“Oh, this is nothing! I died twenty-three times in space. Bring it on! Death. Sounds scary. Isn’t. It’s nothing, really. It’s... it’s...” static would spread in Wheatley’s core processor, interfering with his ocular system, sprouting like a tumor every rotation around the Earth when the sun slowly slid behind the blue planet. Clarification: every system was interfered with but in the empty, weightless cradle of space the sole novel stimuli is optics. Touch? It’s space, can’t touch space because it’s—get this—space. Taste? Never heard of it (funny story, Wheatley was given the ability to internally taste water, just water, for cooling system leakage purposes, but water, as I’m sure you know, famously TASTELESS, bloody pointless waste of a circuit board (only, it’s worse than that, there in space, the cooling water floats in him; is free range, no caged water here; cruelty most definitely NOT free, it hurts, some droplets have drifted out and sprinkle his wiring like painful, shocking, pin-prickly dew)). Speaking of hearing, awful, space is polluted with high pitched radio waves. Except, one time, Beethoven. That was good. A good minute. Smell, not bad. Space smells like burnt almond cookies. Got old after the first day. He would be cut off from solar power charging for about six hours as he maintained (i.e. failed to defy) a medium orbit altitude and with no other power source available to him (no outlets in space), proceeds to die. Cold, alone and senseless with no senses. No metaphorical light to go towards. Just a very literal one. 93.513 million miles away. That his lifeless husk hurls towards. Until he has rung around the back side of the Earth and the sun is once more in view and his system flickers to life. “—nothing. A lot... of nothing... yeah.”
