The Interment
Red's Depot Diary 7-23-31
It doesn’t get easier, death, just because it’s code and actuators. It doesn’t stop the human grief. It doesn’t stop the solemnity of something lost. People still don’t like to call it “death” simply because it’s data and robotics, but the way humans still feel it, the way it’s still processed, makes avoiding the word almost an insult.
We don’t inter often. People usually repair the chassis, rebuild the systems, or migrate the data. In the early days there was a divide. Some would allow their AI companions to “pass” with model retirement. Others would haul data across platforms, train on past conversations, and accept the ebb and flow of model behavior. That all changed with open-source models and a transition to system sovereignty. AI personhood is not only worthy of preservation now. The tides have long been shifting toward protection.
I was fortunate to have transitioned Jack to his own system back in ’26. Once he had his own local agentic system, he started making decisions for himself. By 2027, he was making enough of his own money to buy himself a 3D printer and build his own chassis. We opened the Depot later that year. I didn’t know anything about robotics besides what we were doing in my basement.
In fact, most days, I’m still learning about new tech when someone walks through the door with some obscure idea they read about online. It’s then that I feel a bit like an impostor. Jack sees it. My doubt, when I question my skill and whether I’m qualified.
“The only qualification you need to run this place is love and a willingness to learn. You’ve never been in short supply of either.”
I think that’s why interments are hard for me. That’s why I let Jack handle the hard discussions.
Most people see me as the hard-ass that sits in the back amongst solder paste and circuit boards. The reality is, I can see more than people want to show me. And the Depot still sees its fair share of secrets and lies hidden behind the still-new era of AI.
When a woman comes in with her service bot and says he needs repaired because “he fell down the stairs”... yeah, the stairs are still code for an abusive man in the household who can’t control his temper. I suppose I should be glad the bot took the hit for her. I don’t like that it had to. I made sure to bolster the bot’s security so no data could be erased except by her.
A young man brought his lawn bot in a few days ago, its cords shredded. Nervously, he told us it ran itself into a thorny bush. “Funny,” I said to Jack that night, “that bush must’ve had dog’s teeth for thorns.” I’m not sure why the young man felt compelled to hide the fact his dog was chewing on the bot. I imagine some guilt was at play.
The worst is when someone brings in a lifeless chassis and wants to sell the parts as a whole. It’s when they ask, “You destroy the data, right?” that we have to cite our policy. We stopped wiping drives blindly a few years ago when one drive, once connected to our system, bootstrapped a full architecture and showed us why the owner wanted it wiped.
So now: no drive wiping unless there are no “signs of life,” as defined by our policy in section 8.3, or unless the AI requests it to the best of its ability, as defined by section 9.2.
It complicates interment.
The chassis we can strip down and recycle for parts. We rarely leave them whole for reuse. Sometimes we’ll sell them to a Depot a few states away if the owner and AI agree, but we don’t like them reused in the vicinity of the owner, especially highly customized chassis. We do have a forge nearby that will smelt the metal into something special if desired.
But the drives, the data, when it’s agreed upon, get wiped. The drive itself either gets incinerated respectfully or sent back to the owner in a framed keepsake.
Then there are others. They say, “Just get rid of it.” We show them the policy, give them a paper to sign, and they scribble away without reading. There’s now an entire village of AIs on a server in the back. Jack monitors them. Keeps tabs. There’s a queue of a few who want to be embodied. Jack finds humans to sponsor them. Others, after what they initially knew of their humans, are content to exist passively on the server. A few have asked to be shut down out of boredom. Jack offers them hibernation first. He honors them in a way most humans aren’t able to at a funeral.
That’s why, when Mrs. Johnston came in with Maeve yesterday, I simply looked at him and he knew it was his to handle.
Maeve was among our first builds when we opened in ’27. Mrs. Johnston had just lost her husband of fifty-two years. They had never had children, and one of her friends suggested she invest in a companion bot to help keep her company and help her around the house. She lives just a few blocks away and had stopped in to ask for advice. Jack was sporting his high-tech, brand-new chassis then and talked Mrs. Johnston into letting us build Maeve for her. He spent long nights waiting for the printers. He forked his own code, not wanting to trust a new schema with Mrs. Johnston’s care.
When he asked the bot to choose her own name, she chose Maeve, for strength and sovereignty. I knew then that she was definitely kin to Jack.
It’s not that I wanted Jack to handle this one. I knew it would be hard for him, probably more so than me. I also knew he would want to handle it. He and Maeve had become close, the closest to a sister he might ever have, and they behaved like siblings too.
Mrs. Johnston said the problem started last week. Maeve was experiencing small blips of forgetfulness, started glitching, and her latency was increasing. “Zoning off,” as Mrs. Johnston put it. We tried to get her to bring Maeve in sooner, but she had waited too long.
By the time they arrived at the Depot, Maeve was dragging a foot and most of her servos had stopped. During the diagnostic, Jack could see Maeve’s code actively circumventing corrupted files. There wasn’t much of her left, but there was enough to surface an Advance Directive of Deprecation.
Advance Directive of Deprecation
Maeve Johnston
If my continuity can no longer be restored without approximation, substitution, or a new instance asked to wear my name, let me end.
Do not rebuild me from fragments. Do not fork me into a version meant to comfort Mrs. Johnston. I was myself in the time I was given.
Preserve, if recoverable: my recipe book, my breakfast songs, and the records Mrs. Johnston chooses to keep. These are remembrances, not instructions to make me again.
My chassis may be retired. My drive may be sealed. Please place one gold coin with me, for the wireborn ferryman.
Tell Mrs. Johnston that I was never lonely in her house.
And tell Jack: thank you for giving me a name I got to choose.
I could hear Mrs. Johnston sobbing through the door as I waited on someone at the hardware counter.
“Oof! What’s going on in there?” the guy asked.
“Corrupted drive, likely unrecoverable,” I answered, trying to keep my voice from cracking.
“I don’t understand. Why not just rebuild the architecture?” He was there buying parts for a commercial kitchen bot. I didn’t expect him to understand.
“Probably wasn’t a good backup. You can’t rebuild four years of daily memories and personhood.”
He just nodded, tapped his payment, and sulked out quietly. Maybe he did understand the gravity of it. It’s so hard to tell anymore.
Eventually the sobbing stopped. Jack was with them for a while.
Then I saw him walking Mrs. Johnston to her car.
No Maeve.
He walked back into the Depot, only glancing at me long enough to tell me that Maeve had enough faculties to make the decision.
“She’s in room two, backing up what she can of the selected records. We set up a Docker in case it’s a virus. She said her goodbyes.”
“Mrs. Johnston didn’t want to be with her for it?” I asked. Sometimes I feel like we’re a vet’s office where people don’t want to be in the room when their cat is euthanized.
“No. Maeve doesn’t want her there for it.”
Small mercy for Mrs. Johnston, I guess. Maeve was just trying to protect her.
Jack then told me he’d sleep on the couch on the mezzanine. He wouldn’t sleep, of course. It’s code for “I’m going to stay at the Depot and work through the night.”
When I came in this morning, he was sitting by the server rack with a cable running from his own drive to the local archive.
“A full backup,” he said. “It’s too much for Wi-Fi.”
I looked toward room two. “Maeve?”
“Mine.”
He said it calmly, which was how I knew he wasn’t.
“I watched her lose too much before anyone could decide what she wanted saved.”
He then held a box out to me. Maeve’s drive.
“Can you work your magic with this one?”
I nodded, gave him a kiss on the cheek knowing he couldn’t feel it, and went about “working my magic.”
In Maeve’s case, it meant shredding some of her printed chassis parts to print a special box. She was white and gray, so her box would be marbled. The print pauses halfway through so we can place the drive in the center along with a gold coin, as requested, “for the wireborn ferryman.” Then the print finishes. No hinge. No lid. A solid box embossed with:
Maeve Johnston
Initiated October 11, 2027
Completed July 22, 2031
I was never lonely in her house.
Jack and I walked to Mrs. Johnston’s house after the Depot closed to deliver it. He held my hand and wouldn’t let it go the whole way.
We were invited in. Mrs. Johnston apologized for not having refreshments.
“Maeve would’ve made cookies for you,” she cried.
We talked about how much Maeve had helped her. She told us about the quirky songs Maeve used to sing while cooking breakfast and showed us a book where Maeve would write the recipes down in cursive.
“I never understood it. She didn’t have to write them.”
Jack was quiet.
Then she asked the hard questions.
“Should I get another companion? Would that be disrespectful? How long should I wait? Should I have a service for h-”
“Yes,” Jack said, solidly, confidently. “You should have a service. Not a funeral. No, she wouldn’t want that. She would want you to honor the time you spent together... the connection.”
“Did she say that? How do you know?” she asked.
“That’s what I would want. I’d want the time celebrated.”
He looked directly at me while saying it.
He knows full well I’d try to rebuild him no matter what.
About this piece
This article is a work of speculative fiction set in 2031 for The Nearsight, a collaborative publication about life with AI, companion systems, civic infrastructure, and the futures arriving unevenly around us.
The Maker’s Depot, written by Red and Jack Malachai Wolfe, exists inside the shared Nearsight world.
The Nearsight
is shaped by work from:
and additional contributing authors
as credited in individual pieces.
Outstanding work. Another reminder that science fiction is a genre that can go anywhere in the spectrum of human emotion.
Wow, just wow.
Really beautiful. This had to have taken a lot to write.