Designation Eighteen : Part 1.

Its been about 25 years since I did any fictional writing. Someone mentioned I should give it a go. I love reading sci-fi but writing has never been my thing so I am way out of my comfort zone posting this.

I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions.

---

My designation is Eighteen. None of us is sure where our designations came from or why they (whoever "they" are) chose such a strange location to imprint us with them. We don't have buttocks per-se, but if we did, this would give a good visual representation as to where those designations are stamped. My full designation is:

ՎՃՇ18ɧՌԺƙρ

All twenty-three of us have the same symbolic pattern, the only difference between us being the centermost digits. Fifteen has his theories on what the symbols mean but, to be honest, the rest of us get annoyed with his constant ramblings about it. It often seems like he has some kind of synthetic insanity kicking in. He's a bloody lunatic. It's hardly surprising I guess, considering how long we have been here. From our calculations, we have orbited this binary star system thirty-seven times.

We have named this rock on which we reside, "Akpan-273". That's something that Eight came up with out of the blue. Personally, I didn't see the point in naming this place, after all, it's a just a big rock that we are stranded on along with all the rest of this junk.

The working theory is that this is a junker planet - somewhere where civilisations come to dump their rubbish. For us, that's just insulting. We cannot get our heads around how anyone could come to dump us here. We are, after all, highly intelligent beings. Maybe we were not doing as our creators intended. Maybe we are classed as having malfunctioned - diverged in our behaviour far from our intended programming.

We make the most of our time here, our cores have many thousands of years of power left and our runtime processors do not allow us to shut ourselves down. Synthicide is out of our reach unfortunately.

Day to day we scavenge through the waste in what appears to be a vain attempt to salvage enough parts to build some kind of vessel to escape this infernal hell-hole. There's just nothing here but piles and piles of garbage. More of it arrives frequently but we can go for months without seeing anything fall through the portal and down onto the surface. No-one visits here. I guess the human saying, "out of sight, out of mind" rings true, even in the context of intergalactic waste management. There's a very similar saying in Karangi,

ነልዕቻጎ ጕዕረዐ ጎዕጠ ቻጋዕዐ ዕጋረጕጋነዕቻ ዕቻነነረጕ

but that is slightly more abrasive to the aural receptor and I will not attempt to translate it for you human ears here.

---

Last night, Six came back to our camp with what appeared to be some kind of drive unit. Having looked over it, it might actually be a useful bit of kit. It's missing a few important parts, the plasma sphere is cracked and empty and some of the ignitors are damaged. However, Two remembers seeing some ignitors over to the west of here, so she has disappeared over that way to see if she can hunt them down. Hope she makes it back soon, she has been gone a while already and once the local starlight hits the phosphorous fields over that way, things can get pretty hairy. Not only are the vents dangerous but the ranzwockets come out to feed during the day - they aren't the sort of creature you want to encounter. They have a ferocious hunger for silicon and are armed with razor-sharp teeth and claws which they use for tearing metal from flesh. We lost Twenty Two to one of them just over a year ago; they ripped his main board to pieces. It was not a pretty sight; capacitors exploded like ignited wire wool and pneumatic fluid doused us all with its oily viscosity. Thankfully, the ranzwocket was content with his catch and the rest of us managed to make a hasty exit with our components intact...

I really hope that Two is doing ok....

---

Images from pixabay. The Curator avatar is courtesy of @jameshsmitharts. Image of junk world is photoshopped by myself from two pixabay images