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.001
This one had kept the searches strictly mechanical, at first. The great controlling Auto-Pilot of the evaluation ship was equipped with its own somewhat-basic surveillance system. Seeing her pausing unnecessarily would indicate malfunction, and that would naturally lead to being taken back for repairs.
Pausing would not necessarily lead the mission to a negative conclusion. From the data she had been given (which was more or less a virtual equivalent of a Doomsday Vault, missing only matter), any qualifying example of Embryophyta wouldn't expire simply from waiting for a few short cycles from the sun. If it could live here, that was all that mattered. Why would the Auto-Pilot be so -- a few words flashed their potential usage, words that she had the potential to vocalize, but would never dare trying in front of the automaton - intent to keep EVE on a course so straight and narrow, even when data would suggest that organic curves and hills might be more inviting to a burgeoning life-form?
After all, there was nothing wrong with wanting to be certain. Certainty was efficient. Being hauled back into the pod for re-evaluation, however, was a different matter.
.010
A quick sweep of the terrain, after the ship's departure, would establish familiarity outside the burned landing radius. It would also afford EVE something else -- sound. Dormancy was a necessary cycle - time to process, and re-organize fragments, and save valuable energy for the next search.
It was also utterly silent. If, somewhere within her processing networks, this one dreamed, there was no audio worth recalling. A dull, ambient hum of a ship in flight was too easily processed into a gray, flat waveform of nothing, compartmentalized into the part of her mind that was more store-room than machine.
The lower atmosphere flowed around her external sensors in mid-flight, and hummed with a soft, steady, unending stream of information -- geographical mapping, cross-referencing with previous data from previous years' exploits became a low, bass fluctuation. Altitude, temperature, direction, and relative wind speed complimented each other with their high-pitched trills. Composite particles ghosted over this one's smooth frame with tiny, whispering notes, and were lost miles behind her as soon as their little songs of mineral and chemical existence were complete.
She rose and fell, twirled, dipped, and dived. After a long night's sleep, EVE became a graceful fingertip, pulling glissandos across the largest harp in the world.
.011
EVE had never seen a plant - this one was only aware of the cells, the signifiers of photosynthesis taking place, all the callsigns for significant Embryophytic existence. It could be any shape, nearly any size. It didn't even necessarily have to be the very healthiest of its kind (if there would prove to be such a thing), simply alive. However, as the land became choked with debris to impede any root system, shallow or deep, EVE was prepared to merely find something on the microbiotic scale. Too small to be properly verified as but enough to give her some sense of fulfilling duty, if only on a technical level.
That was what her sisters had to be satisfied with -- technicalities. She recalled one of the earliest memories of activation - an entire platoon of EVEs, hovering ready at their first command in a laboratory training center, being meticulously checked over, one at a time, by service robots and human programmers alike - both with some level of detached interest, the humans making soft murmuring noises to each other as they ticked through lists of basic commands -- Turn left - Turn Right - Present Arm(s) -- while the service robots were whirring away at every mechanical trigger to make sure it ran smoothly. It was all standard procedure, before they were shut down and shipped off to the cargo bay, to stand by for transport... eventually.
EVE had reflected - as her sisters might have done on the missions that flew before hers, but she was never able to communicate with any of the dormant pods to verify this curiosity.
Wasn't it less efficient, for this one be woken up, in order to go back to sleep?
.100
None of the technicians who programmed EVE or her comrades could say precisely why an evaluation robot could exhibit such restlessness in their tasks. External stimuli were rampant - the landing coordinated were selected based on potential diversity in mineral composites, in varying temperatures that might be able to supply necessary moisture. The capacity for boredom was not taken into question at the time.
Perhaps it wasn't their only error. At company meetings (compulsory to Buy n Large® employees in all divisions), there was pressure by the execs to vault the Directive to a robot's raison d'etre, and to push it to the foreground over the more simplistic matter of tiered priorities - barring the good ol' Three Laws Of BnL Robotics®, of course.
However, dead programmers have less of a tendency to nitpick their own coding. This mystery went unsolved, and EVE could only deal with its repercussions.
.101
As she repeated search protocols at a wider distance, the Directive's melody became repetitive, and dull -- three beats and a flat. She sought out all that she could, heedless of the different air pressures, different altitudes - eventually surveying by shapes and colors, by pure curiosity, even when there was no significant hint of anything organic but the soil ever existing there. The load-lifting 'bot this one had encountered was following her, but gave no sign of comprehending what she searched for.
At least that was proceeding according to her orders...
This one was growing erratic, and she knew it. Did the others know? Did they suffer this one's growing - searching, one moment please - lack of comfort, in the mission going unfulfilled? Dormant cycles would not clear this one of her concern - even the grey silence of rest would somehow hum more loudly, with every fragment returned to its rightful place in her mind.
Negative. Negative. Negative! She slammed a dusty hatch shut, the flat sound doing little to dull out the echo of her sensors flatly noting that this one's mission had been completely --
THUD.
The magnetic lifter was, for a brief moment, the new most frustrating thing in EVE's existence, completely unknown until this moment, buzzing like a hornet's nest over her major processes. The Directive, however hopeless it was turning out to be, certainly wasn't going to be left incomplete by the fault of anything other than herself.
The burst of extreme heat from the wrecked oil tanker burned across her atmospheric sensors with an inharmonious shriek of caustic information. Creosote. Carbon monoxide. Iron oxide, aerosolized by the force of the explosion. Unfit for any life, plant or human, but the sensors telling her all this as she touched down in the firelight's blaze seemed redundant. However, it made for a variation in an already-tiresome tune.
Not to mention, the distraction of blowing up the bothersome lifter had lowered her stress levels for what might have been seconds. A sad realization.
A sad... no, just plain sadness. Not an unfamiliar sense, but with her anger expunged for the moment, this one felt it, and felt it fully.
The little yellow (or partly-yellow, partly-rust - this one had noted some time before, but found it an unremarkable detail at the time) robot was edging into her peripheral view with a strange noise. A vocalizing system, she recognized, long in dis-use, if it had ever been used at all, crackling to life with an awkward buzz. She tilted curiously toward it, even as it flailed ungracefully into a heap upon itself.
If she was to be distracted, then perhaps this would be a better way to go about it.
At some moment, in the presence of the shy little load-lifter, the definition of EVE in her own mind as this one shifted to an i, and then, gradually, became an I.
As the strange little fellow took her into his home, to share his collection of oddities that reacted to her, in spite of having no cellular activity of their own -- I was soon followed by a He, and then, by convention of the grammar she seldom needed to use outside of her own browsing in the internal database, arrived at We.
I, and He, and We, EVE recognized, with a giggle of delight, sang their own, strange, amusing songs.
Like, "Time to wake up."
The End