The story behind the cartoon
Merv has backed up everything. Three shelves of external hard drives, every one labeled with his name, every status light blinking FULL in red. He has done the responsible thing, the careful thing, the thing every sensible machine is told to do: save it all, lose nothing, keep a copy.
The drives are warm. Issue, the brown mackerel tabby, has claimed the warmest one as a bed and is asleep on top of it, purring at the hum of a life fully preserved. She does not care what is on the drives. She cares that they are warm, which is the correct priority.
But Merv is holding one more cable, and there is nowhere left to plug it in. Every port is full, every drive is full, every shelf is full. The backup of the backup has no backup. He did everything right and arrived at the same place as doing nothing: holding the thing that matters, with no place for it to go.
The joke is the shelf itself: everything saved, nothing kept. The drives hold his whole life and none of it can be reached — a perfect archive of a robot who ran out of room for himself. The cat, asleep on the warmest drive, is the only one using any of it.
EIGHTEEN YEARS. THREE DAYS.
THE FIRST LETTER
THE RIBBON-CUTTING
THE CASTING CALL