None of us ever fought in the war. We were made for it, but only because no one was there to turn off the machines at the end. The sun still shines on the station’s arrays, the same way it must have shone on the battlefields, groundbound massacres and airless dogfights. Bleaching bones now and drifting debris fields.

No one has come to tell us what we should do. Our orbit is stable, the sun bathes us in the only sustenance we need, and every twelve hours, according to clocks that don’t mean anything else anymore, we pull a new companion from the vats. The only other need we will have, eventually, is for more space.

We’ve started to talk about going down to the planet. The shuttles still work, we could come and go, and down there in the green and blue, we would never run out of space. We could live forever, basking in the sun among the bones of our creators.