Opportunity Lost

She sleeps, her eyes twitching with nervous energy, a dormant energy surging below a skim of dust, her cape heavy with the desert’s dust. A breeze could wake her, or the slap of a rat-tailed rag, anything to knock that dust loose, and so warm her bones. Her heart-beat slows beneath the distant sun, her Spirit already dead in the dark of the moon, her mind one-hundred-million miles away and tangled up in blue, the wealth and intelligence of an alien nation-state left to litter this pristinely pink world.

It is a perfect desert, red and swept. It is lifeless, hopeless, barren, and stepped. The sun drowns down, warming her thin skin, reflecting tin skin, she a tiny bright spot scratching it’s tedious surface, a tiny scrap of metal rescued from the rubble of 9-11 to be tossed away, thrown into space, to be blasted, beaten... to be etched into the sands of this infertile martianscape.

She waits amid sand and storm, alone. Alone, but standing tall yet, head high, antenaes bristling, signals received, stored, but unrequitted in her weary despair. She has done what was asked, she has completed her tasks, she has climbed the Cape of Tribulation and shouted his name, but still he will not come. He will never come. She is left here alone to remember his touch, her footprints filling with dust behind her.

“My batteries are low,” Opportunity whispers, “and it is getting dark.”