Once your arm falls off, it’s not hard to figure out that the day is going to go way downhill.
And I don’t mean, “Oh, my arm’s so tired, it feels like it’s going to fall off!” I mean literally, no longer attached. As in, “The squeamish should look away now.”
Luckily, my brothers and I weren’t squeamish.
If we were, I never would’ve been in a situation where my arm could fall off anyway. I would’ve been safe inside the spaceport with Uncle Max and all his geeky, little science minions, sipping tea, or whatever it is the squeamish do.
I wasn’t entirely sure what a squeamish person looked like, since I’d spent my whole life in the black void of space, where few squeamish people dare to tread… But if I had to hazard a guess, there were a few of the science minions who came to mind.
I, however, was not drinking tea in the spaceport that day. Or any day. Nor did I ever plan on drinking tea. First, because it was physically impossible for me to do so, and second, because if I could taste, I’m sure it would taste as gross as it looked.
So, no tea for me.
Instead, my three brothers and I were running around on an asteroid, wielding drills and lasers and other equipment that had been formed into being from the sweat of science minions and the worth of taxpayers’ dollars, trying to get as much valuable material as we could – in order to make a profit – before it was time to ditch it. Because in space, where vast distances between stuff is the norm, we were getting a little too close for comfort to a black hole. We weren’t in any real danger yet, but the science minions wanted us out of there, fast.
Neil claimed the urgency and the pressure of the deadline were what made him slip and cut my arm off with a laser, but I still think it had something to do with our squabble earlier that day about who would get out first once we got to Earth.
“Oops,” Neil said flatly, watching my arm float lazily into empty space.
“Don’t just stand there!” I snapped, trying to retrieve it. The fingers of my detached hand clenched into a fist as I tried to use the arm that would’ve been close enough to grab it. By the time I remembered to use my other arm, it was out of reach. “Grab it, space-brain! Uncle Max is almost out of replacements, and I am not showing up on the Homeworld for the first time missing an appendage!”
“Relax, you diva, you,” Neil breezed, kicking off the asteroid and catching up to my arm with no trouble. Buzz and Glenn each grabbed one of his legs and pulled him back down, anchoring themselves on the poles we’d drilled into the floating chunk of metal and rock at the start of the mission. Our last mission. “You’ll look just as pretty for the cameras as the rest of us…” He paused. “Except for me. We all know I’m the handsome one.”
“Sure, if you’re confusing ‘handsome’ with ‘annoying,’” said Buzz.
“Or ‘unintelligent,’” added Glenn with a grin. “He’s definitely the unintelligent one.”
The three of us studied our brother, exchanged a look, and nodded decisively. “Yup. Definitely.”
We said the two words in unison. Not like twins say stuff at the same time. We said the words in exactly the same tone, with exactly the same voice inflection – the same voice – and exactly the same pause in-between the words. If you’d closed your eyes, it might’ve sounded like one boy talking, instead of three.
And if you’d stood us up, one facing the other three, you might’ve thought we were one boy looking at himself in three mirrors. That joke about Neil being the handsome one? It was just that: a joke.
All four of us looked exactly the same. Same brown buzz cut, same unnaturally blue eyes. Same face. Same frame.
Same wiring and whirring circuitry beneath the artificial skin.
Except one of us was missing an arm.
The unintelligent thing was a joke, too. We all were programmed with above-average IQs. Some of us just chose to use that inherent intelligence a little more than the others did.
The radio set into my ear crackled, and Uncle Max’s voice filtered through the static – the radio had been having problems recently. It needed replacement parts, so it was good that we were going back to Earth.
“Better haul it in, Alan. The rest of you, keep at it,” he said.
My brothers groaned their usual complaints. Buzz muttered something about child labor laws. Which is ridiculous, because we’re all, like, decades older than we were designed to look. We’d floated in space longer than the current owner of the Company had walked the Earth. The words, ‘Grow up!’ didn’t really have meaning for us.
I wrestled my arm from Neil’s grip before he could start hitting our other brothers with it, like he had with Glenn’s leg that time years and years ago. In space, where not much feels like it changes, you tend to use the same jokes and games over and over again.
I kicked off the asteroid and propelled myself back to the airlock. I don’t need air, of course, which is one of the reasons why we were sent out to do all the dangerous stuff in the first place, so the airlock was mostly to keep the science minions from getting sucked out into oblivion.
When I got back into the spaceport itself, Uncle Max was there, waiting, his deep wrinkles set into a disapproving stare. Uncle Max had always been there, just as long as we had, even though he hadn’t been the original designer of us. That had been his brother… That man had never made it into space. But Max had, starting out young and fresh, hardly older than we were supposed to look, but a true genius.
Unlike us, though, he aged. It was strange, watching someone you know well shrink down and shrivel up… I was glad it would never happen to us.
“Go to your charging deck,” Uncle Max ordered.
“Wha? But-” I held up my arm.
“I’ll work on it later, during the journey. Go.” There was no mistaking it; this was a punishment.
“But I didn’t do anything! Neil’s the one who-”
“-And you let him. You need to be more alert, Alan. Or do you want to end up like Gus?”
I shuddered.
We’d had a fifth brother, once. He was still out there, probably… Somewhere… Let’s just say they now double- and triple-check our anchor lines before sending us off on a spacewalk.
Glum, I went to my charging deck, Uncle Max following behind sternly. I sat back, and the last thing I saw was Uncle Max hitting the button that would send me into hibernation.
~
The good thing about being a robot with Artificial Intelligence is that you can ‘hibernate’ when you’re not needed, which saves you from a lot of boredom. While the science minions spent journeys playing years and years of chess (which is hard when the pieces keep floating away), we just went to ‘sleep’ and then woke up again years later, feeling like only a minute had gone by.
When I woke up this time, my arm was as good as new – because it was. A replacement – and Uncle Max looked even older than he had last time. I thought about thanking him for fixing me up, but chances were he’d already forgotten that I went into hibernation sans arm last time. He’d felt every agonizing second go past, waiting to get back to Earth…
Earth.
“Are we…” I blinked.
Uncle Max nodded. “Welcome home.”
Odd. That’s how it feels when Home is a place you’ve never been before… It feels odd.
~
My brothers and I waited behind a door, grinning and patting each other on the back excitedly.
“We’re really here,” Glenn said breathlessly. Technically we were all breathless, being robots who don’t breathe, but… Yeah. You get what I mean.
“Our public awaits.” Neil winked at me.
Supposedly, we’d been the most sophisticated robots in the world when we left. We didn’t get to enjoy the fame, though – we weren’t fully activated until we got into space.
Tech had moved forward in our absence, and now we were actually pretty obsolete. But we still had fame waiting for us. That was what we’d been promised. We’d be heroes, like the Alan Sheppards and Neil Armstrongs we’d been named for. We were pioneers of space, going deeper in than anyone had ever dared to go before.
The people would love us. And that’s why our outward design was the way it was; to make us look good for the press conferences anticipated for our return. Why else would you give a drilling, working hunk of metal a smile that could make teenage girls swoon?
The doors opened, and we stepped onto a stage, a podium and the president and Uncle Max standing directly before us, with a massive crowd of millions just beyond them. I felt the cameras flash. Voices cheered…
Uncle Max’s smile was forced.
Something was wrong.
A brick hit the stage, followed by other things that were hard and generally unpleasant to be hit with; very different from the flowers we’d expected to be thrown to us.
And just like that, my daydream vanished. I saw things as they were. The camera flashes were gunshots, deep in the rioting masses. The ‘cheers’ of the crowd were screams and wails of protest. The only people paying any attention to the stage were the people throwing things at it.
Another brick hurtled through the air and struck Uncle Max on the forehead. He staggered. Fell. The four of us rushed forward, at the same time the crowd did. The stage was overrun. The president disappeared in a swarm of men wearing black suits and carrying guns.
We locked hands to keep from losing each other. It didn’t stop us from getting lost – together – in the crowd.
We never found Uncle Max.
~
The first place we went to on Earth was not a movie theater, or an amusement park, or a garden full of green things we’d never seen before. It was none of the places we’d talked about going.
It was a dark alley, dripping and dirty. The pile of rotting animal corpses thinned the crowd in that particular alley, but the smell didn’t bother us, so we made the alley our home. Temporarily, we assured ourselves. Only until we could find out what was going on.
We thought about going out, trying to find someone from the Company, and returning to the place that had made us. Then we found a trashed newspaper. Read an article about our escape, and pieced together that they were planning to disassemble us once we were found.
Losing an occasional appendage was bad enough. We didn’t want to be torn apart completely.
So we hid, when the local authorities came to investigate our alley. We watched as flesh-and-blood humans surged past the mouth of our opening. It seemed like there was always fighting going on…
We tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
I’m still not entirely sure. I don’t think anyone is really sure. Things just… happened. More than technology changed while we were gone. The world changed. The people were rebelling, against everything. They were angry about a lot of things, and they didn’t want to put down their torches and pitchforks – or guns and bricks – to ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ over the robots that had captivated the world that came before them.
Our press conferences would never happen. We’d never do commercials, or give lectures… That half of our purpose was gone. So was the half that had taken place in space. And so was Uncle Max, who kept us maintained, and our charging docks, which preserved us when we weren’t in use.
We deteriorated. Quickly. Watching pieces of you rust and fall away was even worse than watching people grow old… It made us crazy. Desperate. But we didn’t know how to stop our break-down. Our parts weren’t exactly sold at the local convenience store. With all the rioting and looting, double A batteries weren’t sold at the local convenience store anymore. We couldn’t do anything… So we waited, and watched each other fall apart.
One day, Buzz stopped functioning completely. A lot of his parts were actually in pretty good shape, but his mental circuits were fried. So… We salvaged what we could, and divided it up between the remaining three of us, to keep ourselves running.
A few weeks later, Glenn snapped and tried to steal some of Neil’s parts. They fought, and strength meant for completing difficult tasks in outer space helped them rip each other apart, until they stopped functioning, too.
I didn’t try to stop them. I watched. And then I picked up the pieces.
Replaced some of my own parts.
Now it’s just me, waiting to rust while the pile of dead animals in our – my – alley rot more and more each day. The metal skeletons of three space pioneers are piled up, too, right next to it.
There’s still one of us up in space somewhere. Gus. I wonder sometimes whether he fell apart faster or slower than us. Whether he’s still up there, floating and hoping that someone will find him someday…
I wish Uncle Max would find me. He could fix me.
I wonder if Glen will still be up there, in space, waiting, long after I… After I what? Die?
What happens to robots when they shut down for the last time?
I'll be reviewing this today.
Just an idea.
Gender:
Points: 12987
Reviews: 162