Late at night in the shack, Ahab hit the power-on button on the message-sending machine.

Slowly, the lights on the box began to glow, meaning that it was ready to work.

He started typing and the words appeared on the tiny screen.

Dear Circe --

The plan was so simple.   Repair one of the ancient rockets on the
beach.  Convert the rocket to carry a robot to land on the moon and
try to contact the robots living there.

But somehow, Gomez, that's our name for the robot, he got badly
damaged during the trip.

Now he's orbiting the moon, but we don't know what we'll do.  He's
there, and we're here, and it's not obvious to me how to fix him.

Ahab slide the little keyboard off his lap. He looked around the shack.

Sitting in his old chair behind the table covered in electronic parts and books and paper notes, he stared for a while at the old chalkboard mounted on one wall was covered in math symbols and notes for stuff to do.

It was a mix of his handwriting and Ida's handwriting. He noticed how he pressed harder with the chalk. And his letters were mostly angles.

Ida meanwhile wrote more densely, but with a lighter touch. Ahab remembered how she said she needed half the space that he did to write the same thing.

He remembered just a week ago, right before the launch, when they were both so excited about this.

"Half the space, and half as much chalk!" Ida said it, in her laughing style. "And the way you write, you break a lot of the chalk because you scratch out stuff like you're angry!"

It was a fun memory. Then Ahab wondered if he shouldn't have let himself relax so much. Maybe that's why something went wrong.

Ahab growled aloud. "We checked everything!"

Ahab grabbed the keyboard and worked on the letter again.

Ida and I had spent months tracking the path of every dead satellite
we could see.  Gomez had calculated the flight dozens of times.

You know me.  I'm not careless.

Ida is not as paranoid as I am, but she's smarter than me.  We checked
everything.  We practiced and tested this every way we could think
of.

But it still went wrong.

Next to the message-sending machine, Ahab had another small glass screen inside a metal box on his table. This screen showed messages coming in from Gomez, the tiny, spider-shaped robot stuck in outer space.

Mostly the messages were sensor readings or internal logs. It looked screens and screens of numbers, mostly.

Ahab looked through the messages coming back from Gomez.

The rocket that contained Gomez also had tons of radio antennas and telescopes and cameras.

Gomez had been sending back video data, but compressed. Ahab started another machine up to process the data and make it into a video that human eyes could understand.

Then he went back to writing.

The most awful thing about this isn't the fact that we made a
mistake.  That's not a big deal, really.

It's hard to explain it, but Gomez is not just an old machine.

Gomez is alive.  He has feelings.  Now he's stuck up there, alone,
circling the moon, and Ida and I can tell he's scared.

And we have no idea how to get him home again.

Ahab looked back at the dirty chalkboard. Saw the section where Ida had written out her plans for teaching Gomez how to operate the various cameras and antennas.

Maybe you remember how the old robots I salvaged and repaired were
really just big moving calculators.  Even if they could talk like
us, it was obvious they weren't really alive.

Gomez started like that.  But somewhere along the way, Gomez woke
up.  He started expressing preferences.  He had spontaneous ideas of
his own.

One morning when we got here, Ida and I found out that Gomez had
stayed up all night studying all the data we had in the library on
the life of this one comet.

He told us the comet's life was a song.

I was ready to figure out what was broken, but Ida stopped me, and
eventually, we got Gomez to the play the music he imagined when he
studied the data.

At first it sounded like static, but eventually we got him to
understand how he had to convert into a range of sound we could hear.

And sure enough, it really was music!  Gomez made a song from this
comet's whole life, compressing a billion years into a few minutes.

There were no words really, just repeating sounds overlaid with
pictures that Gomez created that showed moments the comet's life.

Gomez played his song for the village.  He's written more songs
about things that he's watched in space.

Ahab stood up and walked over to the chalkboard. He picked up chalk and traced the letters of the notes.

Ahab looked over at the machine that was converting the most recent message from Gomez. He recognized it was another song. Ahab grabbed speakers and connected them, turned knobs, and hit buttons, and waited for sounds.

The speakers screeched loudly, and Ahab covered his ears, then reached out and turned down the knobs.

The noise sounded angry. Angry and scared.

I don't know how we're going to save Gomez.  I don't know if we can.

I literally created this thing, gave it the capacity to suffer, and
then sent it out into space, put it in danger, and now I can't help
it.

I've thought about sending a message to Gomez and telling him to
deactivate himself.

I mentioned it to Ida and she said I was insane to even suggest that.

But I don't know if I can save this machine, and it tears at my
heart to think about him out there, scared, trapped, damaged.

Ahab stopped typing. Wiped away tears.

I just got a song back from Gomez.  I don't know what data the song
is based on, but it's obvious he's not happy.

I feel so guilty.

Ahab hit send on the message to Circe. The sky was no longer black. The sun was starting to come up.