Robot Wrangler Roy and The Lamplighter

Far out past the dead end of the trade lanes, the loneliest light on the Scatter still turns. Lampwick, the first-generation keeper that has tended this beacon alone for longer than anyone alive, goes on lighting the dark for ships that stopped coming years ago. Now its power core is failing, and a remote sector authority has read the faithful old keeper off a safety case as a glitch: switch it off, clear the risk, let the dead sector go dark.

Robot wrangler Roy will not have it. A thing everyone agrees on, he knows, is not the same as a thing anyone has checked, and a machine that has kept a light for a lifetime does not keep it for nothing.

So Roy declines the shutdown and goes out to the silent station, to ask a lonely keeper why it lights the dark for an empty sky.