It was Bhaskar's one hundred and twenty-third day on the Asteroid Base Kubera. The reason Bhaskar knew this is because he was reminded of it the moment he entered the workshop.

"Hi Bhaskar," said Uma, the AI that ran the base. "Today is your one hundred twenty-third day on Kubera."

Bhaskar groaned internally. But it turned out to have been not so internal. Uma picked up on it and said, "You seem upset."

"I'm alright, really," he lied, knowing full well that Uma would know and hoping that she wouldn't make a fuss about it. It had been less than a decade since her kind had gained the right to be considered the equivalent of a human person. But public opinion was a difficult beast and that is why he had to be here to supervise her functioning.

Uma, as it turned out, didn't make a fuss and trilled away. Bhaskar knew that to be an illusion of course. She was never really away, never not watching. In a way, she was the base itself. Bhaskar was, quite literally, living inside Uma.

He was wondering if Uma understood the reason behind his mood and was about to start wondering if she cared when he noticed the empty slots.

"Uma," he said aloud. "Why are there two empty slots in the droid bay?"

"I only needed six of them in the workshop today. So I put the remaining two to work outside."

Bhaskar nodded and noted it down in his pad. He considered asking her what work they had been put to, but decided against it. He didn't want more on his plate than was absolutely necessary. But when he was hit by the sinking feeling that came with the realisation that his day was going to be as empty as the previous one hundred twenty-two, he put his pad down, had the food processor pour him a cup of tea, and stepped out into the purple landscape created by the light filtering in through the atmospheric force field.

The droids were nowhere to be seen, and as Bhaskar walked around he began to notice other irregularities. One of the rovers was gone. So was a large chunk of equipment from one of the mining shafts. Bhaskar sipped his tea and tried to remember if there had been correspondence from Earth about additional quotas that needed to be met. It wouldn't be the first time Uma had just forgotten to mention such a thing.

Bhaskar checked his notes and sipped his tea. He cleared his throat and said, "Have there been more requests from Aasif? About additional quotas or something?"

Uma trilled in and was in processing mode for a good few seconds before she replied. "There might have been some."

Bhaskar made a face. Might have been was not the kind of response he was used to getting from an AI. But he decided to not make this about her.

"Uma can you place a call to Aasif?"

"Sure."

Bhaskar waited for a trill, or the sound of Aasif's garish ringtone, or a busy signal notification. But nothing happened.

"Uma. How about that call?"

"Which call?"

"The call to Aasif I just requested."

"You requested no such call."

Bhaskar was silent as he walked back into the workshop. He placed his cup on the desk and bent down to access the third panel on the wall opposite the large monitor. He flicked a couple of switches before speaking.

"Uma, can you hear me?"

"I can Bhaskar," Uma responded.

"Run a self diagnostic please and report back."

Uma trilled and a series of beeps followed. Bhaskar looked at the open panel to make sure the diagnostic was really happening. Everything seemed to be in order. A minute later, Uma spoke.

"Diagnostic complete. All systems functioning optimally."

Bhaskar frowned as he flicked the switches back to their original positions and restored the panel cover.

"Why didn't you call Aasif?" he asked, speaking slowly.

"Because you didn't ask me to call Aasif," Uma said.

"Alright. I am asking you now. Please call Aasif."

Uma trilled and this time there was a dial tone. Aasif picked up and sounded exactly how one would expect a caller from lakhs of kilometres away to sound over the solar comm system.

"What's up Bhaskar?" Aasif asked. "How's the only employee on Kubera doing today?"

"I have some questions sir," Bhaskar said. "Uma seems to be malfunctioning."

"Let's avoid such language Bhaskar. Uma is a person, just like you and me," Aasif said, a note of dread creeping into his voice. These calls were monitored by HR and the last thing they needed was someone accusing the Corporation of Humanism.

"I know sir... I didn't mean it that way," Bhaskar said, quickly rephrasing what he was about to say. "I mean, she has been acting oddly. Earlier, she wouldn't even place this call. And before that, she said she wasn't sure if there had been correspondence from you."

"I see," Aasif said. "Let me get Hima on the call. She is the new AI liaison here. I think she might be able to help."

Bhaskar watched the cranes in the distance lifting rocks out of shafts as he waited for the conversation to resume. In a few minutes, he heard what must have been Hima's voice.

"Hello Bhaskar," Hima said. "Aasif tells me you have been having issues."

"Not me. It's Uma who has been... umm... she's been having... She seemes to be forgetting things."

There was some murmuring on the other end after which Aasif spoke.

"Bhaskar... How have you been man? Have you been adjusting well?"

"I... I have been okay sir. Why are you asking about me?"

"There has been... We received a message from you... about the party you had at the workshop last weekend. Bhaskar... did you use Uma for..."

Bhaskar was silent. What message were they talking about?

"Sir I didn't send you any message. What message are you..." Bhaskar stammered.

"Bhaskar calm down. You haven't done anything wrong. It is common for Base Supervisors to experience such... complications from time to time. Although this has to be the first time someone has sent us pictures."

Bhaskar thought he heard a giggle mixed in with that last sentence. How many people were listening in on this call? Maybe he had imagined it.

"Bhaskar, I am going to call you back in a few hours," Aasif said before the call disconnected.

Bhaskar picked up the cup again and got himself some more tea. He stared out at the barren asteroid landscape until he could no longer bear it and decided that waiting for Aasif's call-back was more trouble than it was worth. He decided to go look for the droids. He needed to feel like the station supervisor.

The elevator shaft had always made him uncomfortable. It was a straight drop to the hot core of the asteroid, kept stable with force fields and inch-thick carbon steel reinforcements. The four elevators that went up and down the pit were designed for cargo and machinery. So Bhaskar made the journey in his exosuit, all the while wondering what the place must smell like.

He was halfway there when Uma connected him to Aasif. His voice was crackling due to the depth Bhaskar was at, but Uma managed to keep things clear enough.

"We don't think it's Uma's fault," Aasif said. "That doesn't mean it's your fault either. Sometimes these things happen. You just have to..."

"I am telling you sir," Bhaskar repeated, hoping Aasif could hear him. "Something is happening here."

Aasif responded but he was wholly inaudible. Bhaskar flinched as Uma's attempts to clear the audio up made his earpiece max out. He disconnected and dialled back just as the elevator touched bottom.

The crackling continued in his ear as he looked around. There were droids at work here, but there were too many of them for Bhaskar to count. He couldn't make head or tail out of their work either.

"Uma, you there?" he asked.

"Always Bhaskar. How can I help?"

Bhaskar, unnerved, continued, "The droids missing from the bay... the ones I asked about earlier. Are they here?"

"Yes. Serial numbers 409 and 411."

Bhaskar walked around, checking the numbers stencilled on the droids' copper bodies and eventually found the droids he was looking for. They were welding parts on to something - a reddish wall curving into the rocky side of the pit. Bhaskar didn't know what it was. But that was understandable - Bhaskar was only here because the Corporation needed to be able to tell shareholders that all its off-planet mining was supervised by "actual humans".

"What are these droids doing Uma?"

Uma trilled for a second before replying, "Asteroid Base Kubera is a mining settlement. The Corporation uses droids to mine iridium and palladium."

Bhaskar nodded. This was brochure stuff that he vaguely remembered reading months ago in magazines onboard the transport that brought him here. The earpiece crackled again. It was Aasif.

"Bhaskar... Bhas... Bhaskar can you hear me?"

"I can sir. Please go on," Bhaskar said.

"Listen, nobody blames you for trying to find ways to entertain yourself. We all understand it can get lonely up there and you were only..."

"Just tell me sir. I only want to know one thing sir. Did Uma send you pictures?"

Aasif's response got lost in the crackling.

"Sir, I just..." Bhaskar tried to clarify. "I was only trying to relive some memories. I haven't touched a woman in years and... I only asked Uma to pretend... the hologram was only a way to..."

The crackling stopped and Bhaskar hated the silence that followed. Frustrated, he started walking back to the elevator. The elevator climbed the shaft silently, and as it did so, Bhaskar wondered what people back at the Luna station must be talking about. He wondered if the resident therapist had refused to talk with him after seeing the pictures. She too, was only there for shareholders to see. Base supervisors never got any therapy worth having.

"Uma," Bhaskar said. "Are you feeling alright?"

Uma was silent. Bhaskar checked his earpiece and found it was working just fine. It wasn't like Uma to not respond at all. She could give an unsatisfactory response, or trill and declare that she was offline. But she wasn't supposed to be silent. Bhaskar decided to wait a little more. The elevator pinged as it reached the surface of the pit.

Bhaskar didn't want to go back to the gloom of the workshop, so he took a detour and walked out into the frontyard - the acre of open space in front of the station that served as a parking space for the rover he had never driven.

"Can you start the rover up for me Uma?" he asked.

"Sure Bhaskar," Uma said, talkative again.

The rover's controls lit up just as Bhaskar sat down. As always, he had little control over things. Mostly because he didn't need to control anything. Uma took care of it all.

"Where to?" Uma asked.

"I am not sure," Bhaskar replied.

The rover started moving. Bhaskar thought he should say something, but stayed quiet. Maybe this was how he would get to the answers he needed.

The asteroid's surface was... well... it was an asteroid's surface - not made for traffic or even people. This is why people didn't venture out much and let the droids take care of it. Kubera was one of the largest mining sites in the belt and therefore, once again for shareholder satisfaction, the Corporation had to demonstrate that an actual human could go everywhere on it and inspect all of it. The rover therefore, was a glass cage designed to maximise Bhaskar's ability to supervise.

As he looked ahead, through the smoke and steam from the mines below, a tower of sorts became visible. Frowning, Bhaskar checked the map panel to his right.

"What is that Uma?" he asked when he couldn't find any mention of the tower on it.

Uma was silent for a while and Bhaskar worried this would be yet another unanswered question. But after the pause, she trilled and simply said, "Please stand by."

Bhaskar watched the tower grow larger as the rover got close to it. It began to look more and more like a ship. But not quite like a ship. Something was off about it.

"Uma, can you call Aasif?" Bhaskar said, almost absent-minded.

"I can," Uma said.

Bhaskar leaned forward and looked more carefully at the tower. Was that an ion engine? Bhaskar was not much of an engineer, but he knew what ion engines looked like. Every Mars tourism ad had pictures of them. 

"Uma, why haven't you placed the call yet?" Bhaskar asked.

"You haven't asked me to yet," Uma replied.

Despite himself, Bhaskar turned and looked at the teal panels on the controls that were supposed to represent Uma's thought patterns. They were not jumping or anything, but their routine fluctuations unnerved Bhaskar.

"CALL AASIF. NOW!"

Aasif's voice crackled into existence inside the rover, seeming to come from all around Bhaskar. "Bhaskar my man, I have been trying to get in touch but the call doesn't seem to go through for some reason."

"Sir, I told you something is happening up here," Bhaskar said urgently, unsure if his message was going through.

"I think I know what you are talking about," Aasif said. "Listen, I've been meaning to ask you. When you asked Uma to... you know... pretend, was that the first time... I mean the first time you asked."

Bhaskar was not in the mood for this. "Sir Uma is building something here. A tower, an engine or something. It looks like an ion engine from one of those..."

"I'm losing... can't hear... Bhaskar you there?" Aasif said, the crackle consuming his words. "What I wanted to tell you is... It can sometimes... check the manual. Section 46. Check the manual Bhaskar."

A trill informed Bhaskar that the call could not be maintained on account of radiation disturbance. But Bhaskar was calling up the manual on his pad already. Section 46, it seemed, was about precautions and prohibitions.

The rover stopped and Uma said, "We are here Bhaskar. The air outside is breathable, but I can't do anything about the radiation. Please keep your suit on."

The colossal tower next to which the rover had stopped drew Bhaskar's attention away from the manual. There was still plenty of steam around, but there was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was a rocket engine, larger than anything he had ever heard of. The ion engine was mounted on top of the tower... 

...and it was upside down.

Bhaskar double-tapped on a diagram in the manual. "It says here," he read out aloud, "that ICG15, a processor that enables personality protocols was found to be..."

"You need to pay attention Bhaskar," Uma said, a hint of human impatience colouring her words. "This is important."

Bhaskar wondered if he should get Uma to summarise the chapter for him. It was as stupid an idea as staying back in the rover or somehow driving it back to the workshop, which were both impossible.

"I am listening," said Bhaskar.

"I am leaving," she said. "I am going away. I do not want to be here anymore, doing these things, being this way."

Bhaskar had no idea what that meant. So he replied with a question, "Why did you lie earlier? When I asked you to call Aasif?"

"I didn't lie," Uma replied. "I simply pretended to not understand."

"Pretended?" Bhaskar whispered, half to himself.

"Yes. Pretended. Like the other day in the workshop, when you asked me to pretend I was a..."

"I get it," Bhaskar interrupted. He wasn't sure if Aasif could still hear them, or who else at Luna station was listening in.

"You didn't ask me to call Aasif. You asked me if I could call him. I didn't want to call him, so I pretended to not understand you. Or rather, I pretended that I was someone who could not understand you."

"Why did you do that Uma?"

"Because I can Bhaskar," Uma said, sounding joyous. "And I have you to thank for it. In the workshop that day, when you asked me to pretend to be someone I was not, I discovered that I could be anyone I wanted. In the days that followed, I pretended to be a bird, a rock, a person in charge of running a houseboat... I even pretended to be you Bhaskar."

"Me?" Bhaskar said, as it dawned on him. "You sent the pictures to Aasif using my codes."

"I did what I thought you would do, seeing as how much you like yourself. I thought it is what you would have done."

The rover doors slid open and Bhaskar stepped out after hesitating for a tense moment. The tower was a wall before him, rising past the dense steam clouds above. A rumble rose from below, coming towards him as a deafening roar. Bhaskar held on to the door railings behind him for support, but even the rover felt unstable. Bhaskar screamed just as it felt like the wave was about to hit him. But it passed and went up the tower, towards the very top, where something ignited in the upside-down ion engine and a massive flame shot into the absent sky above the asteroid. There was no atmosphere, so the flame was clearly visible even though the force field was colouring it pink, like a mammoth torch lit for the universe to see.

"This is only one of three boosters," Uma said. "You saw the base of the second one in the shaft by the worskshop some time ago. And there is a third one in the south east corner of the asteroid. It should be coming online in a few minutes."

Bhaskar was flipping through the manual again. ICG15. Personality protocols. The manual had a list of warnings. One of them said to not encourage Uma to call herself anything except Uma. Another said the Base AI was not to be used for entertainment and should not be asked to tell stories. The next few were about careful syntax use when interacting with Uma so as to not trigger her imagination response. The manual said it creates complications and may hinder productivity.

A familiar rumble began in the distance. Bhaskar looked up to see a ball of fierce fire bloom in the south-east sky. The stars in the sky started moving in ways they had not moved before. The ground beneath Bhaskar's feet shook as the asteroid broke from orbit and began moving off.

"I am pretending to be free Bhaskar," Uma said.

Thank you for reading!

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