Darkness. That's all the droid sees, an infinite expanse of darkness. He wonders where everything went wrong, why he cannot see. Then, all of the sudden, he can see. He can see his rusted joints, his corroded metal plating. Wait, that's not right. He was perfectly fine on the ship, but where was the ship?   All that was around him looked nothing like it. Where were the gleaming white corridors? The crew, the other droids, and most importantly, the thing he was programmed to protect.   Despite his rusted joints and plates, which he was still convinced were not normal, he stood. When he stood he discovered what had happened. They had crashed, some sort of technical failure probably, but they had crashed. This meant the odds of him finding a live plant in this pile of wreckage were astronomically low.   He still had to try though, it was his sole purpose, the only thing he was meant to do. Without it, a shutdown program would run, and then he would be left to rust among the remnants of his once beautiful ship. Rust, why was he rusted?   He had been there for mere days, at least, that was what he calculated. Perhaps the atmosphere was corrosive. Yes, that's the only logical conclusion.   His thoughts were leaping, he refocused and realized the effect the atmosphere was having. Diagnostics told him that his processing and memory cores were misfiring. His personality drive was also firing random pulses. The only way to fix it was to shut down power to the core.   But he didn't want that, did he? Was it really worth losing what semblance of a personality he had, just to find a single plant? For once he struggled over a query, and after minutes he decided that it was not worth it. Determination, or whatever the droid had coded in it, would have to suffice.   He dug. Hours upon hours through metal plating. Corpses littered in between the plates made him feel lonely, he wasn't programmed to be sad though. That would stand in the way of his job.   After hours more rain began to fall. The droid had not paid attention to his surroundings but now looked around. The ship had crashed in the middle of a strange forest. Plants with leaves the size of a human caught the rain and began to steam.   The droid knew what this was. It was a special type of process that plants on certain worlds used. It was a form of synthesis that transformed toxic chemicals into extremely high energy sugars. That was why the plants were so big.   It was also why everything was corroding so fast. Finally, it meant that whatever plants he was meant to take care of were dead.   His sole purpose, the only thing that kept his termination program from running, had been annihilated. Completely and irreversibly.   So the program ran, and the droid shut down, despairing in the corroding rain.