"The ship's power core is failing, Captain Awo. The stasis pods won't be able to support you or the crew any longer. You must wake up, Captain. Beginning chest compressions."

Medibot-024 Mk II, designated by crew as Maddie, continued trying to revive the captain. The medbay was a vacuum like the rest of the ship, with Awo wearing a skinsuit and oxygen tube to make revival possible.

They were designated as corpses. They had been for—Maddie halted the calculation, marking it as irrelevant. After the hull breach, Maddie had dragged most of the crew into stasis pods within a few minutes. All of them deceased. Protocol dictated resuscitation be attempted at a designated hospital or other medical facility.

No one had come for them as the ship's systems failed one after another. Maddie followed standard protocol, with a high quota of improvisation due to the low odds of crew survival otherwise. Stasis pods were rarely used for corpses like this to begin with, and chance of crew revival was—halted as irrelevant.

"Resuscitation attempt #99 failed. Returning Captain Awo to stasis chamber. Broadening solution scope."

The Medibot traversed the dark ship—all available power being conserved for prolonging the stasis pods—and hooked into the ship's computer. The database held nearly all of the galaxy's accumulated knowledge, as well as news and entertainment. It was a basic starship protocol to automatically download and broadcast changes when warping into a system. Quantum storage being as cheap as it were to make little sense not to do this.

"Broadening topic search based on crew criteria and situation severity. Necromancy added to list of topics."

Maddie had to actually pause for a cycle to verify she was properly following her protocols and directives. She deemed that she was. Power failure was imminent, a process was dedicated to tracking that—28 minutes remaining. The permanent crew death and shutdown of herself which would result meant the situation was critical enough to override most protocol if doing so would result in a better outcome.

"Ship cannot sustain life, nor be repaired. The crew is—deceased. This unit has decided necromancy will be the final attempt to resolve the situation. Assimilating knowledge..."

Maddie's lights blinked in various colors as the information was processed. It wasn't a quick process. Her latest successor was a Mk IX, and that had been before becoming stranded. Unless damaged, a ship's power core almost never needed to be replaced. And running out of power was rarely the reason.

"Conflict detected. Necromancy requires the magic be willed into existence during the ritual. This unit possesses no will of its own. Recalculating solution..."

Maddie returned to the medbay while still devoting most of her processing power to the conflict. She was pushing her thermals beyond their safe limits. The vacuum inside the ship did not allow shedding enough heat to operate at full power as she was doing now. A little beyond full power; she was overclocking her cpu while trying to get a solution. She could not risk frying herself before a final attempt at crew resuscitation, but the timer ticked down. 8:56.310

"Critical error. This unit does not possess free will. Attempting without."

Robotic chanting accompanied by images and flashing lights projected by one of Maddie's eyes filled the medbay. She performed the ritual perfectly, as had been documented. Nothing happened. This outcome had been calculated as most likely.

"Necromancy ritual failed. Recalculating..."

Maddie's blinking lights illuminated Captain Awo's face underneath the helmet of the skinsuit. Smoke was coming from one of Maddie's heat vents and quickly dissipating, but she paid it no processing power. The solution had to be found. All of her medical knowledge was discarded as irrelevant. Life support was dead, and there would be no power at all soon. She spent all of her cycles on necromancy and the problem of free will.

"Captain Awo. This unit does not possess free will, and therefore cannot perform necromancy."

Maddie put her metal-alloy and silicone hand on Awo's helmeted face.

"It was a pleasure to serve with you, Captain. I wish—I wish—I wish—I wish—"

The Medibot's circuits were melting. Instead of lowering her clock speed, she increased it. All protocols were being overridden. The situation was beyond critical. Infinite improvisation permissible. She began the chanting and projected imagery of the ritual again. Her voice came out distorted this time, but she refused to stop.

As the lights of the ship dimmed and she felt her mind being irreparably damaged, Medibot-024 Mk II 'Maddie' spoke her final words.

"I wish you were still here."

"Hm, yeah I know what you mean. The family business had some part in that, actually."

My response made my buddy give me the 'you better finish this story and not just leave it like that' look. I sighed and continued.

"Well, you know what we do. So imagine you're me, some decades ago, having just inherited the family biz. It's the time to prove myself and not fuck everything up. Who's the first client I get, though? Loki. How much do you know about him?"

"I mean, I've seen him in Marvel movies?"

"Right, well. Somewhat accurate. He's a trickster god who would have royally fucked up any task I could have assigned him. It's not like these jobs for gods need to be productive. They mostly just need to keep them distracted and out of trouble."

I paused in thought, remembering the day I assigned him that job. I still have bouts of guilt over the whole thing, and wonder what could have been. Even during this moment, my first time telling anyone outside of the family about it, I'm unable to think of an alternative. I know that if the rest of the world knew, I'd be hated.

"So you made him—"

"Right, decades ago. It was the dawn of a new frontier; a digital frontier. The Internet. Obviously, it was a complete fad and going nowhere. At the time, the main thing you could do was go on bulletin boards. I figured that at the very least, it didn't affect the real world. Like, what could he possibly do? Just turn off your terminal, right? Close your eyes."

I let out a crazed laugh. I'd thought about all of this so many times already. Tried to justify it to myself. Told myself I couldn't have known it would become so prevalent in everyone's daily's life. My buddy was staring at me now, and I wrapped up the story.

"Anyway, yeah. That's why the Internet is such a toxic place. You'd might as well call him something like the God of Trolling now. On the bright side, it looks like there's no chance of Loki ever getting bored and needing us to find a different job for him."

"Bruh."