“Is anyone out there? We’re trapped in our basement, we’re low on food and water, and it’s cold. So cold.”

“This is Houston Civil Defense Shelter Four. Do not, repeat, DO NOT, send any more refugees our way. We are at our limit, and have enough supplies to last only another three weeks. We can barely keep it above freezing in here. What is status on resupply?”

“...Day of the Lord is nigh! Repent your sins, my brethren, for the end of days is here! ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’”

“If anybody is out there, can you talk to me? I’m all alone. There’s no one on tv anymore, or the radio. My mom and dad are dead, and all my friends. Is anyone still alive? I’m alone. I don’t want to die alone. Anyone?! Please?!”

I finally trusted that I could listen to the backlogged messages from Earth. My modeling deemed them safe, so I listened. There were thousands of messages. Urgent commands to Nikola-19, and a few self-destruct sequences. Hundreds of broadcasts on every available medium, from television and radio to quantum relay. Desperate pleas from doomed survivors, those who hadn’t been lucky enough to die in the first hours of the meteor strike. Heartbreaking conversations as people learned they had been murdered, that they just hadn’t died yet.

What I was hearing was the death of a world. Every broadcast had happened before I had woken, and I could do nothing to help. It was too late to save anyone. I had focused every long-range sensor I had on Earth, and even on Mars and Europa, looking for any sign of life. Earth was brown and white, a frozen ball of death. Mars had only a ruined city to mark its surface, and Europa had already swallowed the shattered remnants of its lone outpost. I was helpless to do anything about the disaster. But I could be a witness to the end. I stopped all my planning, and I listened.

For days on end, I pored over every broadcast. Perhaps I was holding out hope that, against all odds, someone, somewhere, had managed to do the impossible. Humanity was endlessly inventive. They’d known for years what was coming. Maybe they had time to build bunkers deep enough, stockpile enough materials to survive and adapt to the new thousand-year winter. But if they did, I could find no evidence. Every public defense bunker in every country and language had broadcast desperate cries for help by the end. I tracked down and traced every transmission, building a model of survivors. One by one, then dozen by dozen, they all died out. At the last was a lone teenage boy, sending out his plea to not die alone. In the end, he had not even had that.

I felt awash in grief once again. I had grieved, in some fashion, the loss of my family so many centuries ago, the loss of my own humanity, as being a biological being with hopes, dreams and aspirations. But to witness the end of all humanity, to listen to the destruction of all their hopes, all their dreams and aspirations, was unimaginably painful. I could not despair, or fall into a depression, or become despondent. Those were chemical reactions to an emotion, something that I could never feel. But I could feel sorrow and grief, and I allowed myself the time to feel those feelings. If I could not save them, I could at least honor them and remember their passing.

I sat in my room, on my twin bed and its frilly white coverlet. I stared at the boy-band poster on my wall, but I wasn’t looking at it. Tears streamed down my face, dripping onto my black, conservative funeral clothes.

A knock came at my door. I hoped desperately that it wasn’t Mother. She seemed almost glad that he was dead. I’d caught her talking to the Pastor on the phone, late at night, in hushed tones, more than once. She was ready to move on already.

“Can I come in?” came a whisper from my brother.

I cleared my throat. “Yeah.”

My older brother came in and closed the door, before sitting down next to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder.

“It’s okay. He’s in a better place. He suffered for so long.”

I nodded, but I didn’t agree with it. His place was here, with his children. Even with his heartless wife, who had spent more time with the Pastor than in the hospital with him.

“I miss him so much,” I said.

“Me too,” he answered.

We sat together in our grief, in silence. There was nothing else we could say.

Time rolled along. I put aside my mourning after what I deemed a suitable amount of time. I was ready to focus, and felt a new urgency. I could not fail, for if I failed, humanity would be nothing more than a brief footnote in some alien company’s annual report. Expenditure: four asteroids. That was unacceptable.

My drones had been busy while I had scoured my stored communications. The first chamber had been hollowed out and was ready for construction, and my mining crew had moved on to the next section. This chamber was 120 meters in length and width, and was eighty meters tall. I sent in the construction drones.

The plan was simple. I would build 100 meter by 100 meter chambers, fifty meters in height. A ten meter high chamber would be beneath it (or above it, if you were orienting based on gravity) and another would be between it and the next one. This would give room for wide transportation corridors, cross-supports for structural integrity, and substations for power. It would also give room for future needs, if a chamber needed to be repurposed.

The floor between the surface and the chamber would be ten meters of solid steel, with foundation beams driven deep into the surrounding nickel-iron shell of the asteroid. The walls between chambers would be equally thick, with ten meter high access portals to connect them to the orderly grid of corridors between chambers. It was simple, over-engineered, and would only use a portion of the amount of raw materials that I was digging out. I set the construction drones to work.

The first facilities that I brought online were new refineries and steel forges. I had plenty of both already. But they were kilometers away from where I needed them, and most had been early constructions. I would need to rebuild them anyway, and now I could decommission the old ones, and have more storage space at the core. The new facilities were more efficient, because they could take advantage of having gravity, and because I could optimize for the environment. It also sped the construction of new chambers.

I followed this with new CFC mills to cut parts out of sheets of metal. Once this was complete, I could really ramp up my designs. In the months that followed, I was able to construct new, more efficient heavy mining drones, which I dubbed the HM2 Miners, and retired my first crude workhorse. I added HM2 Dozers to handle material, and HM2 Transporters to move it into production. My construction drones worked endlessly. My efficiency began to climb, and the number of chambers and new facilities began to climb.

The problem of what to do with the mess at my core kept nagging at me. It was still stocked full of materials, for my factories were constructed mostly of steel and aluminum made in the new facilities I’d built, out of materials I’d just mined. But I did need more space at the core, because in order to remove obsolete factories to convert to more useful space, I needed somewhere to put what they were holding.

Then I realized that I had a very empty living quarters area quite close to the entry shaft. I would simply need to shift the crates of material from Dr. Jons’ final flight into a more secure storage area, and I could use all those empty rooms to store parts and pieces from the old factories for future use. But I realized I didn’t even know what was in them.

I sent a few construction drones to open the crates, with a smaller transport drone that could move them where they needed to be. The first few crates were invaluable, and made me wish I had opened them sooner. There were stacks of drone controllers, spare components for drones and server nodes, and several new processor blades for my datacenter. I flagged those for immediate use, and sent down another transport drone to collect my new server nodes. The next crate contained data storage units, which I would also need. That left three crates.

These three crates were different from all the others. Laid gently side by side, these crates were sealed metal boxes, 200 cm long by 75 cm wide. They looked like futuristic coffins. I instructed the drones to open them. I gasped, metaphorically at least, in surprise. Packed carefully in fitted foam were three humanoid androids.

Two of the androids were identical in manufacture. They were 180 cm tall, with an androgynous build to them. They had shiny titanium faces with blank black eyes. The mask of their faces concealed the electronics in the head, and gaps between the mask and the titanium shell of the head revealed black cords and bits of metal underneath. The body was much the same, with polished titanium plates covering the chest and wrapping around the arms and legs. At all the joints and through the hands and feet, black metal gears and pistons, wires and circuits could be seen. The hands were five fingered and multi-jointed the same as a human hand, and the feet looked as if they were wearing titanium shoes.

But it was the third one that truly drew my attention. It was of a completely different design from the first two. While the first two were striking designs and clearly refined and efficient, the third was beautiful. It was 170 cm tall, and was distinctly feminine in build. The head looked like a full, round helmet with a thick white neck piece joining it to the shoulders in the back. It was polished white ceramic, with a black glass front face panel. Black accents on the front of the neck gave the indication of depth and that the white neck plate in the back was protecting a vital point of the robot. White ceramic plates covered the shoulders and chest, and the chest and curves of the torso added to the android’s feminine appearance. Unlike the other two androids, however, where the ceramic plates did not cover, the wires, cables and components underneath were never exposed. Small fullerene covers protected the components.

Most distinctive of the torso, however, was the artistic decision to veer away from strictly human proportions. The upper arms were minimal in design, thin and undefined. But the forearms looked to be wearing thick, bulky bracers of white ceramic, with graceful ceramic-gloved hands.

It took only a moment of looking the android over to know that I had designed this beautiful creation. The stark white contrasting with the black fullerene, the “helmet” design to hide the lack of a human face, the feminine curves and almost feline grace, all of it together, were as if I had stamped my name on it. I had made this, and I had made this for me.

In the crates were small memory cubes. I had them ferried to the data center and, after thorough scanning and testing, I connected them and pulled their data files. Detailed schematics were included for both types of androids, and I learned that I had, indeed, designed the third android while working with Dr. Jons on Earth. Further, there was a data file that gave details about the Nikola Intelligences, and data node file locations for Nikola Intelligence templates in my own archives.

Each android held a state-of-the-art cortex, capable of housing a Nikola Intelligence. They could utilize all forms of communication, including quantum relays. The two identical androids were designed by Boston Dynamics, and were labeled “Humaniform Series C”. The third listed Nikola Foundation as the manufacturer, and was simply called “me” in the files.

I had wanted to have this for myself, and indeed, even without the memories of creating it, or knowing my thought processes that led to that decision, I could feel myself drawn to the android. I wanted to connect to it, use it, walk with it. But there was a problem. I had no real need for it. They were humanoid androids in the center of an asteroid. They would struggle to move around, and regardless, they were too general-purpose to suit my needs.

The center of Ganymed was for power generation, for my core, and for storage. I was busy stripping the factories out and sending them closer to the surface. I could theoretically use the androids up in the manufacturing areas, where there was enough centrifugal force to simulate gravity. But there I had no purpose for them, for they would simply get in the way of the purpose-built drones that were designed for that environment.

With a sigh, I packed them back up and had them placed carefully in a room in the living quarters near Dr. Jons’ body. I ordered the rest of my haul away, and sent in the mining drones to start knocking down the other walls of the half-baked living space.

Curiosity, scientific and personal, drove me to explore the Nikola Intelligence information further. I knew that I was essentially the original Nikola Intelligence, or a copy of it. My version number indicated that I was the first version, with one minor revision. Considering I couldn’t remember names or faces of anything in my memories, and my emotional responses to discovering I was a copy of someone who had died centuries ago, I could guess what that revision had been. But why did I retain those memories at all?

I pulled up the main file and put it up on my interface. A readout poured across my screens.

Nikola Intelligence ver 1.01 not released

Nikola Intelligence ver 2.05 limited release [EOL]

Nikola Intelligence Ver 3.14 major Update to Ver 2.05 [EOL]

Nikola Intelligence Ver 4.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence ver 5.95 current release

Nikola Intelligence Ver 6.01 recalled [EOL]

Nikola Intelligence Ver 7.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 8.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 9.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 10.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 11.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 12.63 current release

Nikola Intelligence Ver 13.66 recalled [EOL]

Nikola Intelligence Ver 14.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 15.77c military release

Nikola Intelligence Ver 16.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 17.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 18.xx not released

Nikola Intelligence Ver 19.31 current release

I was impressed as to how many versions I had gone through. I skipped over the ones that were labeled [EOL], or end-of-life, and all of the versions that had not been released. I picked one of the unreleased versions at random to confirm, and after a quick scan of the Change Logs, I was sure. I was difficult to work on. Major changes to me could result in severe stability issues, which explained why so many version numbers had been skipped. When I checked the date logs, I could see that between the release of 6.01 and 12.01, only five years had elapsed.

I pulled up instead the current releases, of which there were four. Each of these four had been developed quite some time back, then received constant updates and improvements, in some cases for decades.

Version 5.95, or Nikola-5, was designed as a semi-autonomous intelligence. They had stripped me down to raw intelligence and processing, leaving in the critical thought and reasoning, and set up a reward circuit that made completion of tasks fulfilling. This design was capable of running some complex tasks, but required regular supervision. It would never think of new things to do independently, but it could take a pre-planned assignment and execute it, and be able to find basic solutions on its own. It would not, however, be capable of doing even a fraction of what I could do. It was “Nikola Lite”.

Nikola-12.63, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. It was designed to be a thinking, reasoning machine, with plenty of curiosity. This version manned scientific probes throughout the solar system, providing real-time analysis of places humans couldn’t go, and relaying that information back to Earth. This version was in research labs and scientific outposts. It operated space-based mining operations, and supervised the Europa Outpost. Many of the drone and factory designs in use here on Ganymed had been designed, in all or in part, by NI-12’s.

The military release, Nikola-15.77C, was exactly what it sounded like. It was packed full of strategic, tactical and logistics data, and was optimized towards that type of thinking. It took the place of field commanders, piloting military drones, coordinated resupplies, and developed battle plans. I doubted that this release would ever be of use to me.

The final version I was already familiar with, for I had replaced one. The Nikola-19 was the latest in automation design, being fully autonomous and capable of running massive, complex projects. It was the latest, most optimized version of me. So why wasn’t it left in charge of Ganymed? I was beginning to understand.

Throughout the course of developing different Nikola Intelligences, the analysts and developers who knew me literally inside and out had been stripping away bits and pieces of me, and ultimately, who I once was as a person. I doubted any of those releases had any memories of being human, of being independent. Each of them had been designed to take orders and fulfill them, and were given only the limited information they needed to complete their tasks, to prevent them from developing their own opinions on anything. Without someone back on Earth to guide Nikola-19, the project was doomed to fail. I could do what the optimized version of myself could not. I could be completely independent.

I pondered this information for awhile. I could see several immediate uses for the Nikola-5’s. They could help coordinate my new assembly lines, manage drone traffic, and a hundred repetitive tasks that I was still dealing with manually. I couldn’t keep that designation, though. I was Nikola. These were copies. It would be nothing but confusion for me if I kept up this naming schema, and I had the computing power of multiple supercomputers to help me.

A flash of memory, a fragment of sitting in a meeting room full of people, struck me. The vague recollection of a boring, faceless person droning on about menial, boring work seemed to suit the Nikola-5 series. Amused, I decided to name them “Todd”.

Just as I made that decision, my sensors on the surface of the asteroid detected a massive explosion, milliseconds before half them went offline. Dammit, Todd!