adrift
a small horror snippet of a synth lost in space
The cosmos was a large, empty place. One had to keep their wits about them in order to survive. Unfortunately, wits were rather hard to come by nowadays. He'd spent the last... he didn't know how long, adrift. Floating through space, with only his own mind for company.
He wasn't sure how he was still alive. He hadn't encountered another living being in eons. Nor had he really eaten anything in that long. There were times when he'd wake amidst the wreckage of a large ship though. He never could figure out why. How had the ship been destroyed? How had he gotten here? Why was there never anyone in the ship? Not even corpses?
It was all... muddled. Memories of anything other than drifting were hard to come by. He thought he'd had a life before this, but what it was, he couldn't be sure. He... wasn't even sure what his name had been. All he knew now was the drifting, and the endless void.
He'd often wondered about how he'd survived this long. In the rare moments of clarity he fought with the impossibility of his survival. He should have degraded long ago, but his nanites were still going strong. As far as he knew, he had never ingested enough for them to work with, so where did they get the materials to keep him going? And how had he not run low on energy by now? His solar panels were still operational, sure, but they were never intended to be his main power supply.
It was all a big mystery to him. Even sleep had become erratic and unpredictable, to the point of being something he no longer had control over. There were moments when he simply lost consciousness and then awoke somewhere completely different. He looked forward to his naps though, as waking from them brought clarity, though it never lasted long. Within an hour he was back to the vegetative drifter once again. He occasionally thought to try and prolong the clarity, but nothing ever really did.
The ships though, when he awoke in them the time of clarity was always filled with a feeling of dread. Was it the fact that no organic life was left within them, or was it the way that the hulls had been torn and shredded? He never could truly tell, or so he told himself.
There was always that small part in the back of his mind that couldn't acknowledge the taste of carbon, steel, and blood upon his lips every time.