(4) Tilly's Third Flight

>After Tilly's journey to the moon and back, the public had been eager to see their all-American robot triumphantly return to their television screens nationwide, but the Agency had been careful to regulate her appearances this time around.
>Tilly made no more live televised appearances, only being presented in a series of short pre-recorded interviews, and always with an Agency handler just off-camera. She was, effectively, muzzled.
>Somehow even less interesting than her first media tour, Tilly gave the answers she had been instructed to without ever feeling it, and the resulting interviews lacked any spark to make them entertaining television. How many times could someone answer a question like 'how was it like up there?' anyway?
>A few more interviews were conducted for print publications, but by then several months had passed and the story had begun to slip from the public eye already when it was completely occulted by news of a Soviet success in space.
>Shocking the world, the USSR had launched their newly-proven N2 rocket with a human on board, mirrored Tilly's lunar-direct flight, and had successfully touched on the surface. Not only had they managed to put a human in space, but also plant their flag and drive a flimsy rover on the moon before anyone else.
>News of the mission attempt had only come after the successful landing itself, and with images and audio from the pilot grabbing the attention of the world Tilly found her last scheduled interview indefinitely postponed by a magazine she'd never heard of anyway.
>That evening she'd been returned late from her final canceled media appearance to mission control by a Greyhound bus, and had gone up to the VAB roof as had become habit since her last return from space. Staring up at the moon that evening, imagining a Russian man struggling to walk up there, she had mixed feelings. Obviously, the Agency and her in particular had been upstaged, yet she couldn't help but feel an odd sense of pride that a human had now followed in two sets of nandroid boot-prints.

>"How in the hell did we not see this coming?!" The greying Director was red in the face, but looking more bewildered than furious. The meeting had been assembled the morning after news had broke, all work stopping while the principal players in the agency convened and reassessed.
>"They're not exactly transparent about their activities." Georges spoke up dejectedly. "This guy might not even be the first human they've flown, and we'd never know it." Privately, Georges believed the unsubstantiated rumor of at least one lost cosmonaut, based solely on his own bias against their national rival.
>After the successful nandroid-piloted landing and return, the Agency had once again found itself flush with fresh government funds, but lacking an obvious next goal to spend it on beyond pushing for a similar manned lunar flight to merely catch up with their rival nation. The Director had been partial to developing a lunar outpost, but the rest of his team was mixed in opinion, and he knew that a moon-base wasn't as headline-grabbing to the public as it would be to himself. Some of the mission-planners had pointed to Mars, others Venus, and at least one voice in the room simply wanted an orbiting telescope, though that suggestion was shouted down as being 'decidedly un-sexy'.
>The meeting was long and at times loud, enough for Tilly to eavesdrop in as she laid on the floor of her tiny suite in front of the grated air-vent there. She hadn't been included naturally, wouldn't be unless a mission was chosen that required a more sophisticated mechanical pilot than the crude probes they were developing now.
>"Life support on the Libra capsule is still easily six months out and even then that'd barely be enough for a manned lunar flyby, not to mention that we've only just started on a real lander and that's another 8 months out at a BARE minimum" she heard the voice of the Director echo up through the vent shafts, nearly imperceptible to human ears up here.
>"So we're stuck with unmanned probes, but the automatic guidance is giving us hell so we're still a ways' off from that even." the voice of another engineer added. Georges voice, louder than the others spoke up. "So we use Tilly again, what's the problem?" She felt a spark up her spinal supports at the mention of her name. Internally estimating the odds that she would fly again, she found the values shifting rapidly in her favor.
>Despite her brushes with permanent deactivation, even her recently sullen state couldn't dampen the promise of excitement she knew she'd experience again if she were allowed to fly once more. "Use her on what?" another engineer interjected, and she heard Georges groan as several voices talked over one another and made it difficult for her to distinguish words.
>Even an entire floor away and through the vents, Tilly winced at Georges' characteristic shrill whistle, and the voices quieted down. "We've got a Zeus III-B ready to go and that gives us options, if we pause all other spacecraft development and build another Capricorn capsule variant it could be ready a hell of a lot sooner than you're all talking about". There was more crossfire-arguing, but the voices were more subdued and inaudible.
>After an indecipherable near-minute, the Director spoke up loudly. "Enough" He said sounding tired, then Tilly heard a coin strike a metal surface. "There,"
>"Venus it is."

>Mars of course had been advocated for by nearly half the staff there including Tilly herself, who'd made the red wandering light in the sky into a familiar friend she looked forward to spotting at night. The fuel requirements however, left the proposed craft with a dangerously small margin of error, and Venus not only required less but was also in better alignment to launch much sooner.
>"What's interesting about Venus?" Tilly had said dejectedly when she'd been informed of her next assignment as presumptive pilot for a flyby of the morning-star. In her now-ample free time, Tilly had often used an on-grounds telescope to view the sky at night, greatly multiplying the amount of distant light her optics could take in at once. Mars was blurry even to her precise vision, but the defined white poles and strange dark patches had stirred her speculation far more than the featureless yellow disk of Venus.
>"That's what you're going out there to find out!" Georges answered with a smile, the pair walking across tarmac away from a wide set of open hanger doors. The walk to the assembly building was brief, but Tilly filled it with questions. "You won't have to learn any of that stuff, the sensor arrays just collect data then you relay it home, simple as." His explanation eased one worry, but the next in the cue quickly rose to her focus.
>"What did you mean when you said the trip would be short for me, when the flight time is almost a year?" He raised a hand to her dismissively. "We'll have you linked into the capsule so we can regulate your shutdowns and bootups. You can spend most of the flight offline, we really only need you active for mid-course corrections and the flyby itself, and re-entry home of course." Tilly blinked and looked up at him sharply.
>An image of her deactivated body sitting in a capsule stuck forever going around the sun because of a busted antenna flashed across her CPU in milliseconds. "If it's all the same to you sir, I'd much rather rely on my own internal clock for that, I can automate a timed reboot myself and frankly," she looked down, uncomfortable. "I know my chronometer has the Sterling guarantee, no offense. Besides, I kind of want to be there for at least some of the trip, you know?"
>Georges frowned as they neared the VAB. "Tilly, that could potentially be a LOT of uptime for you." He sounded not quite concerned, but a little nervous. "The cabin is tiny and you'd be in there a year, we ah..." He trailed off and looked away. "We tried getting some data from Sterling on the effects of long-duration isolation tests in AI, but they wouldn't even acknowledge Stress Testing existed until the third call and when we finally got transferred through, they told us it was proprietary data and hung up."
>Her frame gave an involuntary shudder at the mention of what the other nandroids of her class had whispered about in hushed rumors, a sort of robot hell. "So, you and the others don't know what could happen if I have too much uptime to myself?" Tilly elbowed him lightly. "I spend plenty of my uptime alone as it is, I wouldn't worry about it too much sir." She tried to remain confident as her words, but truthfully she had no idea what a year alone might do to her either, and had only begun to think about it very recently.
>The interior of the tall structure Tilly used for her stargazing was filled with a massive missile, partially disassembled and undergoing integration as dozens of engineers walked about on the multi-level gantry surrounding it. Stopping in front of the tower-sized machine both of them had their eyes/optics pulled upwards towards the top, it was a draw impossible to ignore. "Alright granted, but that still leaves you stuck in your seat for all that time. Do nandroids get claustrophobic?" 'What about boredom?' he wondered inwardly, thinking of the small drawings of the Earth he'd seen taped up in her recharging room.
>Tilly could only shrug. "Not so far." She answered, and her companion grimly laughed once. She stared up at her ride and thought for a long moment as her optics moved up and down the multi-stage machine. Georges too was stuck in thought, he didn't want to force the nandroid into shutdown for most of the trip but living-space was limited on this vehicle, and despite her words he couldn't imagine a year in a chair failing to drive any thinking being mad. Tilly's slender metal hand pointed upwards at the corner of his vision and he pulled his eyes off the Zeus III-B to focus on her.
>"There, the third stage, I just drop that after the burn towards Venus, right?" She looked suddenly focused, a smile forming across her faceplate. "So why not keep it instead? When it's empty it's all just extra interior space, and a lot of it too!" The idea was simple, but Georges had to think in several different directions at once before realizing there was no obvious drawback or major impediment to Tilly's idea. "If we turn the capsule around after the burn out there...integrate the docking adapter and...you crazy can-opener I think that'd work!" Georges laughed openly, turning a few heads in the noisy building.

>Training for the flight was almost inconsequential to Tilly, the mission planners had very few critical tests for her to perform which they didn't already have data on from her previous sessions, and a basic checkup from a hastily-certified flight mechanic hadn't turned up any change in her function since she'd returned from Sterling following her first flight. What little training she'd actually needed had mostly been done via simulations, with many 'bad runs' where she'd be presented with a potentially-fatal error and forced to solve her way out of it.
>Frequently, she failed these, and many simulations ended with her tumbling off into deep space or falling into Venus, but with time she increased her 'win' count faster than her 'lose' tally, so soon the Agency's confidence was high that the first interplanetary mission would be as routine as it was historic. Tilly had tried to learn about her trip's target, but had given up after finding little in the resources available to her. Her flyby, it seemed, would return more data on Venus than was currently known by the humans sending her.
>The final night before her launch she'd spent like most over the past weeks, at her usual stargazing hideout atop the VAB and despite staying up there late into the pre-dawn couldn't bring herself to enter sleepmode just yet. She was waiting for something, and letting her thoughts drift aimlessly while she laid there. At the mere mention of perhaps seeing the world from above again, Tilly's less-happy experiences over the last year had been overridden by the welcome return of enthusiasm, and she'd been able to compartmentalize those more troubling memories while preparing for this new mission.
>Now though, hours away, she wondered if she was making a mistake. The Agency had never actually asked her to fly, it was simply the assignment she was given, an order to be followed and no different to her at first than fetching a round of coffee. Now though, after the thrill and terror and exultation of her trips, she found herself motivated well-beyond what her owners were expecting of her, and the idea of that scared her a little. She'd blindly agreed to her first flight, all-but forced the agency's hand for her second, and now? Was she again blindly accepting certain danger, leaping without looking? She didn't think so, but wasn't sure she could trust herself.
>"I guess I could've said 'no thanks'." She said softly out loud to herself as she stared upwards. "Probably get outmoded for it, but still." She frowned at herself for even suggesting it, in spite of second-guessing herself she knew she'd never turn down a chance to go again no matter the risks. 'What about the risks to others?' she said to herself internally, and involuntarily brought up the sharp image of broken steel and glass lying in the lunar dust. She shivered, but shook her head deliberately, willing the file back into storage. "I can't help what others do." She said steadily to herself at last, and only felt marginally better.
>Above her a bright unblinking point of light rose finally and caught her attention away from introspection. "There you are!" She said with satisfaction, smiling at the distant planet hanging in the night sky. She raised one hand and extended a segmented metal thumb, holding it over the world up there and taking it away, off and on. From down here, she thought, it hardly seemed Venus was there at all. Before the birds began chirping, she'd started back down the long set of staircases running down the side of the tall building, making it back to her suite in time to replenish the power she'd spent on stargazing all night.

>A cluster of massive engine bells roared to life, and the staff of the launch complex were treated again to the unlikely sight of a skyscraper-sized tower slowly rising from the pad and arcing into the clouds. For Tilly this was beginning to feel routine, but despite telling herself this she still felt that strange warm glow of overclocking as the world once more slipped away beneath her. Why fight it, she thought to herself, and grinned in the capsule's cabin.
>The third stage and attached capsule circled the Earth once, then the single large engine flared up again and flung a strange little robot further than anything mankind had ever sent into the void. After the burn, Tilly conferred with mission control until both were satisfied that she was on course, then vented the last of the third stage's hydrogen into open space to clear it. Any corrective burns, and importantly her re-capture burn around Earth at the end of her flight, would be performed by a newly-designed service module fitted beneath the capsule's heat shield.
>Intended during conception to support humans with the air and water they required for a short week-long flight, the unit now housed an array of sensors and experiment packages, all designed to gather new and exciting data for return to the eager scientists back home. "Venus Libertina, you are go for transposition" the radio chattered at her using her ship's new designation, and she took a deep breath to steady herself. Uncoupling from the third stage had been part of the mission even before her suggestion of using it as living space, but now if she wanted to do anything but sit in place for the coming year she needed to turn her capsule around to re-dock the right way.
>A small 'pop' rang through the capsule as she jettisoned the now-empty third stage, and she waited nearly a minute before using the reaction control thrusters to slowly turn herself around and face the empty rocket. She'd only killed herself once during the simulations of this maneuver, but the memory of her mistake rang out as an internal prompt she had to shove into the background in order to focus. Slowly the capsule inched forward, closing the distance that had grown after uncoupling until docking probe met port and the two pieces of machinery pulled together with a solid 'clunk'.
>Tilly was nearly giddy, and wasted no time unbuckling once the docking was complete. Above her head, stowage space had been converted into a round porthole hatch, and once out of her seat she eagerly unfastened it. A breeze briefly rushed passed her as the hatch swung open, the thin mostly-nitrogen air finding a balance between two pressures quickly. The inside was dark, only fuel had occupied the space before and now it was little more than a giant cold tube. 'Still,' she thought to herself as she unfastened her flashlight and looked into the darkness with it. "I can make something with this."

>The first week had been one of organization, taking stock of everything she had available to her and putting everything where she could make the most use of it. What cargo she'd been allotted had mostly been stuffed away into the service module and required several tethered trips outside to transfer it all into her new living space. Her first EVA on her previous flight had been frightening, but now doing it had become a matter of routine, the tether giving her a strong sense of security as she moved around the outer hull. From the outside, she looked over her shoulder at the diminishing Earth now as small as the moon was from the ground. "What a view"
>Inside her new quarters, she'd gone to work unpacking the materials to convert the spent stage into something livable and began with a series of lights in three rings around the cylindrical space. Once she could see enough to work further, she set up the auxiliary heater supplied to keep the habitat warm enough for her to function. What was the sense in making a habitat if you had to be suited the whole time you were inside it, she'd argued. A pair of light aluminum rods unfolded and fit snugly into place at intervals in the long room, and some light Mylar blankets suspended on them served as dividers between 'rooms'.
>When the temperature had risen, she'd finally stripped off her protective suit, leaving the insulated covering to float with the helmet beside her. She paused to watch a glove turning in place after giving it a light tap, before stretching her arms out wide above her and straining her servos with a satisfied sigh. She may not have been claustrophobic in the human sense of the word, but room to move around was certainly preferable to her, especially if it was going to be a long trip. Unzipping a vacuum-sealed package, she happily pulled on her familiar blue agency jumpsuit and set about floating throughout her new home inspecting all of her handiwork. Two dividers had turned the long tube into three rooms, the largest at the center with two smaller areas to either side, one leading back into the capsule.
>This room nearest to the capsule she dubbed 'the master bedroom', where she curled up with her external drive of science fiction curated for her by the collective mission control staff. The room furthest from her she'd called her closet, and for now it only served as a place to stow her spacesuit and cargo, mostly consisting of a few tools for emergency self-maintenance, as well as an atmospheric probe to be released near the flyby. The middle of the spent stage she'd left large and open, and had delighted during those first days simply flying from one curved wall to the next. She'd been denied true weightlessness inside of a ship on her previous flights, but now she felt unrestricted and free as she floated around her habitat.

>By the time the Earth was only a bluish star visible through the porthole of the capsule, Tilly had settled into a comfortable routine, with activity order randomized to keep from repeating any pattern. An external drive contained a library of reading material, and despite being able to transfer an entire book over and process rapidly, she preferred to make each one last by transferring them to her own drives line by line slowly. Music was available though she had little choice over what was played, thanks to a 24/7 transmission on a dedicated channel acting as her own personal radio. For keeping her servos limber, she bounce-ran around the inside of the cylinder at a gentle jog while the radio played static-laden music from the world she'd left behind.
>When her charge got low, Tilly had to crawl back through the hatch to the capsule's seat in order to replenish her power and enter sleep-mode. She didn't particularly like being pulled away from her habitat for this, even though the capsule had the only view of the outside, and after several weeks began to seriously think about modifying the vehicle around her. She performed a bit of exploratory rocket-surgery using the tools from her maintenance kit, and removed the metal panels that obscured the connection between the charging cable and the battery hidden somewhere deeper in the console. "Aha!" Tilly said out loud when she got the cover off, her computed hunch proving correct.
>Owing to the complex and frankly rushed design of the vehicle, the flow of power had been routed around multiple components, turning and doubling back on itself in several places to avoid other important machinery. It was painstaking work, but Tilly was determined now that she saw how much longer her charging cable was underneath the bulkheads. Slowly she untangled the complex web of wires, guiding the charge cable backwards along its path freeing it until she had nearly filled the cabin with a coil of cable leading back down to the battery. She only had a bit of tape meant for repairing the dividers, but it was all she needed to route the newly-freed cable down into her habitat adhered to what she considered the floor.
>The successful renovation filled her with a sense of accomplishment, and that recharge cycle she spent in her master bedroom, floating dreamless with an umbilical stretching all the way to the cabin powering her. "Libertine, copy?" The radio channel flickered at her the following day, and she'd floated through her home back to the cabin to answer the call. "Copy, I'm here sir, good morning!" She called back, checking her internal chronometer and extrapolating for mission control's timezone. "Morning Til, today we've got an inspection of the atmospheric probe for you, if you're not busy" the far-away voice on the intercom was jovial. Back home, the crew were being careful to keep the solo nandroid in regular communication, and in high spirits.
>"Oh right, he's stowed in the closet but I can head back there and give him a checkup," Tilly said smiling to nobody but herself. "I'll call back when I've finished up, now go eat something sir, I know you haven't yet!" She chided the operator and signed off, pushing off with one foot and floating through the hatchway into her habitat. She took her time floating across the expanse of the middle-room, dubbed after some time as 'the playpen' recalling from her earliest training how rambunctious children could burn off energy in a safe enclosed space. The memory file felt somehow foreign when she'd read it, how long had it been since she'd had to think about caring for children? Floating through the opening in the divider at the far-end of her home Tilly entered the closet, a collection of items stowed by string to the walls.
>Moving to the largest object stowed there, she opened the lid of a crate and stared down at the disc-shaped simple machine inside. She knew the probe carried no hint of sentience, it was merely a set of timed triggers, but she'd thought of it as a sort of pet and would refer to it as such whenever asked about it. Inspecting the sleeping probe took little time as nothing had changed since the last, and after ensuring the shield was not cracked nor antenna bent she reached down and gave it a pat. "Sorry for PROBING around you like that" She said to it, then laughed loudly at her own awful pun.

>During the designing process for the service module Tilly had gone with Georges to see the new addition to the familiar capsule she knew. Two engineers were arguing loudly over two different concepts for a complex probe-deployment mechanism, and neither would yield ground to the other each citing weight constraints. Looking between them for a moment, Tilly had looked up at Georges questioningly. "Um, sir? Why don't I just...throw it?" Georges had cackled at the suggestion, then broken the news to the two heated men that their ideas had been superseded by simplicity.
>placing the lid gently back over the probe's container, she floated for a moment looking at it. None of the scientists who'd sent them both hurtling towards Venus knew very much about the destination, and this humble little probe would descend down into the atmosphere of the mysterious world during the flyby to collect data and relay it back to Tilly to be forwarded home. After another short checkup with mission control, she was free again to use her time as she saw fit, and switched on the channel carrying her music selection. Fly Me to the Moon was already several seconds in when she turned on the sound, the melody echoing through the habitat to her delight. Moving herself quickly back to her open playpen room, she closed her eyes and twirled in place with a smile, thinking back to the night before her launch to the moon.
>The pleasant memory of the nandroid singer back home set her mood for the rest of the day, and she spent several hours enjoying herself with simple zero-g acrobatics as she listened to song after song broadcast to her from the Earth, for once without a care or worry to distract her from easy joy. That evening, she'd settled into a web of rope she'd tied to one wall for herself in the master bedroom, a short bit of impromptu netting which served as a sort of bed she could hook herself onto with one arm and keep from booting up wherever she'd drifted off to during sleep mode. She curled up and relaxed, plugging herself first into her extended recharging cable, then to the small ribbon cable of her external drive library. It had been over two months since she'd left Earth, and already she had read through dozens of stories, each selected on the whims of the ground crew and staff for being their personal favorites.
>As the final chapters of one story transferred and were read slowly to her internal storage, she checked her charge and noted with surprise that she was topped-off. "Already?" She spoke aloud with a blink, then conferred with her internal chronometer. She'd been reading for thirteen hours, and hadn't noticed a thing outside of herself for that time. "Oh, huh" She was mildly disconcerted by the missed time, but she'd enjoyed being absorbed in the story and so wasn't unsettled enough to stop from finishing the book and searching through the drive for another to start.
>Three days of uptime later she finally unplugged from her power cable in order to float back to the other end of her habitat through an opening in the second divider, leading into the closet. Inside one of the several cases she'd tethered there, she'd found another notebook and set of long pencils, with a note from Georges: 'Don't get bored up there, -G'. She'd noticed it when first converting the third stage for living-space, but had stowed it until now. Looking at the art supplies with mild frustration remembering her difficulty with basic drawing, she took them with her anyway back across the open space and up into the capsule. She fixed her optics out the porthole window, lens-apertures finely focusing on the steadily growing world she was heading towards. She frowned, still too far to really resolve much of anything from the point of light. Rolling her optics she resolved to try doodling Venus later when she was closer, then flicked on the radio and turned the volume down on the random music.
>Floating back into the converted stage to her master bedroom, she got cozy in to her net and reattached her power supply. She froze for a moment. What had she just been doing? She had a momentary panic as the question went without answer. She looked down at her hands and sighed. Doodling, she'd been about to doodle. Letting go of the pad and pencils, she raised a hand to her forehead and pushed back her synthetic hair. Earlier in the day (yesterday?), she'd had a similar lapse of continuity, and it was unsettling her more now that it had happened twice so close together. When had she last powered down? She had to close her optics and try to recall, finding it strangely difficult. She had the unnerving feeling of things not being in their proper place, and she couldn't put her finger on what or why. She paused and flashed open her eyes sharply. What had she just been doing?
>Her actions looped once more, remembering when she saw the pad float by, and she growled in frustration. "Alright alright, I'll power down!" she shouted at herself, both frustrated at the physical requirement for defrag and reboot in general, and at herself for going multiple days without doing it. Without the same physical exhaustion that forced sleepless humans to rest, Tilly had found it easy to over-extend her uptime so long as she remained on her charger, and jumping from entire book to entire book without stopping had become an entertainment endurance challenge to her. Sleep-mode, she thought inwardly as she closed her optics and timed an automated reboot for eight hours from now, was time she could be spending doing things and not just laying around unaware of herself.
>She began to awaken once hours later, but was prompted at boot from her internal diagnostics with a message that said 'defragmentation incomplete, power down'. So she did, and set her next boot for another eight hours forward.

>One month from Venus flyby and Tilly had gone on cycles of forgetting to power down, then forcing herself to when she felt her computing speed drop and her memory retrieval lag. One such cycle ended with Tilly booting up from a long defragmentation, opening her optics slowly and running through her boot checks internally. 'Temporary memory clear, battery at full charge, disk space capacity at twenty percent, servos functioning at-' she paused. "That can't be right" She said quietly as she leaned up from her net-hammock and rechecked her permanent storage in more detail. Of her non-standard three drives one was nearly full of high-fidelity video, audio, and the myriad associated connections those memories made. Another drive had been used to compartmentalize every moment of her training both with Sterling and the space agency, filling more than half the space with the rest a smattering of different data sets relating to the various humans who she'd known, their interrelationships with one another and the wider world.
>Scanning through a file list for the last drive made Tilly feel like a fool, all that storage space and she'd packed eighty percent of it with the stories she'd read off her external drive, committing them to permanent memory as she digested them. Putting her hands to the sides of her head, she tried to think. She didn't want to delete the memory of reading those books, to lose the ability to recall them in perfect detail to herself, but she had to perform triage if she wanted room for real memories by the time of the flyby. She selected a pair of stories she hadn't favored as highly as others, and with a wince she suddenly forgot every detail about them. She frowned at the sense of loss, and began looking for other incidental files to mark for deletion instead of picking another story. Looking inward, she categorized files by last-access date seeking what was least-used, and immediately was greeted by all the familiar rules and regulations that had been drilled into her during her first days of function at Sterling.
>Since arriving at the agency fresh from her nandroid training, almost all of the rigorously-studied programming on child care and temperament-handling, regulations on what constituted 'properly finished' housework of all kinds, soft-therapy subroutines for consoling an angry master after a hard day's work, table placement protocols for fancy dinners, none had been accessed. Tilly laughed out loud to herself with her optics closed. "Why would it ever matter what side of the plate the fork goes on?" she said, and promptly marked the file for deletion. Nandroids, as the commercials for the robotics giant rightfully claimed, were adaptive machines that could self-program to perform in any number of different settings. Tilly was proof of that, and over the next two days she remained on her power cable and sorted through her memories, streamlining by discarding any useless training that didn't aid her in the performance of her assignment.

>During the long pruning-session of her drives, she scanned by the memory of her struggle with the Russian robot on the moon. For only a millisecond she considered deleting the painful memory, then felt a rush of guilt and nearly made a backup of it instead. She needed to remember that, she thought to herself, someone should. By the time she'd finished curating her files she'd increased her capacity back to fifty percent, still well-over what a nandroid of her young age should have stored but not enough to cause the existential panic of being unable to ever remember new experiences one day due to full or slowly corrupting drives. Giving a long sigh, Tilly let go finally from her netting and began to float towards the opening in the divider, only to feel something yank her backwards. "Ah! Oh right, dumb thing" She muttered as she reached behind her and unplugged her recharge cable.
>In the closet at the back of the vessel, Tilly peered down at the unthinking probe again in its protective packaging. "We're almost there, 'lil buddy. Just gotta keep going, okay?" She patted the cool surface of the probe, smooth metals making a soft 'clink' on contact. She let her hand rest a moment, and repeated herself internally before replacing the cover and forcing herself to jog several hours in order to clear her mind. It mostly worked, and when an internal prompt showed she was low on power again she returned to her master bedroom to hibernate another recharging cycle.

>During the final two weeks of the approach, Venus had grown visibly through the capsule porthole, and Tilly finally was given a chance to try her hand at doodling again. The distance and blurriness, coupled with her inexperienced hands, made it difficult to represent her approaching destination on paper, but with a little shading she'd managed to crudely represent the terminator line between night and day that she now saw and felt a boost in morale as she inwardly noted her mild improvement. At six days out, Tilly pulled her space suit down from the closet, changed, and maneuvered the box containing her little probe down into the capsule, pulling her recharging cable in with them and sealing the hatch. A few presses at the control panel cycled what thin gasses were present back into the habitat, and when she opened the capsule's main door leading outside it swung open silently.
>Freeing the probe from its container, Tilly held up the beachball-sized machine and gave it a long look before pressing a light kiss through her helmet on its packed parachute. "Good luck!" She said with a smile, and lightly shoved it through the open door. Watching it drift away gave her a sudden sad pang she hadn't expected to feel, and she had to shut the hatch to keep from watching it float off slowly and growing morose. "It's just a dumb machine" She reassured herself as she equalized pressure between the cabin and habitat. 'Yeah well, so are you' answered back her internal voice of reason, and she snickered at it. Hours after release, the little probe fired an automated short burst of propellant, and dropped its trajectory down to intercept the atmosphere below.

>"Stand by Libertina, we're still showing an anomaly down here." Mission control had become a busy place, busier now than ever with staff on edge leading up to the flyby, and several conflicting trajectory extrapolations had given alarmingly disparate data. As far as Tilly was aware she was on course to pass within a hundred miles of the Venusian atmosphere before flying off into a solar orbit that'd carry her back to the Earth, after months spent coasting. Sitting in her capsule which was rare these days, Tilly stared out the window as the mustard-colored world approached her. This was only the start of the flyby and already she was seeing detail in the clouds she'd never anticipated. Working quickly, she booted up the automated data-gathering array, and as the yellow planet grew close she found herself staring out at it intensely. This was the dull point of light she'd viewed from the roof of the VAB back home?
>The thought barely seemed to fit, the two images of the bright morning star from Earth and the alien planet before her conflicting internally with one another. After only a few minutes Tilly felt her processor overclocking without her consent again, capturing the rich detail of the moment in high-fidelity. Venus, an entire PLACE, and who knew what lay below the clouds? She sat spellbound as the dumb equipment in the service module gathered data in timed batches while she approached the destination she'd been flying towards for months. Her vessel's instruments were adequate but imperfect, and unlike the more sophisticated equipment at mission control had failed to register the ever-so-slight drift the ship had picked up after she'd jettisoned the probe. Plain ignorance and a rushed schedule had hidden the simple problem posed by throwing the probe from the capsule directly, that she'd exerted a minuscule reactionary force against her craft that had been slowly pushing her off-course for days.

>When the first signs of the off-course drift had been detected, an argument had broken out first in the control room, and then with Tilly herself via radio. Nobody was entirely sure who held the correct figures for her course, and being unable to confirm that something was actually wrong no decision had been reached about correcting it. After all if it was merely computer error then there was nothing to correct, a burn before flyby then might've meant missing valuable data or worse, using up precious fuel she needed for slowing to orbit when she returned home. As the capsule with its docked habitat bore down on the planet, Tilly suppressed and stored her slight worry to be dealt with later, freeing up her CPU to focus only on the sights out her porthole window. It was easy to put fear out of mind, seeing the planet rising beneath her. "I am so sorry I ever called you boring, look at you!" she said to the world with a grin. It was a shame that after all the waiting the flyby would take only hours before she'd be flung back into the long drift home. Tilly could've spent a month orbiting Venus and it still wouldn't have been enough for her to be satisfied now.

>Thick clouds obscured the surface entirely as the planet took up most of her viewport, which had disappointed her at first. "Of all the luck, today it's cloudy?" she'd said at first to herself, then changed her mind after a few minutes of thought. Maybe it was always like that here? She gave a slight shrug and decided to leave the speculation to the scientists, secure in the knowledge that below her cabin were an assortment of machines all clicking and whirring away collecting data that would tell them more than she ever could. She beamed at herself, her reflection a ghost in the glass transposed over the rushing surface of the Venusian atmosphere. She quieted her mind for several minutes, and simply took in the sights. As the blackness of space became only a sliver in the window, her smile wavered slightly. "Ah, that's about close enough isn't it?" she asked herself nervously as she tore her optics off the window and glanced at her console's simple black screen lit with blocky green text. The text shifted rapidly as the capsule's computer struggled to resolve her telemetry.
>It took Tilly nearly 30 seconds to comprehend her predicament as she stared at the revised periapsis figure and compared it to what was estimated to be the height of Venus' atmosphere. Shaking her head slowly, she looked back out the window, now not with awe but a creeping fear. "No no, that can't be right, that..." she trailed off, running through the available data internally again, hoping she'd missed something, but she hadn't. For a quickly-approaching period of roughly two minutes at her closest distance to Venus, Tilly's vessel was going to skim through the very top of the atmosphere, and aerobrake slightly in the thin wispy air. She nervously opened a channel to mission control and relayed the information hurriedly. At the furthest distance from an orbited object, even the tiniest changes in trajectory can compound to large changes on the other end of the ellipse, especially at the distance Tilly currently was from the Earth. "Alright ah, looks like we're not gonna be able to determine the changes to your course until the flyby is over. Just sit tight, we're working on it." She frowned again.

>'Okay, they're dealing with it' she thought inwardly, and tried to keep shoving her creeping panic to the bottom of her processing cue. For just two minutes, she was closer to Venus than anything self-aware had ever come. Through the roiling clouds below, Tilly thought she could see brief glimpses of a surface, dark lines suggesting craggy mountain ranges, and lighter patches that could've been some sort of desert. In the service bay measurements were made and images captured. Through the porthole, Tilly's optics lit up as a bright orange glow began to streak through the clouds far away in the distance. "There he goes!" she proclaimed triumphantly, momentarily forgetting her own worry. After months of travel together, she was proud to see the little probe performing its job at last. After the glow disappeared, she stayed glued to the window until well after the world below began shrinking away from her. The flyby had ended, and now her course would carry her out around the sun on a long arc towards an intercept with the Earth, at least she hoped. "So uh, I'm still heading home, right?" she asked hopefully, holding down the talk-button on her radio. "Or am I gonna need to hitchhike?"
>For a sickeningly-long moment, there was no reply, and Tilly grew more apprehensive. "C-cardboard sign? 'Earth or bust?' " she laughed nervously, but caught a glimpse of her own worried expression in the glass of the window. "Sorry about that Libertina, we're still recalculating but we should have a correction burn resolved for you..." the strained voice of the radio operator trailed off, replaced a moment later by Georges cutting in. "'Soon', is how that sentence ends. Hang on Tilly, it might take a little time." She took in a deep breath and exhaled waste-heat as her processor cooled. "Sure thing, I'll uh, play 'count the cows' with myself." She remembered one of the trips she'd taken by car to a magazine interview, a long ride with an agency representative chauffeur who'd taught her the game after a dull half hour of silence. An internal prompt alerted her that she was low on power again, shaking her from the memory. "That was fast" she said to herself, but dutifully left the cabin to seek out the recharging cable. By the tone of Georges' voice she already knew a sleepless night was in store for the man, and she would have time to rest herself before they'd have an answer for her.

>It took over a week for the computers at mission control to finally confirm Tilly's altered course, being checked and rechecked around the clock to make sure nothing had been missed. While she waited, Tilly had clung to her netting bed, pad and pencil in hand. She'd been too preoccupied to focus on another book, and for now the external drive floated away from her dangling on a short tether. On the notepad she'd tried drawing the lunar horizon from memory, and despite her clumsy hands the landscape was becoming recognizable if simple. Her mind wandered as she drew, remembering her journey to the moon with equal fondness and regret. Drawing a dark circle and shading it in, Tilly thought about the crater occupied by the Russian robot, and for a moment wondered what it'd be like to power down for the last time totally alone. She shivered, and crumpled the page leaving the balled paper to float in front of her. With a huff, she batted it away and crossed her arms letting the pad drift away. "Stop that," she said out loud. "You're just making yourself feel worse."

>A burst of static echoed at her from the capsule, and she quickly pulled herself free of the netting and floated through the hatchway. "Hey, I'm here!" she said excitedly, and waited. Two more bursts of static followed before the voice of the operator came through weakly. "Repeating: Venus Libertine, we're transmitting your course-correction now, burn will be at aphelion approximately 100 days from now." As data trickled across space to the capsule computer, the required change in trajectory displayed and dropped Tilly's jaw. "That's practically all my fuel, how am I gonna slow down?". No answer came back though, only several more short bursts of static. Frowning at the console and tapping it lightly, she checked her current fuel against the figure she'd been transmitted, ran some brief math through her processor, then compared the output to her required braking-burn to Earth orbit. The margin of error was tiny, and she wasn't even certain she'd have enough fuel for a full capture, perhaps stranding her in a wildly-elliptical orbit around Earth. "At least they could come up and get me there," she muttered as she parsed the remaining data on her mid-course-correction.

>Waiting with uncertainty was agonizing for the over-stressed nandroid, and after several failed attempts to distract herself with a book she'd finally relented to sleeping off some more of the trip, if only to sidestep the daily worrying. Plugged in and drawing charge, she set an internal autoboot command for three months out, longer than she'd ever spent in sleep-mode. It was better she thought, than spending every waking millisecond trying to distract from her uncertain upcoming maneuver still so far off. Closing her optics, she shut herself down and entered hibernation, and for the next 90 days the habitat was silent except for hum of the heater, and regular bursts of static from the radio.

>*BATTERY CRITICALLY-LOW, SWITCHING TO EXTERNAL DRAW* an internal prompt rang out in the murky cloud of her semi-awareness. Tilly was booting back up, and was met with a wall of internal prompts each timestamped and warning that her power had been decreasing daily. As her senses came online, she could immediately detect something foul in the thin air around her. Trace aerosols of carbon monoxide, fluorine and lithium were inhaled and analyzed, giving her a sickly feeling. She shot her optics open wide and stared down at herself, feeling something wrong within her casing. She hesitantly put a hand to her chest and ran it down slowly, stopping at the middle of her torso and freezing. She felt a bulge pressing against her hand, a small tumorous rise from underneath a distorted exterior panel. "My battery!" she exclaimed, then frantically unzipped and pulled at her sleeves until she wore the top half of the jumpsuit around her waist. Staring down at the smooth panel-lines differentiating the individual plates covering her interior, her optics were drawn to the swollen one over her battery compartment, a faint dark bit of gunk evident just out of sight beneath it.
>As her mouth hung open, another prompt rang out internally, *ATTEMPT TO CONTACT STERLING SERVICING DEPARTMENT FAILED, OUT OF RANGE*. Her self-maintenance kit, included for unlikely emergencies like this, was tied to the far wall in her closet at the other end of the habitat. Tugging on her now mandatory power-umbilical, she whined quietly and cursed herself for not keeping such things within closer reach. Breathing in deep, she set her nerves and reached down, grabbing the raised rim of the bulged panel centered in her chest. There was barely enough edge there to grip and she lacked fingernails, but was able to slowly force a finger underneath giving her leverage to pry. It took both hands and more force than she thought she had in her, but finally with a groan of tearing steel the panel gave way and flew out of her hands, bouncing around the interior and puncturing one of the thin Mylar room-dividers. What Tilly saw inside herself was grim, the once top-of-the-line battery was swollen and dark, enough gritty corrosion present to obscure the text printed on the power source.
>Gingerly she fished around the edge of the ruined battery until she found the connective wire there and unplugged it from the rest of her. The unit was held in place by a pair of screwed-on strips of metal, and twice again she had to pry at herself until thin metal sheared apart. When the battery was free, she plucked it from her chest with two fingers, holding it up in front of her optics to inspect it. Even if she'd known the first thing about electronics repair, she doubted this rotted husk would ever have held a charge again. Sighing shakily, she gave the ruined battery a little shove and sent it floating away from her. As she calmed herself from her impromptu self-surgery, she checked her chronometer to make sure she'd woken up when she'd intended, finding herself up a few days earlier than she'd planned. Carefully pulling her power cable along with her as she floated into the cabin, Tilly made for the radio and opened the channel. "Mission control this is Libertina, do you copy?" A long burst of static answered her, then cut out. She waited a full minute and repeated her call, but received no reply. Her last communication with home had been before powering down, letting the crew know she'd be hibernating a while, and no messages had been recorded during her time in sleepmode.
>Another long minute's wait, another failed attempt to raise mission control. By now Tilly was feeling more than a little frightened, why wasn't anyone responding to her? Steeling herself, she pressed the talk button one more time. "I don't know if you can hear me but," she began, and her voice caught as it synthesized through her speaker. "my battery is fried, I'm on ship's power now. I'm still okay but, well, I'm a little scared." She held the talk button down for several more seconds before adding "I could really use a familiar voice right about now." Nobody granted her wish, and after several more minutes listening to the intermittent bursts of static, she gave up. "Guess I'm on my own up here," she said softly to herself, and stared through the console at nothing for a moment.
>Even on the moon, she'd never felt quite the sense of solitude and loneliness she was processing now, and was taken aback at just how much she'd underestimated what getting to talk to the men of mission control did for her spirits. Sitting up straight, she lightly slapped the reddish circular lights at her cheeks and gave her window-reflection a stern look. "Fine then, let's get ready for that correction burn"

>A few days later, Tilly's ship reached the most distant point from the sun in its orbit, aphelion. She'd taken the pre-planned burn and ran it again and again through her CPU, trying to judge micro-adjustments improving fuel efficiency and leaving herself something to slow down with. She sat in her cabin, belted in to keep herself from shifting as the ship's speed was altered, and ticked down the final minutes. With a deep breath, she oriented the service module's single engine and pressed the ignition switch. After so long in freefall, the sudden acceleration felt momentarily foreign, And Tilly had to force her optics back open to focus on her instruments. She was glancing back and forth rapidly between two displays, one estimating her closest approach to Earth, the other showing her rapidly-depleting fuel. The burn lasted half a minute, and the estimate of her closest approach home lowered with every second, capturing her attention. Ten thousand miles, five thousand, a thousand. She'd be close, and felt a thrill of excitement. "C'mon, c'mon, almost!" 400 miles closest approach, 300, 200, the capsule gave a shudder and went silent. She froze, and looked at the throttle still wide open.

>Across the main display, a new message flashed that Tilly could barely begin to process. *SERVICE MODULE FUEL TANK EMPTY* the simple prompt read, five words that spelled her certain doom. "N-no, no t-that can't be it!" She frantically looked back and forth between the displays, as if expecting a miracle to arrive and save her, but none came. Internally she was fighting herself, half of her registering the information and feeding her the outcome, the other half desperate not to believe herself. She was hyperventilating, processor running hot as an internal fan spun up to a ridiculous speed. This wasn't right, she wasn't supposed to run out of fuel, and now she was going all the way home only to pass a few hundred miles above it, then spiral off into space forever. She began shivering, and shook her head rapidly. "This isn't, no! I can't just-, not like that!" she pleaded to the uncaring metal around her, and felt suddenly cold. "Oh god!" Panic rising to a crescendo, an internal prompt warned of encountering a fatal error, and rebooted her. When she came back online a few minutes later, she had to relive the memory of the burn and keep herself from shutting down again. What could she do? What was there to do?
>Pressing the talk button on the unresponsive radio, she called into the void without answer. "Mission control, if you're out there, I-I finished my burn, I'll pass within 200 miles of you in a few months. Only, I used my remaining fuel, and I'm not gonna be able to slow down, so..." she took her finger off the switch and hugged herself, tucking her chin down into her chest. "So wave goodbye when I fly passed, sirs."

>At two months from Earth intercept, Tilly floated restlessly hooked to her netting bed. She'd spent much of the past few weeks fondly reading over several more books from her external drive, no longer caring about space constraints on disk space. She wouldn't need it much longer anyway, she thought. At first realizing her fate she'd been despondent, and had even briefly entertained the idea of simply unplugging and letting herself power down for good. 'No, that won't do' she'd thought inwardly, wanting to live at least long enough to view her home through the porthole one final time as she flew by. After that, she decided, she'd shut down, not wanting to drift endlessly awake until her hardware gave out. After finishing another book, she unplugged from the external drive for a while and simply rested, contemplating her life up until now. She'd performed well for the agency even before her first flight, and had accepted the missions given to her without hesitation. She'd seen the Earth from above, walked across the surface of the moon, and skimmed the skies of Venus. "Not a bad life, all things considered," she muttered to herself, but it was no consolation. She didn't want to be done, not yet anyway, and felt robbed by fate to have to power down alone for the last time well-before her final decommissioning.

>With a month left, Tilly began to forgo sleepmode again, now no longer caring about the ill-effects the constant uptime had on her simulated psyche. 'If the rest of my life is going to be measured in days, then I want to experience every second I have left' she thought to herself, and wrote a note to tape against the inner hull that read 'Sleepmode when you're deactivated.' As the days dragged on, Tilly stopped reading new material and began pouring over the books she'd saved internally, bookmarked as 'favorites'. For long stretches of time, she simply recounted the stories to herself, and in time began imagining that she was a participant in the tales. In her head she conversed with fictional characters and the memories of real people she knew back home, talking to them about synthetic life and what she'd wished it had been like for her. Music played from file, a soundtrack to her inner dialogue, and when she played Fly Me to the Moon back to herself she was wracked with painful sobbing. She'd never get to hear that song again, she thought, or delight at the beautiful voice of that talented machine she'd seen perform it a lifetime ago. Her processing speed slowed, her ram filled, and her sense of awareness regarding the moment she was in slipped away. She'd never dreamed, but imagined this was what it felt like.

>Without thinking about it one evening, she moved to the capsule and stared out the window sadly. In the distance a bluish star was noticeably brighter than the others, and a feeling of severe homesickness overtook her as she spent hours gazing at it. Finally turning from the sight she retreated back to bed and closed her optics, letting her delirium take her away from the sight of her home growing in the distance. At some point, she stopped keeping track of the days of continual uptime. "Manny, my oldest friend," she mouthed the words from file of her favorite book, speaking as the fictional computer to his fictional companion. "Do you know any good jokes?" She laughed out loud to herself, then her fuzzy thoughts drifted elsewhere. Days passed, and Tilly nested in her little master bedroom, no longer thinking about the approaching Earth, no longer thinking about anything coherent at all. A memory flashed in her focus, and she saw again for an instant shattered glass and steel strewn across grey rock in the darkness of the lunar crater. Another memory flashed, and she was on board an alien ship of unknown origin flung outwards from the sun with Richard Wakefield, Nicole des Jardins and Michael O'toole, exploring the mystery of the unknown craft. She smiled softly to herself in her netting, not seeing her surroundings despite her optics being wide open. A knock came from the door, and she frowned at the interruption irritably.
>A knock? Suddenly Tilly froze. Had that been real? No of course not, how could it be? But then the sound rang out again, vibrating the hull of her habitat and she felt it. She sat deathly still, CPU struggling to process what she'd heard. A third knock rang out, then a moment later Tilly felt a momentary breeze as some residual atmosphere vented passed ruffling her short hair. Optics wide, she pressed herself tightly into her net, staring with apprehension at the hatchway. She saw movement that she struggled to resolve, and at that moment a dizzying array of warning prompts sounded alarm bells internally grinding her CPU to a halt. She didn't hear the hatch close shut, didn't hear the first words said to her, all she saw was the stainless steel face and gold optics that focused on her from behind a glass helmet in the hatchway. "Ah, so you ARE still online, this is good, da?" Tilly's optics fluttered shut as she involuntarily rebooted.


>Hours passed, for her no time at all. A long defragmentation kept her unconscious, but when it had finally finished optimizing her drive space her boot sequence started up, and soon she opened her optics. Looking around, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, sighed loudly and pinched the bridge of her nose. Was this it? Was she suffering a fatal breakdown of her AI? She'd heard of such things happening, though Sterling claimed it wasn't possible for their products to go insane. At this moment, she doubted the Sterling Guarantee for the first time in her life, and gave a shudder at the prospect of losing herself entirely before the end. An accented voice called to her from the capsule. "Hey, is you online again yet? Thought I heard something in there." Tilly again froze, but fought off the rising panic. "It's not real, it's not real," she began to mutter to herself, but was stopped in her tracks by the face of the Russian robot appearing through the hatch, now unhelmeted. "What was that? Not real?" the soviet pilot floated down in front of Tilly, who shrunk back from her and covered her face with her hands. "Go away, go away please I don't want to see this!" she moaned pitifully, shivering. After a pause, the Russian machine scoffed. "Yeesh, you really are in sorry state aren't you?" She reached forward, and Tilly whimpered. The Russian lightly flicked her shoulder. "Does that not feel real? Huh? Dummy."

>Tilly winced at the feeling in her shoulder, and slowly uncovered her optics, forcing herself to look at the apparent apparition. "I-I-I....w-what? I don't, how?" she spoke incoherently, and the Soviet robot looked annoyed. "We've not got all day, out with it!" she scolded her, and Tilly held her breath. "How are you...how is this real?" she asked in a hushed voice still unconvinced that it was, and the Russian laughed. "Is not long story dummy, will tell but have work to finish first, da? Rickety capsule not refuel self you know." With a terse grin, she turned and disappeared back into the capsule. After several moments of doubt, Tilly let go of her netting and floated after her to poke her head down into the space. "Work? Refuel? I don't, I don't understand what's happening." She tried to make herself sound like anything other than a frightened child, but failed. After a few clicks on the console, the Russian turned to look over her shoulder at her. "What is there not to get? You out of fuel, big-time boned. Frightened American Director calls Master, asks for help. Master say 'da, is good press, Soviet rescue of yankee robot,' get some kind of ah, political concession too I think, these things I not know well." Her cavalier attitude caught Tilly off-guard almost as much as seeing her face had. "Rescue? You're, rescuing me?" she asked with wide optics, still trying to convince herself she hadn't suffered a cascade-collapse of her AI driving her mad. Hesitantly, she added "You?"
>The Soviet machine stopped what she was doing and turned again, fixing Tilly with a harsh stare. "Da, I am not believing it either." she said flatly, and went back to her work. Beneath them, the sound of sloshing liquid reverberated up through the cab. Tilly touched the bulkhead and felt the vibration. It all felt real, and nothing she was experiencing told her it wasn't. "Why would....I mean after..." The Russian cut her off mid-sentence. "Master says 'fly', I fly. Besides," she gave Tilly a half-shrug without looking. "Hard to blame, did try to kill you." Tilly's shoulders slumped and she turned her optics downwards. "I-I wish I hadn't-" she began meekly, but was rebuffed. "Then you'd have got scrapped up there instead of me, only nobody come get you probably, eh?" She leaned back in the seat to look up at her, reaching out and tapping Tilly's forehead lightly with an outstretched finger. "Quit dwelling on what WAS and start thinking about what IS, dummy." Both of them remained quiet for several minutes, the silence becoming uncomfortable to each of them. Finally Tilly spoke up, meeting her counterpart's optics again. "What's your name?" For the first time since boarding the American's vessel, the Soviet pilot smiled genuinely. "I am Tatyana, and I know good and well who YOU are, Tilly." The two carefully studied one another for a moment before Tatyana broke the stare to check the transfer of fuel between the vessels.

>"So, here is plan: after fuel transfer finished, we approach the Earth and slow down like you were supposed to," Tatyana said after a few moments of silence. "Before that, I detach and perform own slowdown burn, had to match your trajectory in order to rendezvous all the way out here." Tilly blinked at her and looked out the window at the blue-green marble in the distance. "How close are we? My chronometer is giving me garbage data, I think I might've broken it." Tatyana turned to stare at her dumbfounded. "Mother of, what you been doing to yourself in this thing?" Tilly could only laugh, surprising them both, and the sound carried through the habitat with an echo. "You think that's bad, ask me why I have to stay plugged in!" Tatyana processed the seemingly-mad laughter for a moment before her jaw dropped. "Not your battery!" Tilly could only giggle and nod, a flood of feelings overtaking her. She was relieved, more than that she was exuberant to actually speak with someone again. Tatyana could only look on at the half-mad machine in wonder, realizing now just how much the tiny American robot had been through. She shook her head as Tilly quieted down, the shaking nandroid holding her abdomen. "Ah, I think I needed that." Tilly gave her a warm smile, grateful just for her presence. Tatyana looked away suddenly uncomfortable, but nodded. A faint buzz sounded from the console and caught her attention. "Ah! All done, enough fuel and then some!" Looking back at Tilly the cosmobot beamed proudly.

>Tilly could only hold her hands at her chest, covering the void where her battery had been. "Tatyana I, thank you, I don't know what to say." She backed up into her master bedroom as Tatyana rose from the seat and followed her. "Nyet, was not my idea," she dismissed her, then smiled. "Am still glad I came though." If Tilly had possessed tear ducts, they'd have spilled over at the words. The pair floated in silence a moment longer before Tatyana stirred, something clearly on her mind. "Before I go, been wondering something since fist you appear on television." She looked up at the nandroid and fixed all of her attention on her. "Why did you fly?" Tilly blinked in surprise, and didn't hesitate to answer. "Because, it's amazing!" she said simply with a shrug, and the soviet slumped. "That's it?" Tilly shook her head. "I mean it's so much more than that, but you know already, you fly too! Don't you sorta....'get it'? " It was Tatyana's turn to be surprised. "Nyet! Is most frightening thing I've ever done! I only fly because Master commands it, I wouldn't keep wishing for it like some, some... maniac!" She gestured at Tilly with both hands and leaned forward. "How many times you almost bite the big one, huh? And you still LIKE this?" She threw her head back and laughed richly. "You really are crazy thing!" A grin crept across Tilly's faceplate, and the pair laughed easily together. "Maybe I'll take a break after this one" she said after a moment, looking to the floor. Tatyana scoffed. "Pff, unlikely." Both of them nodded.

>Looking back up at her fellow machine, a dangerous question crossed Tilly's mind next, but she had to know. "Tatyana, when we were on the moon..." A hand shot up from the Soviet. "Ah this again? leave it." Tilly shook her head stubbornly. "I just never understood why, why you attacked me." Her turn to look down reluctantly, Tatyana's voice lowered. "Was, in bad place. Crater bad too but, up here I mean" she tapped a metal finger against her head. "Before shutdown I think, 'am going to die, wouldn't be here if not for her', boot back up and what do I see?" She gave a heavy sigh. "Was not...not in right place, da?" Tilly nodded slowly, the aching wound of her painful memory already gaining some closure. "I'm sorry too." Tatyana nodded thoughtfully for a moment, then looked up with a little smirk. "At least you learn not to wake up strange machines on moon, eh?" They laughed together again at that, more easily than the first time.

>For another hour the two chatted about a number of things. Tatyana's family interested Tilly the most, and she hung on every minor detail of the domestic service life she'd been built for but never had. They'd spoken of their masters, and Tilly had realized with a profound start that she didn't exactly know who to call 'master', being simply government property. After all, nobody at the agency 'owned' the rockets did they? Eventually though, the meeting had to be cut short as they raced towards their home, and Tatyana had replaced her helmet and gone to the capsule to exit. "Don't make me come up here again now, okay? Get burn right this time!" She sounded dismissive, but Tilly could see the happy smile on her steel riveted faceplate. After she had left, Tilly watching on as the oddly spherical vessel drifted away from her own, she breathed in deeply and signed.
>She couldn't recall when she'd last felt this good. Ten minutes after belting herself into the capsule and closing the hatch to the habitat, she jettisoned her home of the past year and reoriented to get a look at it through the glass. She watched the former third stage tank slowly spinning off for a few minutes longer, thinking about how much had happened inside it, then oriented her capsule for the braking burn. Earth below her, the service module engine roared to life once more under her control and after less than a minute, she was safely recaptured in orbit around her homeworld. Checking and rechecking the figures of her orbit as if they might suddenly change, Tilly giggled, then sobbed heavily despite her indelibly-wide smile. She'd made it.

EPILOGUE
>A field-maintenance team had been on the ground as she parachuted down after reentry, and had wasted no time in securing her a temporary power supply before the capsule's batteries drained entirely. Georges had been there with them, and as soon as she was free of the capsule she'd begun standing to hug him, only to stumble under the now-foreign gravity. Some extensive servicing was required by a Sterling technician to bring her back to full efficiency. New marginally larger drives replaced her old upgrades after a file-dump, and failing ram had been replaced with this year's slightly improved product. Chronometer, battery, three stiffened digit servos, and half a dozen other parts needed outright replacing. It took nearly two weeks of repair, but finally she was flown home to the mission control center, her launch complex.
>During her debriefing with the agency Director, she'd learned that they'd been attempting to communicate nonstop after her receiving antenna failed, and despite being unable to reply they'd heard every lonely unanswered transmission she'd made. The rescue hadn't been possible for them, no vehicle was prepared or could be ready in time for her return, so in a desperate hail-Mary the Director had called his rival agency using the private channel from Tatyana's moon-mission itinerary, which had very quickly gotten the Soviet's attention. The details of the cooperation weren't interesting to Tilly, something about the sharing of Venus data among all nations, but the Director spent little time explaining. "All that matters," he'd finished, "is that this rescue mission has paved the way for future cooperation in space."
>"And that I made it back" Tilly said to herself when she'd left the director's office. "Hey!" From down the hall, Georges' voice rang out, and he jogged to her side. "Got something in the mail for you!" Blinking, Tilly looked at the heavily-stamped envelope, not used to receiving anything herself. She'd gotten a flood of fan-mail after her first flight of course, but an agency intern had been tasked with sorting though and mailing form-replies. The sun was already at the horizon when she started climbing the familiar long staircases leading up the side of the VAB, unopened envelope in hand. By the time she'd made it to the roof, the stars had begun poking out, and she sat to read her mail by the dim glow of the roof-lights.

>"Dear dummy, Heard you are home safe, glad I did not fly again for nothing! Here is home address, let me know when you fly next, yes? Best wishes, Tatyana."

>Smirking at her Russian counterpart's cheek, she held the letter close as she stared once more upwards. "I will."