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Ten years had passed. Coppélia was fully charged and still in good condition, except for her left arm and right eye which had been damaged by a solar flare hundreds of days before
Suddenly, she felt an urge to look up at the sky. With her good left eye, she was able to make out a distant light that appeared to be getting larger by the second. Glad that the solar flare hadn’t completely fried her ocular equipment, she zoomed in on the light as it travelled through the sky. Her extended vision was good but it did have its limitations and she still couldn’t properly make out what it was. But she knew that it wasn’t a meteorite or asteroid.
She had been on Proxima b for 35,947 Earth days or 98 years 5 months and 1 day. She had been trapped on Proxima b for 3,209.55 orbits of its own sun and that was plenty long enough for any sapient being to spend alone, even one that was inorganic. Unlike humans, she had experienced each and every passing second. Now, she just wanted to go home.
She was still too far away to confirm what the light actually was, but she decided to head in the direction of where it appeared to be going anyway. She started running, but the planet’s terrain was unyielding and she was unable to maintain a constant velocity. Scrambling up and over ridges and sliding ungainly down smooth glass-like gullies she edged closer and closer to the spot where the source of the light appeared to have landed, hoping that whatever it was could take her off the planet.
Still fifty kilometres away, she was totally unaware of another Coppélia boarding Captain Holly Bryson's space shuttle, from the space-cruiser, the Sir Isaac Newton, to begin the first leg of her journey home. Separated by those fifty kilometres, the other Coppélia was also oblivious to her existence.
Unable to reach the shuttle in time, she watched as the light returned to the skies and, if she had been human and known how close she had come to being rescued, her heart would surely have sunk. She turned around and walked back to her Space Lander to continue watching the skies and hoping that one day a rescue ship would arrive for her.
THE END