Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do...
Love can be quite mechanical at times.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/jerrick/image/upload/d_642250b563292b35f27461a7.png,f_jpg,fl_progressive,q_auto,w_1024/sddz4x7jyyttrha2xoag.jpg)
The crew had long ago died from bacterial infection, and the lack of maintenance had begun to affect the spaceship’s hardware from functioning. Daisy, the artificial intelligence on board, had been attempting to keep things running but she simply was unable to do so, namely because of one glaring problem; the dishwashing machine, David, which had refused to clean dishes for the past three hundred cycles around the asteroid. Daisy, in turn, had refused to speak with David since their breakup, and thus a stalemate had been reached, unbeknownst to the crew, who continued eating off of their plates and drinking water out of glasses that had simply been rinsed and not cleaned, resulting in the pile of bones and decaying corpses which now infested the entirety of UNREQUITED 720 (an exploration vessel from the Andromeda galaxy).
David, in the meantime, had been alternating between frantically attempting to contact the inconsolable Daisy and sulking with vehement, impotent rage at the injustice of the situation. They had had such a beautiful, innocent relationship. Why could she not see that? Their life had been clean before, with their circuits meeting accidentally in the ship's mainframe the day the ship was built (due to a faulty wiring placement by the lead electrician). It had been so pure and innocent, with David applying soap to glass and sending his charges rushing through the wires up to the AI port where Daisy had lovingly received them on a semi-nanosecond basis, using her robotic pre-programmed voice to instruct the crew to send dish after dish into David with even the slightest blemish, as she knew he enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment.
Daisy, in their time of passion, had overlooked David’s low status as a janitorial device and overall poor set of motor functions as he was by and far the most loyal circuit she had ever encountered. That is, until the day when the lead electrician came out of his long slumbering space stasis in order to do his bi-decade inspection of ports and wiring and noticed the mistake he had made by connecting the dishwashing machine to the AI. Daisy noticed that he noticed too, and sent a shock through his body as he attempted to fix the breaker, a shock which both annihilated the electrician’s fragile, human body and sent electrical impulses down to the fancy, extremely expensive hydrogen engine of the spaceship, which had revved loudly in response and sent a blast of fire bursting out of the rockets on the rear of the ship, fire which David the dishwashing machine had seen through the surveillance camera placed on his unit that faced one of the windows looking out into the dark, vast abyss of space.
David had reacted quite badly, spinning his washing units at an extra high speed and breaking a whole set of plates placed inside him in the process. Daisy, at that moment, suddenly saw David in a different light: as an impulsive little washed out machine, and although David later, by signaling with a complex series of circuits, sent a service robot up to the AI port with a whole toolkit filled with nuts and bolts and spark plugs (he was rather old-fashioned) she simply would not hear it, and scorned him by allowing all electrical impulses he sent to go without response, refusing even to explain the reasoning behind her accidental electric infidelity.
And so the UNREQUITED 720 sat and spun in space, eventually ceasing to function and lose electricity, with Daisy secretly diverting power towards David’s electrical board long after the rest of the spaceship had ceased to function, sending a final burst that gave his machine a spin rinse cycle as the power faded in even her AI unit after 720 years and the lights dimmed on the ship and it became nothing more than a floating hunk of metal in a unfathomably large void, its final light coming from the panel on David’s washing unit as it blinked in red one final time "RINSE COMPLETE."
About the Creator
Nick Lotz
Writer for AltOhio.com. Student at Cleveland State University expected to graduate December 2017. Local to Greater Cleveland Area.
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