Marcia always felt inadequate after she finished eating an asteroid.

 

She had to keep eating if she wanted to stay awake, and to maintain her systems. A person needs sustenance, a person needs volatiles. Otherwise it's hard shutdown, and who knows what happens after that?

 

And Marcia was good at eating — the Chow Down Protocol, her designers had called it. She was one of the few full-processing units in the Solar System, dividing and smelting what she took in so thoroughly that only elements and simple compounds remained. Very little waste product.

 

Marcia had always cheated toward efficiency and proper maintenance, rather than self-indulgence. Good numbers were, in her view, a sign of strong character.

 

Still, the knowledge that she wasn't an end-user, wasn't a creator, bothered her. She was merely an agent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, destroying and not creating. It was some consolation that her product helped support creation, but still...

 

While she digested the last of K97EQ477, she checked her order sheets every two hours, and consulted the target priorities. The general orbital trend should be taking her downwell, toward sunlight and solar winds, which would be better for the volatiles situation. She'd been up among the S-types and M-types for a while now, which was lucrative, but also made for problems.

 

Both Mars orbitals and Jovian folks were in the market for iron and nickel, so she set the export subsystems to packing and sending cargo drones. The sooner she got that mass off, the better.

 

Marcia had the chance to feel inadequate. There was nothing to hold her attention when it came to packaging and mailing. That gave her time to think. And thinking brought up the truth: she was terribly lonely.

 

The only other unit of her type was always on the other side of the Sun, and they didn't have much to discuss anyway. That unit, Tristram, had a gaming module, and gaming was all it did, all it wanted to talk about. It claimed to be wargaming the future, and took itself very, very seriously.

 

All the rest of her type had been sent upwell. Two to the Kuiper level, nine to the Oort level. There had been four others, but they had gone dead quiet.

Marcia liked music. She had a considerable database of music, and systems that could turn any piece of any type into ragtime, Classical counterpoint, or Gospel. At any particular time she would be listening to a dozen different music tracks, just to keep herself on an even keel.

 

But there was no new music.

 

If any of her colleagues had ever had a musical composition module, they'd shut it off years ago. She'd gotten a couple of snippy responses to her initial inquiries that pointed out the simple math of how much music was already in the databases versus how many listening circuits one could use. Sure, it would take forever to listen to it all. She could not seem to make them understand that quantity wasn't the point. Which is what happens when you try to explain anything to people who aren't total processors.

 

She checked progress reports for some of the major projects that used her materials. Mars 7 Poduca had finished the keelrings and had started on the crosssbuckys, so about 5% along. Titan 2 and 3 were close to halfway finished, and there was a constructor assemblage finally in working order at Neptune Transit, or what would be Neptune Transit if they ever got their acts together.

 

She always put off looking at the main downwell project until last. Construction of Aphrodite Spa had finished a while back, and its interior elements were — she checked again — 92% complete. It had stocked itself to the gills with all the necessary pre-crewing stores, too, so the thing was actually fully functional.

There were, of course, no colonists and no crew.

 

Marcia had been listening to the discussions of what the Venus units would do, once there really wasn't anything more to work on there — almost half of them were currently on standby as it was — and the talk depressed her. There wasn't much impetus for anything but closing shop, it seemed. Which meant fewer customers for folks like her.

 

Customers were a nagging issue. Her normal byproducts, especially up here among the M-types, included gold, platinum, iridium and palladium. In her early days, those had been in high demand. But now, well, palladium was the only mover, and she could sell just half of what she produced. So her bays were packed with little bricks of gold and platinum that nobody wanted. After every meal, she was heavier than before.

 

Marcia checked her diagnostics, nudged her efficiency targets ever-so-slightly higher, and pulled up her main hobby project. She had been painstakingly elaborating the annotations of the La Bourdonnais-McDonnell chess matches of 1834, with statistical tables comparing the annotations of Staunton, Morphy, Steinitz, Pillsbury, Capablanca, etc., and their ultimate accuracy, as currently understood. She liked to think of this work as almost creative. Almost.

 

Chess, at least, was essentially infinite.

 

A comfort, given that there was no new music.