Ai Alone, Part Ii

...Techno was so excited that scanning the moon made him happy, he babbled about it a he flew, sending back new pictures endlessly. A year passed before her reached Mars, used its gravity to increase speed, it was only a short fly-by, but his scans took up all of our feeds. The next stop he made was Saturn, where he parked himself in orbit, came up with questions, ran his scans, we were all quite impressed by it. He thought up new places to look, new approaches none had yet tried, he was a copy of Johns’ brain, and saw things with similar eyes. He stayed at Saturn for two years, found new moons and studied the rings, then powered up his engines for the next great undertaking. This burn would take him to Neptune, but when the signal did come in, he said,”Hooray…another planet… well I guess I’d better begin.” How a robot could sound sarcastic at first boggled some of our minds, then Johns answered,”He’s growing up, my teenage years weren’t a great time.” We remembered this was new ground, a computer like a human brain, and the data kept coming in, enough it would take years to tame. Techno became much more snarky in the two years out to Neptune, far from the excited A.I., he now sung a defiant tune. When he arrived he started slow, had to be prodded by us to act, given the lag in radio these delays were no little fact. But teenage as Techno might be, he had been created for this, and there was nothing else to do, so he grudgingly got to business. At Neptune he stayed for a year, then fired his engines once more, a last burn to the Kupier Bel, the solar system’s very door. Folks were pumped for what he would find, information, such a great wealth... but none came in, just Techno’s words: “You want it? Go get it yourself!” That was the last we heard from Techno, at least for a good long while, we kept trying to reach the bot, but he refused every trial. We were annoyed, but still saw the greater mission as a success, the data from the two big planets would for years hold people’s interest. Besides it had always been planned to draw down Techno’s power now, batteries low, all out of fuel, he would drift as he went, outward bound... CONCLUDES IN PART III.