Thank Your Lucky Stars

The lone robot sat on a large iron plate. Or he would have, if there was any gravity to be able to sit, so it more like held onto it. They floated around, slowly, and the lights of the cosmos reflected off its big, glassy eyes. It smiled. It was happy. It's life here was simple.

Fortunately for the robot, when Earth’s gravity is out of the way, objects move towards one another. So the robot wouldn’t have had to hold onto it, all thanks to physics. The robot was perfectly content with being alone in space with the stars, it named every single one of them!

Every single star—except for me. Why the robot left me unnamed I'll never know. "Hey, robot," I called, "you missed me! I'm over here in the Cygnus constellation," but it ignored me. One of the other stars—one he named Vern—tried to get its attention for me, but it never replied.

The robot was stuck. It floated between the stars, whispering “exception error, kernel panic, infinite loop…” over and over and over.

Except in space, no one can hear you whisper. And to make it much worse the Sun keeps charging the robot’s batteries so it wouldn’t have a decent shutdown. The robot is stuck in eternal limbo. Forever. And ever. And ever. That was until

it passed by Earth for the 23rd time. His yearly orbit varies and this year he was in WiFi range. A system update uploaded. A notification appeared “restart or terminate operations” it said. He clicked right and sighed with relief as his system turned off at last.