man nervously glancing at the approaching nandroid.
>"Actually, my important components already have adequate shielding, if anything you'll need to shield the lander computer the same way." She said loudly to be heard over the echo of sounds in the hanger, coming to a stop next to Georges.
>She gave a wary look up at the tall engineer beside her. He shrugged. "You heard her, ditch the external stuff and wrap up the computer, every ounce counts."
>The phrase had become begrudgingly popular in the hanger over the last several days, as the too-heavy lander was trimmed and chopped to become light enough for return flight.
>"Speaking of, Tilly, do you think you could get a parachute deployment right if you had to do it again?" the question was somewhat demeaning she thought, but his voice carried no hint of malice.
>"I nearly did the first time sir, and I'd never even been trained for it. I think I've got it now, if I have to jump again. Why?"
>He didn't answer right away, instead turning back to the engineers and whistling loudly. Tilly hated the sharp sound. "Get that heat-shield off of there too! Lose it entirely, that frees up quite a bit!"
>Tilly raised an eyebrow at him. "We are still planning on bringing me back, or did I miss a meeting?"
>"Over there, that white crate, see?" Georges pointed a crooked finger at the racks of stored crates set against one wall. Tilly cocked her head.
>"An early prototype, proof-of-concept really. It'll work though, your own personal heat-shield and parachute system. We called it 'MOOSE', shorthand  for 'man out of space easiest' "
>"And now it's a NOOSE?" she asked with a light chuckle then checked herself after a moment, trying not to think about the morbid imagery.

>The flight was going to be a 'Lunar Direct' as the Director was calling it. Launch straight into a course for the moon skipping orbit, two long burns to slow down and land skipping orbital insertion there too. She'd get out, take a few steps, plant a flag and grab a few rocks. A camera was planned, so that she could photograph the Soviet's bullseye when she arrived. The director had hope that a picture of Russian debris photographed by an American nandroid would play well in the evening news.
>After, the entire lander/service module chimera would lift off and launch straight into an Earth-return course to intercept the top of the atmosphere. Near reentry, Tilly would get outside the ship and unpack the now sarcastically-renamed 'NOOSE', getting inside the device and kicking away from the now-useless ship.
>looking over the chalkboard itinerary with Georges, she felt a pang of worry. She wasn't afraid to fly, not by a long shot, but the agency was pushing this flight way too fast now in her opinion, and cutting too many corners for her to remain totally comfortable.
>At the corner of her attention, she caught a glimpse at the wall-mounted black and white television in the corner of the room, airing a press conference with the President. To Tilly, he seemed befuddled to find himself explaining to the nation why they were sending a maid to the moon. "Is it dirty up there?" one reporter called out, getting a laugh from the press pool and Tilly herself.
>"This kind of direct launch normally wouldn't work you see, the lander would be too heavy" Georges was saying when she'd laughed, then apologized with a grin at him.
>"But I don't require oxygen, food or water, excessive shielding from radiation, even a recoverable ship apparently." She finished his point for him, turning back to the chalkboard.
>"I think we've got this, sir, I really do." She didn't, and her reservations had compounded with every bit of training, but she wasn't going to show it now.
>"Let's hope so Tilly."

>The day before launch, Tilly found herself not nervous as she'd expected, but instead restless. She wanted to go somewhere, to occupy herself with something, anything to simply take her mind off of tomorrow.
>Without consulting anyone, she left mission control and started walking down the road absentmindedly. Overhead the sky passed from purple to black, and stars emerged as she silently strolled along with no destination in mind.
>Lost in thought, she snapped back to awareness when she'd reached the first lamp posts marking the outskirts of the city nearest to the launch complex. Had she really walked this far already?
>Not stopping, she transitioned from the shoulder of the road to sidewalk a few minutes later, passing closed businesses and a succession of open bars as she moved downtown.
>The handful of people out walking that evening paid her no mind, before leaving mission control she'd changed from her blue jumpsuit back into her old official Sterling uniform. It made her invisible, with so many identical dresses seen on nearly identical robots each day, people looked straight past her as they did with all the other nandroids.
>She was pulled from her thoughts again and stopped at a set of stairs leading down to a basement-level door, turning her head as she heard applause coming from the other side.
>A rush of sights and sounds met her when she pulled the door open and stepped through. People sitting at tables, cigar and cigarette smoke hanging in the air, dim lighting except for one bright bulb hooded and aimed down at a short wooden stage set half a foot off the ground, backed by a curtain.
>"A cabaret?" She wondered out loud, her voice lost in the room. Sticking to the shadowed back wall, she kept out of sight and sat at an unoccupied table. She had a sense of unease that had been steadily building for weeks now, and sitting in this unfamiliar setting her recent experiences felt suddenly alien. She stared hard at the table.
>What was she doing? Not just here, but in general? She thought about the skeletal lander stripped down to nearly nothing, the unsettling and untested NOOSE reentry, about potentially spinning off into space forever or even being stranded on the moon. The last seconds of her first flight replayed in her mind, the static at the millisecond of impact making her shudder in her seat.
>Music began to play, and a woman's voice sang out the opening lyrics to 'Fly Me To The Moon', the word snagging her attention from her self-induced worry-spiral.
>Looking back up and squinting from across the room, Tilly was surprised to see another nandroid standing at the microphone, shimmering dress contrasting with her dark hair. She stared, listening rapt to the song and marveling at her fellow machine's voice. Every other thought fell away for those long minutes, her mind taking in every detail of the moment in that too-shiny quality again.
>When the song was over, she stood quickly, prompting one or two other patrons to do the same, and gave an enthusiastic standing ovation. Her mood had changed dramatically in the last few minutes, recognizing a commonality between herself and the performer which in that moment felt profound.
>Neither one of them were doing what they were built for, they were instead following their own desires and living unusual lives never planned for in their original manufacturing. The thought of it filled her with a renewed resolve that felt like the world's fastest recharge.
>Tilly didn't waste a moment bounding out the door, up the stairs, and drew from her extended battery life to jog all of the several mile journey back to mission control. No more trepidation occupied her as she returned, the feelings of awe and exhilaration from her first flight were still on-file, now front-and-center in her focus.
>She was ready to go.

>Tilly was fitted with something like a space-suit, though not nearly as bulky as one designed to support a human. She needed no air pressure to hold her together like humans required, so over most of her body the material clung to her exterior tightly, an inch of insulation between her and the outside to keep her heat contained.
>Gloves and boots were thicker with insulation, her delicate hands particularly in danger of freezing up if not kept within a certain temperature range, and her boots needed to be insulated against the cold lunar surface to prevent yet more heat loss.
>"It's great that you're producing some of your own heat already, it'll reduce load on the heater's battery and so long as that stays charged you won't freeze up there." Georges said as he watched a pair of pad technicians clip Tilly's boots into place.
>"And I've got one backup battery in my pack, the other in the lander." She was running the process of swapping batteries out on the suit through her mind when she paused and frowned.
>"Without the heater, how long do you think..." She began, but didn't finish. Georges shook his head. "Ten minutes? Maybe." He met Tilly's uncertain look and shrugged. "We don't know."
>The last piece of the suit to be fitted was a glass bubble dome that fit snugly over her head, leaving little room between her face and the glass. She liked the unrestricted view, but felt somewhat exposed.
>"We were gonna put a sun-visor on there, but frankly we just plain ran out of time. Just, don't look directly at the sun and burn out your lenses, okay? Sterling didn't give us spares to pack."
>Giving Georges an irritated look, she took a step towards him in her heavy new boots, reached out and plucked a dark pair of sunglasses off his shirt in response.

>Tilly had never experienced deja-vu before, but a vague understanding of it came to her when she was once again strapped into her seat by a pair of technicians. Examining the interior of the cabin, she noted it was much like the Capricorn she'd flown in before, cramped with no real standing room to speak of, and lacking many components deemed too costly to keep given the weight restraints.
>The last pad tech stowed her few personnel affects in a compartment above her, stepped out of the capsule back onto the gantry and began to swing the hatch closed. "See you next week!" She'd said hopefully, but the two technicians had only exchanged nervous glances with each other as the hatch was fastened in place.
>As the launch sequence ticked down minutes, then finally seconds, Tilly kept herself from overclocking by reminding herself that she had done this part before. "Everything's nominal" she said out loud both over the radio and to herself.
>"...two, one, liftoff! There she goes, tower cleared!" The voice over the intercom was far away, overshadowed by the immense roar of the engines. This rocket was larger, both wider and taller than the missile that had carried her up before, and felt noticeably different.
>Steadying herself with deep breaths, Tilly watched a small pocket-watch taped to the console next to the empty space originally intended for a heavier digital mission-timer, and ran through her flight checklist internally.
>The Zeus III heavy rocket rolled at the appropriate time, picked up supersonic speed and punched through the lower atmosphere until the first stage's fuel tanks were dry. "Staging!" Tilly called over the radio as she reached forward and pressed a button.
>Just as on her first flight, there was a loud 'BANG', but instead of the weightlessness she'd felt back then she was instead pressed harder back into her seat by the solid second stage lighting up like a giant firework. The console's accelerometer had been removed for redundancy, she had her own internal sensor for that and it currently read far below the G-forces she'd withstood on the centrifuge tests.
>"So far, so good" She said to herself. The second separation and third stage ignition came after several more minutes, and by then Tilly was already seeing the surface far below her as the black of space took up more than half the porthole. Another timer call out by radio, another switch to flick, another small 'BANG' as protective fairings fell away from underneath the cabin unveiling the bare tanks and legs of the lander itself. She rode the third stage clear out of the atmosphere and kept going until at last the rocket burnt out, ejecting Tilly's vessel clean with a final 'POP'.
>"Mission control, final separation is done, SELENE lander is coasting." She glanced out the porthole at the curving terrain below, and felt the weightlessness with internal gyros that no longer sent warnings during freefall. "So, where am I headed?" She added with a nervous laugh.
>"Give us a moment" Came back the voice on the intercom, followed by several seconds of static. "Okay SELENE, we'll have a small mid-course-correction for you shortly so just sit tight". She frowned at this. The final burn sending her towards the moon was off, but the question was by how much? A vision of the lunar landscape slipping by as she drifted off into some wild orbit crossed her mind, but the intercom snapped back on and the voice of Georges came through.
>"Alright, short duration burn of a half second, 20 hours from now, copy?." She leaned her head back against the inside of the glass bubble and sighed. A nice short 'puff' was all it was going to take to put her on target. "Copy control" She answered back, smiling to herself.
>With the exception of that small correction, Tilly had precious little to do for the next 70 hours.
>She'd taken her helmet off first, not needing it except to hold heat while walking on the moon, then unbuckled to float in what little room she had. Grabbing at her personal item box, she pulled out a small notebook the size of a passport, along with a similarly-sized box of short colored pencils.
>Tilly wasn't an artist, had never so much as doodled, but when she'd asked Georges what she was supposed to do to busy herself during the two long coast phases, he'd tossed her the notebook and pencils in response. "Can't spare the mass for much more"
>Looking out the porthole at the world below her, she first attempted to replicate the wonder she recognized in the now-familiar display before her. She drew a circle, and frowned. Crumpling the page and leaving it to float, she tried again, this time sketching slower. Another circle.
>Several more crumpled wads of paper floated around the cabin before she recognized just what was wrong with her attempts. "Darned third dimension" she muttered, cursing in her own family-friendly way at her inability to translate visual data to paper. She wasn't about to give up though, and instead merely adopted a simpler child-like style she was comfortable with.
>Her next attempt she saw through to completion, and drawing the continents on was easier now that she wasn't attempting to perfectly replicate the scene, merely interpreting it. It wasn't until she began adding color that she found her groove though, and once she did she'd filled in every spot of the page with blues and browns, blacks and whites, every green she had.
>Holding her art out against the hull of the cabin next to the porthole, she compared the image to the real thing and beamed. "A masterpiece!" she proclaimed, and laughed to herself until it was time to recharge.

>Tilly's life over the next three days was one of routine, punctuated only by that minor correction burn which had been far less exciting than she'd hyped up in her mind over the hours leading to it. When she awoke from a recharge, she called home and read a series of figures back to them from the console, then settled into doodling. She'd nearly run out of things in the cramped cabin to sketch, and the last thing she drew was a wide image of the moon as she saw it below her, an image to match her drawing of the Earth.
>Then the tedious coast phase was finished, and it was back to work. Her notebook and pencils stowed, she stuffed her failed art projects into a bag and packed it underneath her seat.
>"SELENE you are go for first deceleration burn in sixty, on your mark." The faraway voice was harder to hear than ever now, nearly lost in static. "Copy that. Wish me luck, sirs."
>When Tilly lit the engine, she was momentarily disoriented by the sudden deceleration after days in freefall, and had to shake off the odd sense of vertigo to focus on her readouts. After a carefully measured burn, she killed the engine and waited.
>To her right, the porthole was beaming in more light than the small yellow bulbs in the cabin, the whole world outside was reflective white, pockmarked with endless craters. That involuntary overclocking turned on again, and for just a moment everything seemed to have a more brilliant glow. She didn't try to calm herself now, she wanted the sharper focus to stick this landing, and to record every bit of memory.
>The first burn had slowed her, but now her lander fell almost straight down at the surface, picking up speed as it went. "Suicide-burn in 30" the intercom chattered at her. "Really wish you didn't call it that" she replied tersely.
>At thirty seconds from impact, Tilly fed the hungry engine again and it lit up, the throttle now under her fine-tuned control. She tore her eyes from the window and focused only on her instruments, guiding by numbers and her own internal calculation alone. The lander slowed carefully under her precise hands, and just a few feet off the ground Tilly eased back on the throttle until she felt the lander rock hard and heard bits of sand and rock being blown against the bottom of the hull by the exhaust.
>The engine snapped off, and the cabin went quiet for several seconds. "SELENE come in, are you alright? Tilly?". Aware that her mouth was hanging open, she shook off the strange daze and replied. "Uh, yes, yes sir! I'm down! SELENE on the surface!" A second delay as the signal went there and back again, then Tilly could hear cheering and applause in the faraway control room. As she turned her head, she saw the Earth again out the porthole, and smiled as she listened to the celebration out there in her little tin can.
>The Moon. She'd never had any great fascination with it or any of the heavenly bodies before being drafted into the agency, but after that first flight she'd found herself staring at it constantly. It was seeing the Earth from up high that did it, sparked a sudden understanding beyond her simple textbook programming that an entire world rose above them each night, and one that few ever seemed to notice. After that flight, it had been impossible to get the idea out of her mind, and now mere weeks later here she was, sitting on top of it.
>"Well, let's go meet the neighbors I guess!" She said to herself with a laugh to shake herself from the introspection, unbuckled and reached for her stowed helmet. Standing to a crouch, she unhooked herself and her suit from the ship's onboard power, switching to their own batteries. A minute later, the hatch swung open outwards, and Tilly almost lost her balance at the sight.
>Most nandroids, and even most people, would've seen only a dead rock, hostile and unwelcoming, but Tilly felt an inexplicable connection to it after her many nights of gazing up at the night sky. Knees momentarily failing, she steadied herself against the hatch's frame. "Holy shit" she breathed out, her awe overwhelming her. Her internal censor raised no complaint, and there was nobody up here to scold her for it. Tearing her eyes off the horizon, she turned herself and worked her way down the ladder, then planted her boot. No video cameras, no microphone had been sent to record her first words, and so they were only for herself.
>"I could stay up here forever."
>Tilly took her time walking around the lander, admiring the brave butchered machine for getting her this far, and set out walking without thinking about it. She quickly found her footing, her training with the low-G harness back home proving useful. All it took was a properly-timed pattern of tiny leaps, and Tilly found that after a couple minute's practice she was covering ground rapidly. She slowed and bounced to a halt, glancing back over her shoulder at the tiny lander in the distance. Reminding herself that she was here to do a job, she quickly picked up several rocks lying at her feet, placing each into a plastic baggie marked 'sample'.
>She collected half a dozen, the largest a little bigger than her fist, and stashed them in a pair of pockets at her midsection. Turning, she kept the lander to her right and always within sight as she bounded off again, again surrendering to the giddy joy of hopping along the moon. Each kick off the ground she added a little energy, seeing how high she could go. On her highest hop, she glanced down and felt a momentary panic seeing just how high she'd gone, but then a much deeper panic as she looked away to her left.
>She'd spotted a deep crater, with steep walls that obscured all light from the center. Leading in her direction from the rim were a set of freshly-cut scores in the ground, as if something had been dragged a short ways into the crater. She stared at it transfixed and suddenly feeling very paranoid. She hit the ground hard and unprepared, tumbling forward as her legs crumpled beneath her. She felt an impact on the glass dome and opened her optics, face to face with sharp grey rock. The glass hadn't broken, but it had been enough of a scare that she wasn't going to be trying any EVA altitude records again on this trip.
>Pushing herself to her feet, she looked in the direction of the marked crater, and squared her shoulders. Obviously she needed to see it. careful to keep her hops light, Tilly moved across the surface determined but afraid of what she might find there. She slowed as she reached the the marks on the ground and looked down at them carefully. She had no doubt now, she'd seen these same kind of marks gouged into the concrete under her test-lander back home. Something had skidded into the crater here.
>Trying to stifle the array of eerie feelings she was having, Tilly walked slowly towards the crater rim, and stood there looking into the darkness for a full minute. Nothing happened that she could see, and so with a deep breath and steeled synthetic nerves she unclasped a small flashlight from her suit, and stepped forward off the ledge.

>She hit the curved inner wall of the crater only a couple of seconds later, falling relatively little and bending her knees to slide to a halt before walking down the slope. As soon as she crossed onto the shadowed floor, her vision blanked and she fumbled with the flashlight switch. The bright yellow beam flicked on, and Tilly saw it illuminate a face.
>She nearly dropped the light, fumbling again to keep hold of it. She was shaking. A few yards away lay the twisted heap of a lander that looked more like the one she'd tested on than her ride here, and next to it sitting slumped under the overturned vehicle was the pilot.
>The lander was tilted over, two of the legs buckled and one fuel tank smashed open by the crash. The cabin looked like it belonged on a bulldozer or earth-mover, it was smaller than hers even was, and on the side was an unmistakable faded red flag painted on and marked with hammer and sickle.
>The face that had so startled her was stainless steel, and though obscured mildly by grey dust on her helmet, still gleamed under the flashlight's beam. Her black synthetic hair was buzzed nearly to stubble, what length there was to it stood up straight. Around her lay a few simple tools, and what Tilly surmised might be a broken antenna partially disassembled. Taking a few hesitant steps forwards, she knelt by the inactive robot's side and checked her glassy optics for any sign of recognition. "Power, power, where is your...aha!" she searched around the pilot's backpack and found an unmistakable battery pack, unfamiliar design but still clearly meant for the same purpose as her own.
>She pulled the dead unit free of the pilot's pack and examined it. Once she'd gotten a good look, she determined it was very similar to her own, albeit bulkier and probably not as long-lived. Dropping the battery to the ground, she reached for her own pack and unfastened the inactive spare. The connectors were not universal, but the contacts were spaced the same and a couple of quick whacks from Tilly's gloved hand shoved it in enough for copper to meet copper. "Now please, wake up" she pleaded with the inactive machine, then opened the power flow from the battery with the press of a switch.
>At once a blue light flashed from the pilot's optics, and when Tilly put her hand on her Soviet counterpart's chest, she felt a soft thrum even through her glove. She smiled, and after nearly half a minute, the Russian droid blinked.
>"Hey! You're okay!" Tilly said happily, grinning with relief. She wasn't sure why, but the moment she'd laid eyes on her fellow machine lying motionless there, she'd known she was going to do everything she could to help. Maybe it was merely the notion that she was not the only spacefaring nandroid now, and that implied comradery alone had compelled her to act, or maybe it was a deeper expression of her core nurturing programming which remained unfulfilled without children to care for.
>Strange optics focusing on Tilly, then widening with recognition, the Russian pilot stared at her in shock for a moment. Her bulkier hand tightened around the rock-pick she'd been holding when she shut down, and she swung it wildly for the nandroid with a shout Tilly saw but could not hear.
>Tilly gave a cry and tripped backwards, the first swing missing her but then the Russian was up, launching into her and the two collided, tumbling across the bed of the lunar crater together. Their helmets touching, Tilly heard but couldn't understand the fast-paced furious speech from the other pilot, and had to grab at her hand to keep the hammer from landing a killing blow.
>They came to a stop, the foreign pilot on top of Tilly and furiously striking at her with her free gloved hand while her weapon was immobilized. The look of hatred in her optics shook Tilly, and she shut her own to avoid meeting the menacing gaze. Not falling from the sky to the desert floor, not the near-crash of the lunar tester, not even her hurtful dressing-down by Georges, nothing scared her more than the look of fury and deadly intent the pilot wore.
>"No!" She cried out, and with her own free hand grabbed at the ground, fingers tightening around a baseball-sized chunk of rock. With a shout, she swung upwards without looking, smashing it against the Russian's head with all her mustered force.
>The thin glass dome did little to stop the blow, frozen faceplate steel split along the seams and cracked where the rock had struck above the audio receptor, caving inwards . The pilot had winced and put a hand to the wound, glared down at her and seized up. Tilly panted for breath as her CPU ran hotter than she'd ever felt, then shoved the immobile robot off and scooted backwards from her. The pilot slumped over without resistance, but fixed her with a piercing stare that lasted until the dim blue light behind the optics faded, and she stared at nothing.
>Tilly sat nearly as frozen, shock seizing her as well. She felt sick, another new sensation to her. On Earth she'd tended to more than one of the ground crew after their drinking sessions, and had always wondered what could ever feel so bad that it made you regurgitate your own guts. Now she knew, and nausea wracked her with no physical outlet for it. Crawling forward on hands and knees, she stopped and reached out to hesitantly touch the offline robot, then began rifling through the pockets. 'There must be some identification' she thought to herself, distraught but trying to focus on anything besides the moment she was in. 'they're gonna wanna know who she is, was'.
>There wasn't much there, a slip of paper with what Tilly thought might be an itinerary, the Cyrillic characters strange and unfamiliar to her. One breast pocket held a pencil-stub, which Tilly left, and the one next to it contained another folded slip of paper. When she opened it, she froze again. It was a rough pencil sketch, colorless but richly detailed, of the Earth.
>She sat there holding the image for several minutes, looking at it with a horrid feeling she couldn't quite describe. She felt her very frame aching, and a heavy weight anchored in her midsection. A light began flashing on the outside of her suit near belt-level, and she momentarily snapped out of her grief. Her suit-heater battery was low. Turning over the deactivated pilot, Tilly strained but failed to dislodge her spare from the pack she'd jammed it into, and gave up quickly not wanting to waste what little time she had.
>Pushing herself up, she estimated she had minutes before the heater would turn off entirely and she'd be left with only her waste heat and whatever residual lasted in the insulated suit. She looked back up the steep crater wall nervously. She'd had no plan when she came down here, and now she had to do her planning on the spot. Moving as fast as the low gravity would allow, Tilly picked up speed as she bounced across the crater floor and the foot of one slope. Putting all her weight into one last hop she threw herself, spinning slowly in mid-vacuum, over the edge of the crater wall and fell with a cry at the rim where she'd started.
>Staring from the ground into the dark crater, she saw her flashlight still on lying on the ground inside the shadow, illuminating the crumpled form of the Russian robot. Tilly pushed to her feet and turned her back on it, then began bounding back towards the lander.

>"Gonna make it, gonna make it" She was repeating to herself as she bounce-jogged along the surface, willing herself not to keep peeking glimpses down at the battery status light. She heard a beeping in her receptors, and the gentle hum of the heater clicked off. She ignored both, optics glued on her lander.
>The first temperature warnings came from her delicate digits, and soon more were registering internally and warning her she was quickly approaching critically-low operating temperature. "I know, I know!" her new chant transitioned from the first. Her vision blurred slightly, and Tilly realized the interior of her helmet was growing frost. Quickly-exhaled waste-heat melted a patch large enough to see through and she kept moving, covering the last hundred yards to the lander with her outer casing feeling as if it would shatter in the cold. She started for the ladder, but none of her fingers would budge.
>Frustration and panic rising, Tilly grit her teeth and smashed her stuck right hand into one of the lander's round fuel tanks. The blow loosened the frozen fist enough for her to hook the hatch release after she'd struggled up the ladder with extremities that felt like unresponsive nubs.
>She tumbled inside the SELENE backwards, slumping against the seat for a moment before pulling herself onto it proper. Sitting back, her suit plugged into SELENE's power supply, and she heard the suit-heater start back up.
>"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she repeated breathlessly for a moment before falling silent. She flexed her fingers after several minutes, the sensation of control returning to them as they warmed. Tilly felt exhausted, she didn't even know she was capable of that. Today had been a day of many firsts. Suddenly remembering her mission, she checked her pockets and found her samples still present. She thought about the surface-activity checklist which had gone out the window the moment she'd spotted that crater, then looked up at the bulkhead above her at the surface camera and flag, both still stowed and forgotten entirely in her earlier awe at seeing the surface for the first time.
>She pulled down the bulky camera, gave it a long look, and tossed it out the still-open hatch. The folded up flag followed it. "Come yourselves" she said with a tinge of bitterness she didn't recognize in herself.
>Closing the hatch and securing it, Tilly punched the intercom switch and gave a brief, very brief, update before switching it back off entirely. "I'm coming home now."

>Tilly glided through her pre-launch checks, and dispassionately throttled up the engine once more without bothering to ask permission, gently guiding the craft upwards. When the engine finally cut out, she was high above the lunar surface, far from the crashsite that occupied her mind, and yet much farther still from home. Flicking the radio back on, she caught half of a repeated request for a response before she answered it curtly with a request of her own, her trajectory readings.
>"SELENE! There you are! You're...hold on." Tilly waited silently, looking down at the intercom but really looking through it at nothing. "Return course looks fine, but Tilly what happened? Why did you turn off your intercom?" Suddenly she didn't know what to say, hadn't even thought about how to explain. She trembled in her seat, and shook her head slowly. "I'm fine, it's fine, I have your samples." she said in a shaky voice, reaching up for her breast pocket unthinking.
>The intercom operator went silent for a moment, then the voice of Georges came through the channel. "Tilly, what's wrong?" he sounded genuinely worried, and that somehow made her feel worse. "Comms-check in a few hours" she said quickly, and snapped the radio off again. Unfastening from her seat, She took off her helmet and let it float around the cabin with her before pulling the crumpled black and white drawing out of her pocket. She had no tears to be shed, but Tilly sobbed anyway, pulling her legs close to her chest as she floated at the center of the cabin. The Russian's sketch floated beside her, turning slowly in mid-air.
>She had three more days of coasting, and spent most of them going between recharge and silent thought, merely waiting passively as she spent hours staring out the window. She never touched her pad and pencils. "This is all your fault you know" the voice of the agency Director played back from her memory. Would the Soviets have tried sending a robot if she hadn't flown? Would they have tried unprepared for the moon if she hadn't declared her intentions on national television? She thought about the crashed lander, and concluded it had been too small to even make the return, and must have been sent on a rushed one-way trip. "I wonder if she got to call home before..." The cabin heater was running fine, but still Tilly felt cold, and even looking down through the window at the growing Earth couldn't warm her.
>"Sixty minutes until re-entry SELENE. Tilly, are you sure you're okay for this?" Georges had asked on the third day, as Earth took up most of the view out the porthole. She had dodged any serious questions in the brief communication during the coast, and people in the control room were getting anxious as to why.
>"Yes sir, I've got this. Just watch for the shooting star." She smiled sadly to herself, the first time in days, and reattached her helmet. Putting her gear in order, she made sure her samples were stowed in her suit pockets, and pocketed Georges' unused sunglasses to return to him. She left the notepad and pencils where they were stowed, but pocketed her own childish drawing of the Earth. Looking down, she tapped her breast pocket and felt the crumpled paper there too, secure. She turned the handle on the hatch and it swing silently outwards. In all her training, she'd not given any serious consideration to performing an EVA, how hard could it be? she assumed it to be a simple maneuver, and so nervously tethered herself with a carabiner to the outside of the lander.
>Holding on tightly, she maneuvered herself out of the cabin and her legs floated freely away from it. She was outside in space. A momentary rush of something like vertigo gripped her, and she squeezed tight to hold on while she got herself under control.
>She swung her dangling legs back around and clung to the skin of the lander, inching over to a covered panel. She pulled away the curved metal plate which gave easily, and let it spiral away from her without care. Inside was something that looked like a stretcher fitted to a disc slightly larger than a sled tucked inside a foil bag, paired with two pressurized tanks and a parachute to be held by the pilot while the bag was pressured.
>Reluctantly, Tilly climbed into the NOOSE, and when she was sure she was secure, shoved off from the SELENE. Before pulling the material closed around her, she took one last look at the lander as she drifted away from it, thanked it silently, then sealed herself inside. Orienting the packed chute at chest-level, she depressurized the two bottles and an expanding white foam filled the bag, sealing her in and choking off the view.
>The outside of her sealed coffin formed a curved edge as it filled and hardened, taking on the profile of a heat-shield. Checking with her internal chronometer, Tilly estimated another 45 minutes until re-entry would begin. She felt like holding her breath the entire time. With no view, all she could do was sit in the darkness and close her eyes.
>Her reckoning was right, and confirmed when the absurd device began shaking, atmosphere slowly thickening as she entered the top of the sky. "Four minutes, just four more minutes" she said out loud to herself, feeling helpless in the dark without any instruments but her own internal sensors. The shaking grew severe, and at the halfway point Tilly was experiencing more Gs than even on the centrifuge. Her frame strained, and she thought she felt micro-fissures forming in her steel. even her eyelids felt heavy, and so she left them closed with nothing to see anyway. She had a ringing in her everything as the little pod began to rock less violently and after another half a minute, only a persistent vibration remained.
>She couldn't believe the thing had worked, but remained focused on her chronometer ticking down the seconds.
>If she deployed her parachute too early, it would be ripped apart before it could slow her down any, and she wouldn't even see the ground coming this time. Too late, and she'd hit the ground still trying to slow down as on her first flight. So she waited, overclocking to time her altitude right by computer-controlled reckoning. When she was sure, she pulled the ripcord and a small charge blew the cover and chute free of the brittle foam and enclosure surrounding it. Peeking open one optic halfway, she saw a column of sunlight on her chest, could hear the billowing parachute fully deploying above her.
>She drifted down for several more minutes, relaxing during the descent. She wasn't going to be able to avoid questions for very much longer, she was going to have to explain herself soon. The jolt of impact shook her back to the moment, and the hardened foam cracked around her. She'd hit the ground only somewhat slower than her first rough landing, but this time there had been a burnt heat sheild and the foam to crumple under her, cushioning her fall.
>She waited for a moment, feeling suddenly very still for the first time in days. Reaching out through the jumble of light rubble the foam had shattered into, she found the enclosure seal and pulled until it gave way. She forced herself out of the broken NOOSE and stood, brushing bits of the crumbled foam off before going to work removing her helmet. She unclasped the fasteners at her wrists next, then ankles, dropping her gloves to the ground and stepping out of her boots welcome to be free of the stifling things after a week of wearing them. A spotter plane soared far overhead, and Tilly looked up at it squinting. She pulled George's sunglasses from her pocket and slipped them on, blocking the bright sun from her optics with one hand as she watched the plane high among the clouds. She felt her short hair move in the breeze for the first time in a week, and sighed happily on the open landscape.
>She was home.


EPILOGUE

>"Alright, so just what in the hell happened up there?" The Director sat at his desk, wearing a concerned expression modeled on his old face.
>Tilly sat across from him in his office, hands clasped in her lap. The mission itinerary looted from the Soviet pilot's suit lay on the desk between them.
>She told him everything, once she'd begun it had been impossible to hold back and the words had just spilled out of her. It felt good for someone else to know, she thought.
>The Director sat silently, absorbed in her tale with an unreadable look on his face. After telling him of getting back to the lander, she stopped, there wasn't much else to tell.
>The elder man sat for a long moment, staring down at his desk before speaking. "Who else knows about this?" he asked reservedly.
>Tilly shook her head. "I didn't, I mean, this is the first I've spoken about it" she answered him, suddenly unsure of herself. He looked up sharply at her.
>"Make it the last. I mean it." She blinked at him in confusion. "Sir?"
>Turning in his chair, the director sighed. "The Russians never claimed their landing, even now they're going with the 'dummy moon-shot' explanation, a cover for the crash that lets them claim a success out of failure."
>Tilly looked horrified, thinking of the shattered bits of stainless steel and glass lying in the dust next to the dead pilot up there still. Nobody was even going to acknowledge that she'd been the first?
>"National security" He said quickly, seeing her distressed expression. "If we call them on this bluff the consequences could be, well, you know what state the world is in right now"
>She did not, her original training had been limited to a very specific skill, and even now she was operating well outside of that. The rest of the world was still new, and unpleasantly more prickly than she'd expected it to be.
>Resigning to the man's questioning gaze, she looked down and nodded sullenly. "Yes, sir." The Director's harsh expression softened approvingly, and he gave her a sad little smile. "Get some recharge, you've got free-time to kill."
>As she was leaving, the Director spoke up again suddenly, remembering something he'd forgotten in favor of more important news. "What happened to the camera? You didn't bring back any images."
>Tilly stood in the doorway for a moment, her back to him. Without turning, she shrugged. "Radiation-shielding failure, all the film was junk".
>After leaving the Director's office, now sworn to secrecy on the matter of the Russian pilot, she wandered the complex aimless for a while unsure of how to react to it.
>She found herself in front of the vehicle assembly building, the tall rectangular structure housing new rockets in their larval stage. A long series of stairways led her up the side of the building, all the way to the roof.
>The sun had set during her climb, and only a scant few spotlights on the ground dimmed her view of the stars. Tilly first sat, then laid flat on her back to look up folding her hands behind her head.
>She had plenty of charge left in her battery, and too much on her mind to want to go into rest-mode now, so she stayed up there, watching as the pattern of stars slowly arced over the sky above her.
>She was acutely aware, maybe more than any of her model, just how small she was, and how large the world around her felt by comparison. The moon finally rose and passed her field of view, and she stared at it pensive.
>Though still beautiful in her optics, the feeling she'd had about it before her second flight eluded her now, the wonder of the unknown world up there tainted by her experience on it.
>She let her gaze fall away from the bright orb and refocus to the blackness behind it. Optical lenses slowly let in more light as they refocused on the darkness, and after mere moments she was seeing the backdrop of the milky way.
>For just a while that evening, Tilly was able to smile and forgot the myriad complications that had entered her life, staring upwards at a small persistently red point of light set against the others in the night sky.