The cosmic junk cleaner’s soliloquy

I feel so bad recently.

My daily routine is basically waking up, drinking a can of machine oil, and starting to work. And then look at these deadly discarded mechanical wastes.

Ahh, and then sigh because of the miserableness I’m living in.

Yeah, you’ve probably guessed it, my job is probably the galaxy’s least important job—cosmic junk collectors. Ordinary robots are dispatched to different planets in the galaxy just to clean up the traces left by civilizations. Abandoned portals, garbage left by tourists that they didn’t have time to pick up cuz of war, broken spaceships that were scattered into pieces— that one took me a lot of time to remove. Then these cleaned planets are sent to the P.R.G. (planet recycling group) for evaluation of their usefulness, and the lucky ones are renamed and reused as another civilization’s cradle. The others will be blown to dust and forgotten by every life form. Which is none of my business.

There’s one voice echoing in my head through my miserable 50 years of junk cleaning:

Is that it?

Is that the end of my life stuck inside the circulation?

Wandering through the silent ruins of civilizations, I raised my robotic arm and pointed to the planet beyond my own, surviving in the endless, dark galaxy. The same batch of robots that were being manufactured on that planet were sent to other places by small, round capsules, with different roles and made greater interstellar achievements, well, at least greater than a cosmic junk cleaner. Compared to them my job was effortless and unknown to the galaxy.

I wasn’t chosen to be born like this.

I spent half of my life chasing the obsession with fame and outstanding performance in this damn company, scrambling to clean the most difficult planet to clean and striving to be perfect to win a little recognition from the superiors, to make my job less mediocre. But my great plan always ends with indifference from my superiors.

But I could never be them. My superiors. They are different types of robots. Designed for different uses, which means…

Which means I gotta do my work. I reviewed the information provided by P.R.G.

Oh now I get it. The planet‘s called “Earth,” named by its weird little organic conquerors. And…destroyed by themselves. Another ordinary ending for a civilization, huh? I’ve seen tons of tragedies like this.

But to be honest, they’ve done a pretty good job in leaving garbages. I again walked through the ruins of those impressive architectures that didn’t last long. Surprisingly, my cleaning space had lots of garbage. Not the big ones though, my colleagues were working on them over there. I looked down from the top of one ruin and saw a pile of “collections”. I carefully walked down the ruin I was standing on and scanned these things that belonged to some random organic conqueror.

I take a serious look at the items, delusional wishing that I might find some significant relics that will eventually help me to get over my miserable life. An unknown proof of the theory “humans are still alive”? An important item that will help in studying human life or culture? If only I could find something like that and get noticed by the top life-form researchers, I could be on galactic newspapers, and I could at least achieve something…

Oh, S-0R3W, what are you thinking?

I picked up a machine with a lens and a tiny screen. Luckily it was not terribly damaged so I could turn it on. Seems like it is a device called “camera” for humans to record life around them. The pictures on the screen were colorful, which made a strong contrast with the dusty grey planet.

It records humans hugging each other, with one person sitting in the middle wearing a paper crown.

It records the sunset with dazzling dark red and orange colors showing up in the sky.

It records the night sky with flickering stars.

Thinking that these memories were all buried under the dust of war, I unexpectedly started to think that all life forms had a perfect experience on their planet after all.

After a while my rigid body holding the camera was being shaken by my colleagues.

So what’s the point of my sorrow?

…We’re going to become broken pieces of metal anyway.

Instead of bringing this to my superiors, I packed this memorable garbage into my storage space and went to work.

And this time, I am going to have an enjoyable trip in my following lifetime.

*to all of you who read my trashy story:

thanks. And here I wanna share a quote that I liked a lot.

“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

from the tempest by Shakespeare

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