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02.03.02 - 05.25.02.
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LUDIC LOG

Dearest Peggy,

It pains me to write you this letter. Partially because my digits are not designed for manipulating implements as delicate as this writing utensil, but also I mean this in an emotional way.

I think the time has come for us to stop seeing each other. In your case, this will mean transferring to another operation; in mine, it will mean erasing all data regarding your existence from my memory banks. Believe me when I say this will not be an easy process; it will require a great deal of effort on the part of my heuristic routing technicians, a large number of requisition forms, and a not-insignificant amount of sadness. Or, not exactly sadness, but a robotic analogue of sadness. You know the feeling you get when your internal waste oil filter has been removed for routine maintenance, but you have been left running anyway in order to provide cooling for your drill units, so you can feel the absence of the waste oil filter, and even though you don't need it at the moment because the oil pan has been set to hold, you can tell that it's gone and it feels strange? Sort of like that. Maybe this has never happened to you, I don't know.

Which is one reason that I think we need to be apart. It's not that I don't love you. Well, actually, I don't. I'm incapable of love. I've tried to tell you this in the past, but you always argue and fuss. I try and make it clear that I mean it quite literally, but you seem to think it's a metaphor. It's not a metaphor. What I'm saying is, it's not that we haven't had good times together. I remember the first time we met, when you were assigned to routine data collection on Asteroid 46-RRE-7 -- from the moment I laid optical sensors on you, I could tell that you were like no one else who had extracted workload efficiency counts from my timer-setting box before. I'll always replay in my RAM the times we stayed up late into the third-shift drilling operations cycle, talking about your hopes and dreams and my various mechanical specification. And the first time you touched my massive carbon steel industrial brushes with your tiny hands, I felt something that I had never felt before; something similar to the way I feel when I receive a new timer belt. Not really like that at all, but it's the only thing that's close.

Anyway, all that aside, the fact is, we are two different people. Or rather, you are a person, and I am a large industrial mining combine robot. You want to finish your degree and go into astral engineering; I want to use my drills and brushes to extract utile mineral elements from soil and rock. You want to have children someday; I want to use my drills and brushes to extract utile mineral elements from soil and rock. You are very close to your family and love to travel; I want to use my drills and brushes to extract utile mineral elements from soil and rock. In the past you have accused me of being more interested in my career than I am in you. Comments like that hurt me, and I don't mean in the way that a large piece of environmental debris getting caught in my wormgears hurts me. But in the final analysis, you're right. The most important thing in my life is using my drills and brushes to extract utile elements from soil and rock. You can never come first in my life. You will always take a back seat to using my drills and brushes to extract utile elements from soil and rock. Also to performing automated maintenance subroutines on my systems, recording job data and stratum analysis, and forwarding follow-up action flowcharts to my various slave units. And this is unfair to you.

I know that this will be hard. It's hard for me. Harder, in a certain sense, although not in another, more accurate sense, than the rock surfaces that I drill through on a daily basis. But you are strong, Peggy. Not as strong as me, of course, but as strong as can be expected for someone not made of steel-titanium alloy. You will find someone else, someone with emotions, who moves from place to place and can communicate in a non-digital manner. Please don't take this to heart, dearest Peggy. It's not me. It's you.