I invented the quantum slipgate.
It was I who hoarded the knowledge I had aquired and worked so hard to attain. I did not share it with a soul. And now here I am, alone as planned - except that I am without a way back.
I guess I should be happy, right after I made the jump it was obvious that I wouldn't be jumping back. Knowing this saved me the trouble of having to learn gradually that I couldn't return: I got that right out of the way.
I then realised, with a little mental calculation, that I had about 1,000 years of life left in me; My prosthetic body would see to that much at least.
1000 years to build from scratch the technologies I need to locate my position and create a gateway back home.
Looking at all the random crap I had seen through the slip gate before me I wondered, why oh why didn't I include my maintenence unit!
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As the last of my joints started to freeze up, I wondered if I would really be forced to spend the last 999 years of my existence this way.
...
Upon arrival at this planet, I found myself on a boundless plane of dirt stretching in every direction. The dirt originally seemed to be much like Earth dirt. As my first day wore on, and I tried to explore my surroundings, I got dirtier and dirtier. When I woke on the second day, I found that my InVigro Corp. cybernetic legs no longer worked.
It is hard as hell to find a warranty station out here.
I was forced to stand on my arms, and quickly taught myself to walk on them. By the time I had learned, I found myself covered in dirt. It was about that time that most of my cyber-prosthetic body gave up the ghost. At first I cussed my forgetting the maintenance unit, and then I realized that the dirt had a life of its own.
As I laid on the ground, unable to move anything but my neck and eyelids, I felt the ground move underneath me. Large portions of it were shifting sideways, up and down. A liquid piece of dirt slid slowly up my right side.
By dusk, most of my body had been covered by dirt. I was being swallowed by these machines from the dirt. The only thing I was able to move was my left eyelid. Finally, that too froze only halfway shut. I wondered if I would really be forced to spend the last 999 years of my existence this way.
I began putting my disabled components and modules to sleep and initiated a procedure to take the same action for any future failing components. My enhanced limbic system was definitely not overlooked, I shut that down quickly - I didn't want to have to deal with the fear and anxiety. The usefulness of these primal emotions had expired as soon as my vision systems were overrun by this...this 'dirt'.
As from my seat of consciousness I watched the lights of my being gently go out, I remembered back to the first half of the 21st century when I was learning about classical computer machine code. It was a big joke, back then, to make fun of the piecemeal way the early engineers had cobbled together instruction sets at the atomic level - just to perform basic mathematical tasks. Of course, the laughing stopped when our instructor informed us of the level of proficiency and expertise we were expected to show at the end of this course.
Even with the standard cognitive chemical and cybernetic enhancements evenly distributed amongst the students, machine code was a mind twister. It was the sheer size of the designs that would daunt us in our studies. Oh how we longed for that fabled day when we could finally just download all this information into our brains; the best we had way back then was primitive immersed VR.
More of my internal systems were gracefully sending their final reports back to my core as they left the world of the functioning.
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