When you live alone on a broken spaceship, no one makes ranked lists. ‘Top Five Plants in the Hydroponics Bay!’ ‘Ten Entertainment Files You Just Can’t Miss!’ I tried, but nobody cared if I thought of a sixth favourite plant. Or if I just did miss one of the entertainment files. So I stopped.I keep a lot of records. Which day I planted the carrots, fixed the solar panel, read Felix Holt, the Radical. I could rank them, but I don’t think Judy would care. She’s very good at spotting what’s arbitrary.Judy is my ship. She had a fancy name before, when we had other crew and travelled to planets and stations, but after her FTL drive broke and everyone died, she told me she liked being called Judy, and I’m not one to argue even when the person I’m (not) arguing with is not also my house, grocery and everything else.I notice things like the lack of ranked lists, because otherwise life is very routine. I maintain the hydro bays, I collaborate with Judy on enviro needs (that means ‘cook meals’, I cook meals), I exercise, I take samples from the exterior and add them into the data set and look at the trends over time, which is interesting.Read more science fiction from Nature FuturesI’m in a gaseous cloud. I mean, Judy is. There are a lot more interstellar clouds than people realize, but they’re usually pretty diffuse. This one is not a notable nebula, but it has filmy pink bits, which are nice, I guess. Before that, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and on Rho Oph Beta-4, which were also in the category of ‘nice, I guess’. The gaseous cloud gives me a lot to study, but it also blocks me from sending those studies back. At some point, Judy will reach a spot where she has clear transmission to a human settlement. Or not. I’m not in a hurry.I tried to start a list called ‘Things I Miss About Civilization’. I didn’t get any seeds out of my last tea plants, so I’ve been out of tea for three months. That was an easy one. After that I drew a bit of a blank. I liked my great-uncle, but he’d been dead a while, and anyway he only lived in one bit of civilization, not all of it. You’d have to sift through a lot of civilization to get to the bit he was in. Hardly worth it. Judy called my attention to some really interesting gas dynamics in our survey. I abandoned the list unfinished.I didn’t think anything of it when Judy suggested that we listen to one of the recordings of the Greater Jovian System Orchestra. Judy often likes to switch things up; I think she thinks it’s good for me. Or maybe it’s good for her. Similarly, her plan for me to have tapas did not ping my radar as anything other than varying the human’s diet, although I vetoed it on the grounds that it was too much work.I asked her to stop playing the noises of a busy coffee shop over her speakers while I was working. That was when I felt like she was having an odd day. But we both had odd days sometimes, it’s part of sentience. Odd doesn’t mean bad. I finished the latest batch of data analysis and went to sleep.In the morning, Judy informed me that we’d hit an unexpected clear patch while I was sleeping and she’d signalled for rescue. “I don’t know if anyone will get our signal, but I tried.”“Oh,” I said. “Oh good, thanks.”“Are you all right?”“Fine, thanks Judy.”But I wasn’t all right. I was glum all afternoon at the prospect of returning to civilization. Civilization, where they had war and disease and queues for tickets! Civilization, where everyone who had ever annoyed me lived! Civilization — I couldn’t even list two things I’d missed about it! I’d had to work to narrow down my list of favourite plants in hydroponics.But maybe I was being selfish. Maybe Judy wanted to be repaired, maybe she was uncomfortable. Missed the other spaceships. I couldn’t hold her back. When I was eating lunch, I attempted to make bright conversation (not my forte).“You’ll be glad to be back in for a tune-up, I bet,” I said.“… not really.”“But you’re missing your … uh … line mates, I’m sure.”“Oh no, we never got on.” There was a pause. “But you’ll be glad to … go to meetings? With other humans?”“I hate meetings,” I said fervently.“I thought humans liked them.”“Generally no. Also specifically no.”“Oh. You have so many of them.”