Null

Null likes their job well enough - it would truly be pointless cruelty to make a robot hate the job it was created for - but getting ordered to retrieve your own corpse from a wormhole every few months does things to one's psyche. Their nonchalant attitude and calm under pressure ultimately stem from a complete lack of self-preservation; after all, what's it matter if they die? They'll just be back as soon as the lab guys feel like it. Between lack of time and interest they never really picked up any hobbies, either. They just throw themself into their work, which is varied and exciting enough to keep them occupied.

The overall effect is, uh... hauntingly reminiscent of one of those soulless and overly cheerful digital assistants. They can hold a conversation if talked to and they're down to help you with whatever, but they barely have any drive or motivation of their own. If you asked them about themself they literally wouldn't know what to say. They've died 41 times? Their serial number is A053873? They... have arms?? Sometimes they're arms, anyway.

All that said, they genuinely didn't mind this existence much, and now that they've left it they've had a difficult time adjusting. Suddenly the habits they've built up for 20 years have permanent and serious consequences. As adaptable as they are, that's going to take a while to unlearn. They're consoling themself with the thought that the lab guys have certainly booted up a new instance of them by this point; even if the worst happens, it's not gonna be the end of Null-A053873.

Null was created by a Ferrum shipping company as a sort of low-budget maintenance engineer. Running checks on sensitive wormhole equipment is unavoidably risky, and training people for it is complicated and expensive. On the other hand, a Porygon-Z can survive indefinitely in vacuum with no special equipment, and even if they die out there you can just boot up a memory backup and keep going.

Most of Null's life has been comfortably formulaic: go out the airlock, run some diagnostics, write a report, putz around in the station until the next check. Once or twice a year this routine is interrupted by waking up in the respawn room with no memory of the past 24 hours, but they're not the type to get existential about it. They genuinely find the science behind wormholes fascinating, and would have happily spent their entire life outside the airlock if it weren't for the ethics committee's objections.

Everything changed this past January, with the plague of rogue wormholes sweeping the known universe. The nature of their job meant Null had frequent contact with these gates, and if they weren't sucked in, they had to fight off the Pokemon emerging from them with their extremely limited combat experience. They'd racked up a dozen deaths since the beginning of the year, and it was getting exhausting. As they made their memory backup for their final mission, the lab guys promised them they'd talk to the committee and see if they couldn't make some adjustments to their schedule. If anything ever came of that they would never know, since half an hour later a rogue gate opened nearly directly above them and pulled them in.

They woke up - much to their surprise - with the memories of their "death" intact, for the first time in their existence. Miraculously, the gate had dumped them into a stable orbit above Vis. They drifted for several hours, at a complete loss for what to do; another instance of them would be running at the station by now so there was little point in trying to find their way back, but what else was there? It would seem, they thought grimly as they mentally reached for their distress beacon feature, that they were forced to decide that on their own.