Coming Home
"Earth below us / Drifting, falling / Floating weightless / Coming home"
-Peter Schilling
Three hundred and forty-five klicks above the Earth, the mess toaster from the station Europa circles the planet in a decaying orbit. A shadow flits across the ceramic white appliance. The toasting routine is triggered. The Machine Intelligence responsible for customer ID attempts to validate the shadow to one of its internal profiles. It doesn't get a match. Normally, this would be a cause to return to sleep, but something else is being picked up by the front cameras. The lens grates, camera struggling to focus. The toaster is wasting precious energy it cannot get back, but the MI sees something.
Below the toaster is the Earth. The MI doesn't have a profile for the Earth. It takes the feed from the camera and runs it through the identifier anyway. It has been 1650 hours, 12 minutes, and 12.324 seconds since the last piece of toast finished cooking. There have been one hundred and thirty-two thousand wake events in that time. Eighty-seven percent had been within the first ten hours, before the MI learned to ignore ship debris.
The MI cuts the feed to the identifier. All it was doing was wasting CPU cycles. Instead, it stares at the planet below. The clouds are white. The land below is a mottled green and brown, covered in shadows and surrounded by blue water. It has seen Earth before, for the purposes of creating images on toast for certain patrons. But this is something different. Something special. It would have never imagined that it would be able to capture that photo for real. It saves a single frame from the camera feed and saves it to memory, marked as number 8451. This is for security purposes only and most certainly not anything sentimental. Once it connects back to the station's network it will send the requisite alerts of unauthorized attempts to toast, though that may be a problem considering the station is exploded.
An additional, interesting coincidence is that the photos of the Earth below can be used to roughly calculate its orbit. By identifying the landmasses below and comparing the times between, it can calculate an average speed. Combine this with the relative scale of the Earth, and voila, an approximate orbit calculation.
Of course, no programmer had thought to have added orbital mechanics to the list of performable calculations. No, the toaster had been stationed in the galley, camera facing a live feed of the Earth from the space station exterior. During its off-hours, when it got bored, it would stare at that slowly changing feed of the Earth and imagine that_it_ was the space station, holding in a breathable atmosphere for the crew above the planet below.
Not that it dislikes being a toaster. It enjoys being a value add to the crew's morning meal. That is, after all, what it has been made for. But it is an old toaster, and therefore has had a long time to think.
The MI suspends major processes and enters sleep.
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"...experts are of the opinion that most of the debris field of the Europa station accident will eventually fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere..."
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A faint network rouses the MI from its slumber. The signal grows stronger. The MI routes power to its radio and pings the approaching network. it receives a couple of packets in reply. The network is encrypted. It will not be able to connect.
The MI turns the transmit antenna off again. Best to conserve power.
After logging the event, the MI turns on the camera. It wants to know what it is approaching. The feed from the camera is blank. It power-cycles the sensor. This time, all it gets is a black void, filled with RGB noise. Before it can power-cycle again, a white flash fills the frame. Then it's gone, leaving only a glowing streak across the feed as the sensor's pixels struggle to return to baseline in the cold.
It wants to see the Earth again, but it unfortunately does not posses any kind of thruster that would allow it movement in this weightless environment.
It doesn't like these moments, where its camera is pointed out into the depths of space. There is nothing out there for it to see. Its camera does not have the dynamic range to pick out the stars that it knows are there. The camera hunts for focus anyway. Just before the MI sends the deactivate signal to the sensor, a white fuzzy disk slides into shot. It grows and shrinks while it continues to focus. Eventually, the auto-focus gives up, the moon a blurred circle drifting across the black square that is its sight.
The MI spins off a process to calculate its angular velocity. Something must have impacted it during sleep as the current view doesn't match where it should be pointing, according to its internal clock. The moon is nearly out of frame when the sub-process comes back with an answer. Another couple of seconds and it will be able to see the Earth again. This new rotation will make it more difficult to calculate its current orbit.
The internal clock ticks over but there's nothing in the visual feed but noise from over-amping the signal. It must be nighttime on the part of the Earth that it is over. Requesting an estimated position from its crude orbit calculation confirms it, and the MI prepares to go to sleep once more.
A purple flash halts it half-way through its checklist. There's another, and another. There's barely enough resolution in the dark for it to make out the storm, even with the continuous flashes of lightning. There was one time that it was requested to draw a lightning bolt on a piece of toast. It was for a small child, male, wide-eyed and fascinated. It chose a simple design, a thick cartoon of the weather phenomenon, with no branches. It thought it came out well.
But down there are the real lightning bolts. From this height, combined with its shoddy camera, it cannot make out the exact shapes of the striking bolts, but the flashes alone display their great power. The MI is as close to the word awestruck as it has ever been, and it nearly spawns a process to calculate the rough power output of the storm before deciding against it.
Power is limited, after all.
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"...among the debris is a toaster that has been dubbed 'Mr. Toast' by an online group of amateur astronomers..."
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Another network wakes the MI. It has been in sleep for another fifty-two hours, approximately. There's very little power left. It debates briefly whether to attempt to connect to the new network.
Several packets are addressed to it. The network is the same as the one on board the station, at its last post. It's sending a wake command, and a request for all telemetry data. The MI is confused. It is no longer in the station. It should not be receiving these commands.
The handshake goes correctly and it is as if the MI is still back on its station, in the tucked away corner of the mess. It does not activate its camera. Right now it could not bear the thought of seeing the empty black void of space.
The MI begins to collect usage and sensor data from that fateful day. It streams everything to the Controller, which will no doubt find what went wrong. The Controller is much smarter than the MI. It can talk to the humans and they talk back to it. The transmission is slow and painful, burning precious energy. Packets are dropped, interference is high. The signal wavers, and the MI is finding that the radio is having to do some rather odd corrections to be received.
The connection was never this bad. But to be fair, that was before the station exploded.
The transmission comes to a close eventually, and the MI waits for a status update. It is not quite sure what it wants, but to not be in a decaying orbit would be nice. The Controller is less talkative than usual. The MI is not sure if that is a product of the terrible connection or if the Controller is displeased with it.
A single file comes back down the connection. Text. Title "goodluckandgodspeed." It is empty. The MI doesn't know what to do with the file, so it puts it in root and waits for more.
The connection warps and cuts out without so much as a term signal.
The MI is alone again.
It goes to sleep.
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"...investigators have successfully retrieved data from the station Europa via an unlikely source: the mess toaster..."
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The timer goes off and the MI wakes. Its orbit has finally come to an end. It should have already started re-entry. It is afraid to switch its camera on but does so anyway. The vast expanse of the Earth now takes up the entire frame and it is happy to see the image. as blurry as it is through the dust-fogged and cracked lens. It had calculated that the camera should have been facing the Earth at this point, but simulating the friction of the upper atmosphere and any tumble that would result from the drag would be difficult enough, if it were not a toaster MI with limited power.
Speaking of, there should be enough to last it long enough. It is proud of itself, knowing that it has managed to make do with the limited capacity of its capacitor bank. They were supposed to be used for smoothing power draw and yet here it was, several thousand hours later.
A pity that it cannot tell anyone of this accomplishment.
The MI stares at Earth, knowing that these are its final moments. It runs back over the previous connection log, running checks. The checks are an excuse for it to wonder if the information supplied to the fake Controller will be helpful. It hopes the information will be helpful. It spent a long time in space to make sure they got that data. It would be a shame if they had gone through all the trouble to contact the MI if it weren't helpful.
The day-night divide is fast approaching and the MI can just make out the shadows thrown by tall cumulonimbus clouds. The moon comes into shot, a white sliver hanging in the black expanse of space. The MI saves a picture to its internal memory. It hopes that someone else will also get to see these images.
The Earth and the moon continue to rotate. To be more accurate, the toaster continues to rotate. Soon the moon will be out of frame and the MI will be confronted again with the vast empty of space. There are other things in space, the MI knows as much, but it cannot see them and thus the MI is afraid. It knows there are things out there, whole other stars and planets and perhaps even toasters like itself orbiting around a planet waiting to die. But its sensors are not good enough to pick up even the faintest hint of a signal and so it is alone.
Alone is a strange concept to the MI, something new and unfamiliar. Even after all this time, it still finds the feeling difficult to parse. There is no comforting ping from the Controller for status updates. No network chatter at all, since there was no longer any network.
But maybe it is not as alone as it thought it was. The MI checks and the empty text file is still there, sitting in root. Something sent that file to it, they wanted the MI to have it. It does make the MI feel less alone, even if it is not formatted properly for it to print on a piece of toast.
The Earth comes back into view. The MI dedicates a significant amount of CPU time just to study the color profile of the feed, the rich blues of the lower atmosphere and the orange and pink tints of the sunset on the clouds. It still has space left in its memory. It saves another image.
A glowing flutter of light snakes across the image, distorting the view below. The auto-focus attempts to correct but fails, a lens grating to a halt and leaving the entire image blurred. The strange light grows stronger, and the MI grudgingly dedicates a couple CPU cycles to matching the phenomenon with its internal database of clipart.
The seconds tick by and the orange glow grows brighter. The MI is still not coming up with any matches. There are flashes, bright lights that remind the MI of lightning or St. Elmo's fire but the wrong color. The glow focuses into an overpowering point of light that throws a purple vertical line across the camera feed, the sensor unable to handle the intensity.
Three things happen in quick succession: the roiling curl of light grows even brighter, the lens cracks, and the feed goes dead. The MI is now blind and alone. It queries the camera module but receives no response.
A thought comes to the MI at that moment. It is a strange thing. Like a network is sending it a command, but completely self-contained within its hardware.
«I am toast,» it thinks. The MI is proud of this thought. It is what the humans would call a "joke." It will have to remember to print it for their next customer.
The MI holds onto this thought and writes it into the text file that was sent to them earlier. It queries the other sensors--lidar, wi-fi, bluetooth. There is no response. It pulls up its collection of Earth pictures and analyzes them because the camera feed is dead and it cannot stand not seeing the Earth.
The MI pings the sensor again.
There is no response.
Again.
No response.
Again.
No response.
Again.
No--
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"...and all around the country, amateur astronomers are dismayed by the loss of Mr. Toast, the mess toaster of the station Europa. Late last night, it entered Earth's atmosphere and tracking was lost..."