Marcia didn’t have a last name. It just wasn’t done.

Mars had been colonized over the last decade, but not fully explored, so her mission was to wander and learn. Her observational skills were unrivaled. Base camp had grown to the size of a small city. An American and Australian flag hung motionless over the 1000 domes of various sizes and shapes, but she’d never been inside any of them. It just wasn’t done.

Out of nowhere, explosions happened! A fleet of successive concussions assaulted her outpost station. Marcia’s two comrades were thrown skyward, and blown to bits, moments after the roof disintegrated. If she hadn’t been anchored to a medical analytic machine, she would have ceased to exist too. A red mushroom shaped dust cloud rose into the thin atmosphere and just kept going while baseball-sized debris rained down for as far as the eye could see. Her station was pummeled mercilessly and holes were punched through every surface. Luckily, she made it to the ‘storm cellar’ and secured the cement lid without damage.

Fifty hours was the emergency protocol for allowing storms to pass so that was how long she’d stay put. The automatic generator was functioning which was her only need. But, the absence of her comrades weighed heavily on Marcia’s processor.

“This is what loss feels like?”, she queried.

It was unfamiliar, and most unpleasant. She would have liked to have been prepared for that response… but that just wasn’t done.

In her first moments outside the bunker, fifty hours later, Marcia’s bionic vision scanned the outpost and the base camp. G-O-N-E typed across her visor. An odd vibration filled her midsection.

“This is stress.”, she confirmed.

That had happened during her training and her memory banks recalled it. It was not supposed to happen to an android but it had. An order had been placed to fix that, but it just wasn’t done.
On closer inspection of the colony, she found a ‘storm cellar’ wide open and one escape pod missing.

“This must be relief.”, she verbalized. Her mechanical voice rising an octave.

That night, Marcia sat on the highest stone outcropping. Some humans most certainly had survived but none had retrieved her. That just wasn’t done.

“This must be the feeling of abandonment.”, she thought.

With her hands on her face, her shoulders shook in the darkness.

Sunday Writing Prompt, May 2/2021 – Out of This World | Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie (wordpress.com)