Usu

by Jayde Ver Elst

  Stitched on his outer left calf fluscle were the letters 'Usu'; information your humbly omniscient narrator had clearly been in on for quite a few pages now. He began pulling the leg in a vaguely motivated attempt at helping but couldn’t help but confirm his suspicions. “So, I take it that 'Oosoo' on your leg is your name? Or… model? Taxidermist?” A cringe-worthy pop released our strangely named protagonist. Leaping to his feet he nodded the most enthusiastic nod you’d see from anything inappropriately medicated, before remembering he had something to do on this ship, something more important than he rightfully understood.

  Taking the moment in, and promptly ignoring Modbot’s further prodding (both metaphorical and literal) for information, he focused on the after-images that now barely traced his mind. He knew where to go and wasted little time in doing so. Using his trademark not-quite-dead-yet dash, Usu headed to the very back of the deck, entering a small and relatively dank trap-door.

  “Right, right, I’m not following you in there. I’ve got… err, sprockets. They’re sensitive. You have fun while I try and actually progress the story along,” Modbot could be heard saying as a barely audible mumble from the claustrophobic interior that now stood before Usu. Sparks from dangling cables, the faint smell of diesel, and a layer of thick grease overwhelmed senses that had previously been standing their ground, if only just barely.

  Despite this, he took every step forward with determination; a determination to be very, very far away from where he was at present. Five steps, ten, twenty, he’d lost count by the time an almost surreal glow of light greeted his horizon. He could still hear Modbot mumbling to himself up above. Perhaps―he wondered―that’s what had kept the robot sane all of these centuries. But chances were more likely that a lack of sanity was the reason for the mumbling in the first place.

  Stepping into the cerulean light, Usu stood in shock at the forest of terminals that appeared to be its source. Spiraling outward from a single unit, nearly three dozen terminals blinked an ever-patient underscore, waiting for anyone to give purpose to their stagnation. Clothes were draped over some, messages of love and hope scribbled behind others, and shattered screens of desperation hung over a distant few.

  The center of the room was dominated by a large curved display which, for reasons apparently unknown to even the author, was currently displaying a closed-circuit feed of Modbot trying to 'modularize' a vacuum cleaner he’d found; an act far less successful than it was anatomically lewd. “Fine, fine! I’ll use the hands for a few more hundred years, maybe I’ll even find a nice human child’s neck to wrap them around! Vacuum would be no good for that, after all,” Modbot rattled about bitterly as he tossed aside what was now neither vacuum nor cleaner.

  Usu’s fragmented memory could help him no further, finding this room inside the behemoth structure was the limit of what had been etched into his heart. Yet it had still taken him to where he needed to be, and with just the right amount of misfortune, he could probably fumble upon what exactly he needed to do next.

  He brushed his paws across the nearest screen but, before he could pretend to read even a single word, the darkness claimed him.

  Human - Condition

  Above me dangled a corpse more alive than any I could scavenge at my feet.

  I don’t know why I pulled her down, or why she seemed to breathe sweeter air than I’d ever tasted, I only knew she was important.

  This clumsy, mumbling, rambling girl; her overflowing humanity made me question my own.

  Androids do not dream of electric sheep, they dream of being more than sheep.

  She knelt before a lake, peering into the depths, and for all the faults and cruelty in her world she had but one despair:

  “I can’t see me looking back at me.”

  Chapter Three - Serendipity

  Grasping back at the straws of his cognition, Usu awoke, checked himself for self-urination, checked himself further for thinking he could urinate in the first place, and stumbled to a tragically piss-poor variation of 'standing'.

  His vision was clouded and in his head permeated a sense of wrongness. Every second, darkness would creep into his skull with a dull ache and a commanding pulse of his heart. Slowly, the pain faded, the darkness waned, and his stance looked less and less like a botched yoga experiment.

  He had felt something when he blacked out; an extremely familiar feeling. Memories absent of what he saw or experienced, yet the feeling of a piece of him sliding back into place was undeniable. Hence the bit about making sure he didn’t wet himself was only logical you see.

  Not far above him sat the console he had so gracefully fallen from a chapter prior. Usu quickly scaled it once more, using two separate disc drives as footholds in the process, finding himself once again staring at his light-source adversary. Before he spent too long convincing himself that his paw print on its thick film of dust meant he got the first hit in, he came to the baffling realisation that he actually understood what was displayed on it. Indeed, when prior to his blackout he was barely capable of admonishing vacuum-cleaner rape, he now possessed the basic computer literacy you’ve lied about on your CV for years!

  He began scouring the system, activating various (and rather audible) functions around him until he froze on a very particular confirmation screen. The words that stalled his largely metaphorical heart were 'Colony A59'. Not quite sure why the ship was involved with multiple colons, let alone naming them in hexadecimal, he wasn’t too fond of the idea of pushing the ever-obnoxious OK button that he could swear was growing bigger and bigger across the screen.

  Usu was, at least partially, correct about the OK button getting larger. You see, for quite a few moments now, Modbot had been trying to get his attention, presumably to complain about American television or something, an effort that proved increasingly futile. Futile enough that he rationalised, “If he likes that screen that much, he might as well—” before gleefully smashing Usu's head into the screen.

  This moment defined many things for our hero; his future, his fear of glowing glass terminals, and most of all, a very good reason to never ignore Modbot from then onward.

  Oh, but we mentioned that future bit didn’t we? Yes, yes, I suppose that is vaguely important at least. You see, Modbot had unknowingly set into motion, delicate irony noted, the force of motion itself. Usu’s flailing limbs and the shards of shattered glass were little more than a distraction now that the whole world seemed shake, and a roar bellowed through every inch of their beings. Then, much like if one were to use a teapot to substitute binoculars, they both had a rather sudden and literal change of perspective, as they were sent flying from one corner of the room to another.

  With the eloquence of a bewildered walrus, Modbot screamed with each shift, changing to a noticeably deeper pitch whenever he faced Usu or any number or inanimate objects he had yet to have his way with. Usu, on the other hand, was still struggling to come to terms with nearly being murdered and barely noticed his cushion-based body flopping about. He was dedicating most of his attention to giving an evil eye to Modbot, with the rest of his resources trying to figure out how to apologise for said evil eye once they stop their synchronised smashing.

  The world around them wasn’t entirely oblivious to this course of events either. As it turned out, not only did the ship launch, but it ripped up the few dozen islands it had been tethered to in the process. The chains that did said tethering were now whipping field-sized hunks of earth through the air as momentum continued to gain. I could use a metaphor or simile to describe the amount of damage done by this, but instead I’ll suggest you put all that useless coin change of yours into the microwave, set it to a good five minutes or so, and stare very, very closely.

  Those of you still alive to finish reading this paragraph can now begin regretting it, as you are forced to use your imagination to grasp the full extent of the destruction left in their wake.

  Five minutes. Five long grueling minutes inside the most well-varnished washing machine you coul
d imagine was roughly how long it took for gravity to high-five them into the floorboards, a welcome release from the ceiling at this point. There was now a stable, comforting hum not entirely unlike flying transportation would be expected to produce. Dozens of turbines, and a baker’s worth of gravity inverters held the skyward beast aloft, all remnants of the anchoring chains now ground into a long-passed dust.

  Having escaped the room they would spend the bad half of a chapter in, Usu and Modbot stumbled onto the deck and were immediately hit with enough air-force to nearly combine the two. Modbot desperately tapped away at a button just outside the door until finally, with a victorious whinge, worn glass panels raised from each side, doing a somewhat naughty-looking interlocking ritual at the top.

  The air settled and so did they. Now able to take in the scenery without becoming part of it, Usu was wide-eyed at the world shifting past him. Every now and then he’d hop a few times and drag Modbot to explain something mundane like a Tower-of-Dead-Bankers, and somewhere in that cynical copper head the robot began to appreciate it, even taking a portion of pride in having a use beyond cleaning after dead humans.

  “Look, that’s the thirtieth Tower-of-Dead-Bankers we’ve passed now. I explained already that they all made very good building material by not having souls, but every building is built on a firm foundation of bankers. They’d spent centuries holding onto other people’s money, so they were considered best for the role of holding onto other people’s bodies.” Modbot’s final sentence, the rare type that only questioning could make you seem like a bigger tosser than the one saying it in the first place, was followed by, “It’s all simple logic you know.”

  Logic, being out for tea at that moment, could not be brought in for further comment.

  Other schools of thought, however, notably sanity, did decide to weigh in on the matter. You see, Modbot’s somewhat bitter disposition against organic life in human shape had him taking advantage of Usu’s curious bewilderment. The towers in question were not in fact flung together corpses, but rather, gigantic stone monoliths which had served as shelters for anyone brave enough to travel on foot in the past. Artificial oxygen had been generated inside by synthetic flora, a desperately needed pit stop at the time.

  Modbot did, however, have a few points right; the majority that could not settle for a life in the colonies without giant screens yelling advertisements or stock indexes respectively, were indeed marketers and bankers. Though their well-dressed corpses had merely littered the monoliths, rather than having been the foundation for them.

  Just then, in the loudest silent shrill only a mute rabbit could possibly pull off, Usu pointed rapidly. “That? That’s… That’s a junkyard. Scrapheap.” Generating a small sarcastic holographic rainbow from his fingertips, he finished, “The place all of us robots dream of malfunctioning in for eternity!”

  It wasn’t Usu’s junkyard they saw as they sped past overhead, it was simply that he hadn’t known any existed other than the one he called home. For a moment, he wondered if there were others like him in each one, then he looked at Modbot and wondered if there were more of those too. Enthusiasm then abruptly went out for a few donuts.

  Human - Attachment

  Something stirred inside me, a witch’s elixir for a dying world laid bare a seed of hope, but instead I found rage.

  It won’t work.

  It won’t solve anything.

  This massive, hulking beast we seek to flee on.

  I won’t leave. I won’t forsake her.

  This girl who feels every stroke of fate’s brush and bares every strike of its cruel whip with a smile.

  She is our real hope or, perhaps at least, mine.

  Chapter Four - Frankincense

  Making a habit of passing out is a bit like making a frozen yogurt; both could pass for pleasant under the right circumstances, but you’d probably want neither several hundred feet in the air, mere minutes before a dreadfully climactic scene. Usu had not the luxury of choice. It was brief however, barely taking any time to recover at all, though that might have been because Modbot had caught him, perhaps out of an ever so slight guilt about smashing his face into a glass screen panel earlier on. However, confessions not being legal tender meant this was probably as much admittance as you’d ever get from a robot forced not to harm humans, but seemed to be doing a stunning job at harming other things.

  Clearly competing for the role of narrator, an over-powering female voice now reverberated around them. “DOCKING PROCEDURE IMMINENT” was the polite way of the navigational system saying it was going to gracefully slam into a nearby structure, a feat it did rather well, presuming it intended to keep a flight record of zero survivors. The monstrosity tore through what may well have been up to nine different layers of sheet metal and concrete before finally settling gently down next to a bare-boned staircase that lead into the heart of the massive structure they had just bored into with smashing grace. Worn decals reading 'A59' littered the twisted metal haphazardly strewn together to comprise the structure’s interior.

  Of course, calling it a structure for god knows how many paragraphs wouldn’t be right. Instead, we’ll call it what it really was, a large colony built into the Rocky Mountains. What met the eye alone surpassed street-variety imagination, but in reality so much more was hollowed out beyond immediate sight, reaching depths we’d rather not start putting math against. This was the very same colony whose mere name had triggered Usu’s first of many awkward black-outs, and yet he still had only the smallest of inclinations as to why; perhaps a side effect of the immense brain damage being smashed head-first into a glass panel tends to give you.

  “Blimey balls and blue-arsed flies!” instinctively muttered Modbot, his British sectors notably flustered by the ship’s very vague interpretation of the word 'docking'.

  He’d made a lovely dent in the only useful door during the impact, and was briefly compelled by his programming into cleaning up his own mess before the ship had the audacity to insist, “DOCKING PROCEDURE SUCCESSFUL” at which point he, ignoring the ever-wobbly Usu examining the smash-related-entrance, delved into a twelve minute rant about how he doubted this ship had the wits to dock with an iPod. The ship, having not been established as a sentient character, failed to answer his taunts, and instead slowly fell silent as its every mechanical inch sank back into dormancy.

  ‘“Ugh, these things never listen, and when they do they just blame it on being programmed precisely like actual pilots, including the drunk ones it seems. Now you, Usu, at least you show some colour when cha―” It was only then that he noticed that he, irony be damned, couldn’t quite notice Usu anymore. After taking a few long moments to peer into every nearby vent and to perhaps relatedly check up on a certain vacuum cleaner, he was fairly sure the fuzzy rodent wasn’t on the ship anymore. What made him absolutely sure was the tiny bit of fluff at the steel stairwell they’d landed next to, and the odd way it seemed to form an arrow before he dutifully incinerated it.

  Feeling slightly dejected at having both his indignant rant with the synthetic voice and his appeasement through flowering camaraderie denied, Modbot was at a rare junction in his existence. He could, theoretically, smash his own face in the control room until he hopefully got sent to some slightly more familiar destination, at which point he could resume his joyous days of bitterly cursing humanity as he cleaned up after them. He could also follow the extremely subtle fluffy arrow, and no doubt get caught in a fate spun of numerous exploding things, smashy things, and rather difficult make-shift sign language interpretation.

  Noble a bot as he was, the choice was simple, or at least made simple after he checked several dozen times that the entire flight system had become as extinct as those who made it. He would foster this blossoming friendship, and at least pretend it was by pure intention. He set his leg servos to a 'moderately annoyed' speed for the first time in decades as he crawled through the hanging gardens of broken glass and barbed metal. Standing once more on the other side, he took
note that he was on the small stairwell, measuring perhaps only four Usus wide and surrounded by a gargantuan hollow wind tunnel. The door in front of him was already open, a clearer sign he couldn’t ask for.

  Immediately upon stepping foot in the building, his senses, which had previously been dulled by the howling air from moments ago, were now privy to a rather obnoxious dripping noise. He hated dripping noises. Everyone did. But everyone, as you may recall, was currently preoccupied with being dead and thus had not the luxury of finding the source, let alone solving such an obvious hydro-disaster in the making. “No, no, I’ve… I’ve got to find the little bugger thing, there’s no doubt he’s causing all manner of other havoc!” Modbot did little to sway his own judgment, even with such despondently passionate words. “Oh fine, fine, fine! He probably started the drip! Or he’s at the drip! We always planned on re-uniting at drips if we were lost didn’t we?!” And so his course was set in bi-pedal motion. Modbot would use centuries of refined research at the pinnacle of human science to try and find a leaky spot, and Usu, well he had something quite different in store for him.

  From the very moment he entered, Usu was overcome with an overwhelming feeling of panic. Hysteria of a nature few ever come to feel, for he was not afraid of what might be ahead, but far, far more afraid of what might not be. Every step he took came with an image, every second step a voice from memories long buried. Carrying himself through countless passages until, in one derelict room, he finally came to a standstill before a single shaft of sunlight piercing the beautiful porcelain shell of a girl.

  Silence took him, no images, no voices. White noise seemed to have taken the place of kaleidoscoping images, and moments before he shut his eyes, giving in to another bout of unplanned unconsciousness, he was surprised to hear a series of banging noises followed by “Yeah! Fuck you, leaky pipe dripping all ov―I mean… Good show Sir pipe but you’ve lost this duel!” Which made all the drama before it seem a little silly.