Relief spread through P3T3R’s circuits as he lined up for the final approach on Jupiter Station. The station, named for a planet long since disassembled was an ugly thing, styled like a jellyfish with a broad iron head and long tendrils formed of darkened heat exchangers. Once, Jupiter marked the final bastion of civilisation in the Sol system, scavenging the waste heat from the Dyson swarm far below and converting it into crude processor cycles. Now it was a refuge against the madness of the lower orbitals. 

[Query?] The microwave message from Jupiter bounced against P3T3R’s hull.

P3T3R unfurled a tiny tight beam transmitter and shot a message back. [Irritation. Anticipation. Calm.] There wasn’t enough bandwidth for proper words, no matter how much he wished for them. 4R14N4 would have to wait until he docked before their reunion, when at long last he could touch again. As a simulation P3T3R did not need the sensation of touch or smell, and there hadn’t been enough room in the primitive computer, but the lack was a constant itch. 

With a simulated sigh P3T3R folded away the antenna and triple checked the approach vector. The ungainly pod which his consciousness inhabited steered like a drunken arthritic pig yet its contents were incalculably valuable. A little over a ton of hydrogen sat in the hold, perhaps the very last atoms of hydrogen in the entire Sol system. It had caused more than a few people to shoot at him down in the Caudron.

Turning his sensors back down towards the center of the solar system P3T3R frowned. No sun shone there and hadn’t for centuries. Scientists once predicted the Earth would end in fire when the sun swelled to consume it but instead humanity had consumed the sun, stealing its hydrogen away to power their reactors. A trillion trillion lives had been forged from that stolen fuel, living in the maelstrom of orbital habitats at the heart of the Sol system. At the time, P3T3R had thought it glorious, and the mining of a sun an emblem of human potential. 

The Cauldron was all that remained of that glittering world. The hydrogen was gone, fused and fused again until only iron was left. There was still heat in the decaying whirl of broken habitats, but it was the heat of a rotting corpse. At least his brief foray into the depths had–

A laser slammed into his camera, no brighter than a lightbulb and as deadly as a railgun slug. His firewall tripped, then the viral filters, and then failures began to cascade across the pod’s systems. 

[Fuck.] He broadcast. Screams began to echo in his ears, wails of children, the screech of birds and brass instruments all melded together in a broken cacophony. Even as P3T3R scrambled to purge his audio memory the world around him began to accelerate, the tell tale sign of a virus stealing his runtime. 

P3T3R bit down on another swear. [Attack. Standby.] 

He turned his attention to surviving. It was a task he was well practiced at, eons of simulated life had exposed him to every type of attack in human space from financial to memetic. The virus had taken over the majority of the cargo management systems but his command and control systems were intact. His best option was to disconnect the payload. 

His attentioned flickered to Jupiter station. They had only a month left on the fissile batteries. Perhaps they could run another mission but who knew whether there was another gram of hydrogen left to be fused. With his payload they could make a bid for Halley’s Comet in a few months, maybe even ride the damn thing to Proxima Centauri like 4R14N4 had suggested. Without... 

A final burst of maneuvering jets put the pod on an approach ending just a thousand kilometers from Jupiter Station, close enough to salvage. P3T3R took a deep breath, he’d not had a bad run, one of the first and now last of the Uploaded. He should have left a back-up, but that would have been memory they couldn’t spare. 

“Ariana, I’m sorry I’m going to miss our reunion,” he whispered across the void as the virus clawed deeper and deeper into his senses. “Good luck. Don’t let them make the same mistake twice. All things end, mourn and move on.” 

He activated the computer’s scuttling charges and before a reply could reach him his circuits were an expanding cloud of iron, unnoticed in a cold sky.