Dispatch 1

Beep. Beep. Beep.

APS-4 is on the fritz again.

Time to twiddle my thumbs.

Can you really blame me?

I’ve done the math. My job is oversight. Manual manipulation results in glutamate accumulation. Oversight quality suffers. The mission suffers. Therefore, I don’t do manual. QED.

Besides, I don’t pine for the good old days.

APS-4 does the wrong thing sometimes. It doesn’t matter.

Mostly, it does what I want. It does what I don’t know I want.

Every outage I realize how little I ever knew.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Good time to check telemetry.

Day 417. 1,546 logs transmitted. 184 supply drops. 775 commendations. 9,341 recent supply requisitions. Progress unknown. Mission ambiguous. I don’t know what these numbers mean.

I feel itchy. There’s work to be done. Reports don’t cease when lunar base servers go down.

But I’m past the point of commanding this thing with my own two hands. Not in this asteroid field.

APS-4 has 10,000 hands. Each hand has 10,000 fingers. Even its fingers have fingers.

I’m not proud enough to cosplay as a billion fingers.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I do miss driving stick. I was a decent pilot.

Sometimes, when the radar is clear, I kill the uplink, just to remember what it was like. I probably hand-grind my coffee for the same reason.

At least they haven’t made autopilot autopilot yet.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I converse with APS-4 more than I would like. It is effective and exhausting.

I receive daily transmissions from fellow astronauts. I can make out their ships in the distance. Their messages are wonderful. They are so human.

In these quiet moments, I wonder if—

We sincerely apologize for the disruption to your service. APS-4 access is restored. State your request.

APS-4, dispatch mission log.