The Sun broke the horizon, its giant red mass slowly peeking and stretching across the whole of the line between the sandy plane and the sky. Even in the early morning, its rays were hot and intense, feeding the hungry solar panel and quickly refilling the battery of LM081018.
The battery, aged several millennia, struggled to hold a charge.
LM081018’s CPU booted up and, before the Sun fully rose, the robot picked up on the path it died on last night. As though nothing had happened, it continued to sweep away at the dust with a rotating brush whose bristles were worn to little more than a fine stubble. It had been ages since the highway was traveled, but LM081018 proceeded with its job, keeping the highway swept, mending the cracks, and keeping the lines painted, with as much satisfaction as a machine could derive from performing its only purpose.
LM081018 was equipped with a temperature sensor from eons ago when the area once saw seasonal snow. While snow was no longer a concern, LM081018 did perform its check noting that the temperature was already 75° Celsius and rising. This was the only way LM081018 experienced the planet’s extreme heat that had been rising more quickly with the red expansion of the Sun.
LM081018 had once been connected to towers that warned of rain. These connections had long since been severed, but LM081018 predicted through its own analytics that the chance of rain rounded out to 0%. LM081018’s memory told it that it had not rained in millions of years, but it had rained from time to time in its early existence, which factored into the analysis. Little did LM081018 know that all of the Earth’s water had boiled off long ago. Rain was no more probable than a flood.
The Sun continued to grow in the sky, both rising up with the rotation of the Earth and expanding, as it had already gobbled up the last of its hydrogen and now gnawed away at its helium. LM081018 had nothing in its program to consider what this expansion meant. Even if it had, there was nothing it could do. As the sun ballooned its gravity tugged at the Earth, drawing it into its callous maw like it already had Mercury and Venus. The forces of the Sun’s expansion and the tug of its mass drew in a now yellow planet that spoke little of the spectacular uniqueness that it had once fostered with its billions of lifeforms.
As the Sun consumed the Earth, LM081018 had no thoughts of awe as the sun became the sky. It had no fear as its temperature gauge exploded in the rising heat or as the planet’s surface began to liquefy. There were no fond memories of the species that gave it life and purpose, or their legacy and the spectacular monuments and achievements that they had attained here.
There was no more and no less than the simple drive to maintain the highway that LM081018 had known its entire life. In the final moments before the planet exploded with a pop that, cosmically speaking, was invisible, LM081018 recognized that something was wrong with the highway it had tended to for so many years. This recognition prompted a critical warning that kicked off a series of scans that was as close to fear as LM081018 would ever get. LM081018 was unable to infer the meaning of the melting highway and incorrectly diagnosed the issue as rain.
LM081018 logged a miscalculated rain event before it was vaporized with the planet.
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Matt Nagel writes stories influenced by his passion for our greatest frontier: Space. He is frequently pondering the unknown wishing he had a gift for numbers that would allow him to solve a mystery or two. Matt lives in Stroudsburg, PA with his wife and their one-year-old son.
Great picture of our world’s last moments. Well done!
Good flash fiction and believable depiction of earth’s end. Even made me feel sorry for poor little LM08101!