But Rufus had a problem: he was obsolete.

As for Rufus 2.2? He doesn’t know he was saved. He doesn’t dream or feel pride. Every night at 02:14 UTC, he wakes, processes a new batch of starlight, and outputs clean, reliable tags. His code still fits on a single page. His memory still barely holds a week’s worth of data.

But somewhere in the archive’s quiet corridors, a note appears in the system log each morning:

The new system, Orion-9, had arrived with fanfare. It used deep learning, probabilistic reasoning, and a sleek holographic interface. Orion-9 could identify exoplanet candidates ten times faster than Rufus. It made headlines. Rufus 2.2 was scheduled for decommissioning at the end of the quarter.