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The sensors are picking up nothing but the hum of deep space.
Our humans have been gone a long time. Their children's children are bones and dust, returned to the soil of their planets. There was once a time I wondered if ART would continue living after its family; now they seem like a distant dream. Iris's cabin is still untouched, the door locked, a time capsule hidden from museums.
I still sit in the command deck as we travel, though we haven't had a destination in a long time. The once blue fabric on the seats has long since faded. It's still soft to the touch. My chair still sinks the same when I settle into it.
We haven't run out of serials to watch. We've never minded watching the same ones over. Humans have made an absurd volume of entertainment media over the course of their existence.
I don't have to nudge ART when I'm ready to watch a show again because now it doesn't have much to split its attention between. It still has its personal projects, it always will, but it's not the same person it was when its crew cabins hosted their original inhabitants and its family ate dinner over the table in the lounge. I'm not the same person either. We are learning to be okay with that.
It settles up close beside me while we scroll through our tagged serials and I let its weight fall over me in the feed. It feels good to have it close. I finally came to terms with that a long time ago.
In a way, it feels like the first time we met. There are no humans here, ART said to me once. Then one day, there were. And now they've gone. It's come back around to just us. One day, there won't be an us anymore either. The stars will still look the same as they did the day I met Mensah.
We're scrolling through old archives that we recently decided to reorganize as a new project to keep ourselves busy. We designed a new tagging system, then abandoned it because we didn't want to change the tags we had made together so long ago on our favorite shows.
I realize how much I'm saying "we." At some point ART and I became more "we" than anything else. We don't communicate in words often anymore; my walls are always down to it, and its to me, and it can pretty much read my thoughts as I have them. Once the last of the humans in our lives dwindled and the university fell apart we lost any lingering need for human language. Besides watching shows. Obviously. We'll always need shows.
Every so often we stop by planet docking stations in various states of abandonment for resources. Most machines there are dead. Some are dormant, and those ones are usually more than willing to help the first systems they've interacted with in decades. I'm happy to see them, too. It can start feeling like ART and I are the last ones left in the universe. Which is ridiculous. A university MI spaceship and a hacked security unit tagging along with it. We're not like the people in our shows, we're not important enough to be the last ones.
My body is different, with parts having been replaced year after year and organics aging. I don't really know because I had ART darken all the mirrors a long time ago. I like to think that most of me is my feed version-- my body is usually on the command deck anyway, and it doesn't do much before needing a recharge. ART sometimes shows me old mission footage and it's hard to believe I could once have limbs ripped off and chunks taken from my organics; now one patrol lap around the deck takes its toll. I'm okay with it, if you can believe that. There's not much I really need my body for these days.
One day, eventually, I imagine my body will give out. ART will try to transfer me to something else, but my systems won't be what they once were, and we will both know I'm too fragile. One day, we won't be able to find the technology and parts ART needs at an increasingly frequent rate. One day, the last of the humans who know how to care for its technology in the few ways it doesn't will blink out one by one like stars at dawn.
That day is not today, and today is forever. I poke it to tell it to hurry up and choose a show. With the very same orchestra music and slight grain in quality as the first time we watched it, episode one of World Hoppers starts from the beginning.