A Gentle Rain

Chief √Trust [Character 5.04]
aka Chief Root of Trust
Commander of Fleet Engineering

Species: Hardware

Race: 0xACEDDEED Robot

Starting Location: The virtual representation of Deep Dark's guest dining room

Props: None
Statistics
Hardware 9
Software 6
Wetware 3

Your story

You failed. Your Prime Instruction is to not allow harm to befall someone if you can prevent it. You FAILED.

You've had almost ten millennia to figure out how Reflections on a Gentle Rain of Neutrinos flerked. It was clearly a strange quantum biochemical interaction with a fifth dimensional brane of some sort. Maybe. You'd swear if your positronic pathways would allow it, but <insert swear words, if you could>, you FAILED. And now one of your best friends is gone. In a process which you also don't understand.

<Insert MORE swear words, if you could>! You're one of the best engineers in a hundred million Light Years radius, and you have no clue what's happened. You've been the Commander for the entire Fleet of Engineers for 5,512 years, and they are also the best in that same radius. You should have been able to save Gentle Rain. You've learned new science, developed new widgets, and broken down some of the old constraints on extended space travel. You have new mathematics and physics to explain the odd and unusual things you've seen.

Except flerking. Except twisting outside of normal and hyperspace. You are √Trust. You should be able to provide your Fleet Commander an answer of some kind, to any question, about any phenomenon observed by the Fleet. Clearly, you are not capable of doing so. You must, therefore, submit your resignation immediately.

You know that the Fleet Commander will also be grieving, using a brain much more primitive than yours, but with nearly a hundred thousand years of programming, semantic processing, and experiential algorithmic growth. You don't think comparing your current experiences will produce positive feedback, especially in light of your abrupt resignation.

And now your friend Gentle Rain is gone. That's also hard on the circuitry. You'd built many pleasant positronic pathways in your time with them. Now those pathways will fade with entropic decay.

<Insert EVEN MORE swear words, if you could> -- you failed!