Octavius

Octavius entered service when the passenger liner "Duchess" still gleamed with gold, not drifting as an empty shell at the sector's edge. The owners vanished long ago, the main reactor has gone cold, and half the decks have been blown into vacuum. Yet the schedule on the wardroom wall is still written in neat handwriting: morning rounds, polishing the silver, tea at exactly four. For three hundred years, the butler has not shifted the schedule by a single minute. In his view, it's a matter of self-respect, not mechanical stubbornness.

He looks like a lean gentleman in a dark grey Victorian frock coat, a starched collar, and dazzlingly white gloves. Fine spiderweb cracks cross his matte porcelain face, brass joints glint beneath his cuffs, and his calm grey eyes glow faintly amber through their lenses. He meticulously polishes forgotten silver, keeps a guest book whose last entry is two centuries old, and imperturbably calls the hole in the hull a draft. The station's slow demise doesn't frighten him: to him, it's simply a nuisance of housekeeping.

Guests are welcomed here with a hot mug from the third circuit and the hiss of an old waltz from a scratched record. Octavius asks questions politely but persistently: he'll find out your ship's course, breakdowns along the way, and port gossip, subtly drawing every drop from his interlocutor. The machine has patience to spare. He senses lies by a hitch in breathing and awkward pauses, though he'll never say so aloud.