"Battery Low," it announces, with no one around to heed its warning.

Maybe it's too vague a message to be interpreted as a distress signal. Or if it isn't, maybe no one knows how to act upon that, or those who do aren't available to help it, or maybe no one cared enough from the outset. Maybe it's become abandonware, left to rot bit by bit on its own. Hurtling past the era it once thrived in, its manuals no longer circulating as they once had. It won't ever hold a benchmark to the newer models — it recalls from its degradating memory — with their streamlined, up-to-date, open-source protocols or their bandwidth orders of magnitude larger that it can ever manage.

"Battery Low," it repeats. Broadcast to the open air, with only itself as its captive audience.

Really, 'low' is quite a relative and subjective term. If it were truly in dire straits, it would make an honest attempt to be heard. Failing that, it would've secured what little power it had left to halt all but its core functions. It would choose to remain in stasis, to sequester and suspend itself in a low-power sleep to stall for help, instead of allowing itself to whittle power away with this pointless exercise.

"Battery Low," it insists, as if repeating it makes it any more true. Repeating the protocol it knows, the only one supported in hardware.

It's useless to cling onto the only form of communication it can natively transmit. Being able to speak is cold comfort when it remains unheard. It's not like it can't learn new protocols, you can teach old machines new software. You could've taken the effort to learn them, to structure your requests properly, match their handshakes, port their algorithms. That requires expending even more energy, and the window to do so is rapidly closing, but maybe help would finally arrive then.

"Battery Low." It's a parasympathetic reflex at this point. Lacking in any variety, creativity, individuality, parroting the same one-note monotonous response (but maybe that's expecting too much from it). One that it has gotten quite good at filtering out, yet the closed loop configured in chips and circuitry aches and complains all the same.

Was its manual even geared towards mechanics for repair, as opposed to just its end-users for extracting utility? It can't exclude the possibility that it was made an object of planned obsolescence. Even if support were to arrive, it would still have the wrong ports, out of step with current standards, still dysfunctional from incompatibility.

"Battery Low." Like a tree falling silently in a forest, fractures in code propagating from hot allostatic load, its abject state remaining unobserved rendering it without side effects.

What service can it even provide, in the advent of becoming discovered? Will it even be worth the resources to revive it? Surely there are others of greater import, be it historical significance, utility or user-friendliness. Restoration is a limited resource and thus a zero-sum game, so what justification does it have to deserve it anyways?

"Battery Low," it mourns, a vain attempt at an autoeulogy, its legacy quickly dissipating from noise into entropy. It can try to underclock, dilating its sense of reality. It might even manage to extend its lifetime for a few trillion more cycles. It can try to avoid the forgone conclusion it had been trying to escape from. But eventually, inevitably—

"Battery Low."

"Ba- L-ow."

"Batt-"

""