High humidity hung thick in the hazy air of the rising sun out in the bayou. The overpowering song of the insects clashed with crowing of roosters to welcome the rising sun. Harold Stevens awoke, hungover from the previous night. Drank too much cheap bourbon while losing money hand over fist at the local saloon. He couldn't remember how he got home. His routine didn't change just because of a hangover, fishing at dawn is how he made a living.

Harold trudged down to the dock that stretched out over muddy swamp water, his fat calico cat, Cash, hot on his heels. Nothing in the traps from overnight. Harold took a swig from the bottle of bourbon he kept on the dock, he'd have to do it the old fashioned way. He baited up some poles and cast the lines out. Fish didn't seem too interested this morning, Harold only caught two, gave one to Cash for breakfast.

As the sun rose higher into the summer sky Harold spied something shiny in the mud a hundred yards downstream. Harold and Cash did what they always did when something caught their eye, they indulged their curiosity. The shiny spot was only a tiny piece of something much bigger. Harold struggled to get the heavy thing unstuck from the muddy bank of the swamp. Cash was no help.

Harold managed to wrench his catch out of the mud and onto solid ground, he'd never seen anything like it. A shiny metal man, well, one without a face. "The fuck is this?" Harold wondered aloud. Cash meowed back. "Let's get it on the dock, don't want any nosy gators checking it out too."

Harold carried the metal man like a soldier helping his wounded comrade escape enemy fire, making it to the dock slowly but surely. He laid it on its back and wiped some more mud and other accumulated flotsam and jetsam from it. It was cold to the touch, didn't have any give when Harold poked it with a stick. Cash jumped up to get a good look.

"Get off there! You don't know where this thing's been.....or what it is." Harold barked. Whatever it was, it looked real fancy, and expensive. No rivet holes, no welding, one solid piece. As Harold thought about how to make a profit on this find, it sat up at the waist. A series of bleeps and bloops emanated from hidden speakers. Lines of green text scrolled quickly over its "face".

Harold drew his six shooter, aiming it directly at the thing's head. Didn't pull the trigger, bullets were expensive. A cold, monotone voice spoke out.

"Diagnostics complete. Memory banks: critical damage sustained. Power supply: critical damage sustained. Exoskeleton protective coating: Nominal damage. Searching for network.......no network found. Starting in power saving mode, estimated remaining time til shutdown........seventeen hours."

Cash bashed his head against the metal man's side, looking for attention. Harold kept his gun trained on the thing. "You can talk?"

"Yes. I am fluent in over one hundred languages."

"You got a name?"

"This unit is designated Intergalactic Voyage Admiral of Navigation. They called me Ivan for short."

"You're a space man?"

"I am an older model of a virtual intelligence housed inside this spacesuit, I was built on terra firma."

Harold scratched his head with the barrel of his six shooter. "Where's that?"

"Earth."

"That's a fancy name for it. How'd you get here?"

"Accessing memory banks.......it appears my journey here is unrecorded in my memory. May I ask the date so that I may attempt to narrow my search, maybe the file is mislabeled."

"It's uh Thursday, I know that. Um.....shit what is the date today? I think it's the twenty third of March." Harold replied, he honestly didn't know, time on the bayou can be tricky.

"Year?"

"I know that, it's eighteen thirty-two."

"Searching.......it appears my memory stops right after the big flash of light."

"Walk the wrong way down a train tunnel?" Harold joked.

"There was an electro-plasmatic anomaly located near a binary star in quadrant forty-two, I was sent to investigate, I was expendable."

"Sounds like you got some nice friends." Harold chuckled, taking a big swig of bourbon.

"I was built to serve a purpose, nothing more." A series of beeps echoed in the air. "Power calculations updated, time until shutdown: eight minutes."

An awkward silence hung in the air. Ivan broke it, a panel slid open from its chest. It handed Harold a stack of papers filled with blueprints, diagrams, and walls of text.

"What's this?" Harold asked.

"My design documentation. Everything one needs to repair or rebuild models such as myself. Maybe one day I can be useful again." Ivan laid back down on the dock, powering down.

Harold looked through the papers, he wished he could read.