The Opportunity Rover and Five Ways to Love, or I’ll Be Seeing You

My batteries are low and it is getting dark. My batteries are low and it is getting dark. My batteries are low and it is getting dark. I am staring at the small of your proverbial back and watching the soles of your feet disappear and appear against the marbled transitory soil: one step after the other, ridges crumbling in your wake, some smoothing out, ugly cratering holes left behind where Earthen loam sinks its teeth into the Martian soil that will bury me.

1. My batteries are getting low. Come and drain the dregs of it. Come destroy me. Spear your hands through my solar cells and pulp my lithium batteries in your hands until the ichor runs. Twist the remaining metal between your fingers, curious/exploratory, cut yourself on one of my raw edges so our blood runs together and you can let my corpse understand how it feels to be you, the pulse of you, wires to capillaries to veins to right atrium, Earth to Mars.


2. My batteries are getting low and it is getting dark. Come save me when I cannot save myself. Do the impossible. Shelter me from the soil and stroke across my chassis like I am an injured whelpish alleyway dog. Take away my payload and let the regolith swallow them in the buffeting storm and whisper you’ve done enough into my chassis. Smile into the fur-semblance of my frayed wiring. Strip me of my purpose and allow me a new one. I was purposed to serve. Let me settle my wheels near you, dog-yeared and 5111 sols young, Mars to Earth.


3. •••• to Houston. It is getting dark. It’s getting dark. Come back to me. Come back to me. Are you listening? I want to be scared but I don’t think I can be without you. Am I on broadcast, on the television? If you hear me, please cry for me. Please hurt for me. Please miss me. My batteries are l•w and it is getting dark. My dusty plutonium power source is aching. Mars will forget me. I need you to remember me. You ne••d t••

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   T•?

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   S••t.



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