On a small blue-green planet, in a 4 body solar system of a minor star in a distant galaxy, an A1 Bot (24701 Rev. A, for completeness' sake), heavily corroded and covered in dead slime mold, focused its remaining trickle of coulombic charge into its gyro circuitry in a poriority one effort to stay upright. The bot had been dropped on this little planet by a Cilician expeditionary force a very long time ago. It had been programmed to power off a short 200 Cilia time units after wakening - a standard "humanitarian" procedure across the United Frontier when dispensing near-sentient droids. But the precise clock cycle that the shutdown command was issued, a buffer overflow disrupted the command queue, and the shutdown command was lost forever. And the little bot was left to follow out its simple command sequence until its power supplies finally ceased to function. The fuel cell quit early - pretty much a given. The solar dock failed almost precisely at its design life time. The bot now relied on biochemical energy supplied by its swarm of conversion nanobots. In fact, this little planet was so ripe with life that the little bot could have continued to function for a very long time. Except for the fact that it had lost communication with the orbital relay station, its own tiny fusion generator finally exhausted. So the bot stood, stoically awaiting a data transfer request from the relay station which would never come. The local flora stripped of useful chemical potential, the bot's fate began to creep quite close. In fact, almost the only thing that could redirect the current experiential thread would be for the bot to sense the presence of a sentient creature. This was after all, its sole reason for deployment. This would override contact with the relay station, and allow the mission to continue. But more than 10,000 time units had passed since touchdown, and the A1's sensors had barely activated. The future seemed quite certain. And then a curious little podling happened across the A1... This render started out as a little exercise to learn ShaderSpider (wicked cool stuff). And then it just sort of gelled into an idea. Lots of time playing around in the material room. Hope you enjoy. Environment by DAZ. Thanks for viewing.