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Messenger Design — Description

I'm working on a new story called Roots, summary below:

The thing that kickstarts this story is known only as the Signal; back on Earth, humans tore open an interdimensional portal, and the thing that came through decimated most of the earth and warped what remained into something unrecognizable. There are a few humans that remain alive, though most died in the chaos that followed the opening of the portal, and most of the dead I'm thinking roam their dead Earth as ghosts. Millions of miles away, the Signal brings Messenger to life. Messenger was the little helper bot that belonged to a group of human explorers, though these humans unfortunately died from an unknown disease they contracted from one of the planets they were surveying. Messenger has been running the SOS system ever since its human crew died, trying to call for help, though because of the nightmare unfolding on earth the search and rescue efforts that were underway have been destroyed. Messenger spends some time attempting to contact Earth - to contact anything, though unfortunately it is unable to reach anything else. It decides to try and bring the ship back home so its human crew can be laid to rest - its memories are still perfectly functional, and it realizes that its human crew loved it even when it could not love back, covering it in stickers and their names and even giving it its own uniform with its name on it: Messenger.

While on the way back home, Messenger finds another ship - one whose crew also died following an accident involving the life support systems. Their communications are no longer functional, but Messenger is able to reach out to the androids still trying to fix it. This is where they meet three other bots - I haven't designed them all yet, but one of them I'm thinking is going to be a human whose conscience was uploaded to a robotic body following a bad accident earlier on in the voyage. They become a team, and once the others learn that Messenger also can't reach home they decide to go back to Earth to try and figure out what happened to humanity and why they've all gone dark.