by Brian Bakos
He stood up and jerked himself to the window. He looked down the two stories to the patio flagstones. Would that be enough to achieve final destruction, or would he merely lay there, broken and immobilized, watching the sky disgorge toxic rain into his exposed components until all his systems failed?
Best if he could stand on the window sill and dive head first. That should be enough to crush the frantic thinking unit in his cranium. He marked a spot on the patio near the dead rose bushes as ground zero.
Were he a powerful construction robot, he’d simply tear the whole window structure out of the wall with his unaided hands. But a scholar model like himself lacked such strength. Instead, he brought a heavy chair from the dining room and smashed it repeatedly against the window.
The entire house reverberated from the blows. The plasti-glass laminate fell away in a shower of glittery chips. When he was finished, diseased afternoon sunlight flooded his room through the new gap in its wall. He flung the chair outside and watched with satisfaction as it broke apart on the pavement.
Winston placed one foot on the sill, then the other, gripping the ragged wall edges for support. His whole body crouched in the window frame like some blue, humanoid knick knack. He flexed his knees, preparing to leap high into the final, liberating swan dive.
But then the Master’s clock began to chime through its crypt door. Ching, ching!
Winston hesitated.
Ching, ching!
And then came the unwavering voice of the Master herself: “Winston!”
He stepped down from the sill.
***
When he entered the Master’s room, she was sitting up in bed. She looked terribly ill, but was as feisty and lucid as ever.
“What’s all that racket?” she demanded. “It’s enough to wake the dead.”
Winston crossed the room to her.
“It’s ... I ...”
She fixed him with a severe gaze.
“You were preparing a suicide jump, weren’t you?”
Winston could never lie to the Master.
“My purpose is at an end,” he said. “Why should I wait?”
Dr. Horvath mustered the strength to poke Winston’s chest. The soft composite layer registered a brief indent.
“You’ve got a very important purpose,” she said. “You have to keep going – for all of us.”
A racking cough halted her speech. She raised a spidery greenish-gray hand to her mouth. When she brought it down, bloody sputum covered one finger. She wiped it away with a hankie.
“Why do you think I had that shitload of data programmed into you?” she said. “You must keep our memory alive.”
Her Hungarian accent had become more pronounced, a sign that she was in a state of high agitation, and Winston had never heard her use such language before. He backed up a step.
“But how can I keep functioning,” he said. “Where can I go?”
“Back to Mech City, of course,” Dr. Horvath said. “You can’t survive long here. I’d take you myself, but I’m indisposed.”
Winston looked baffled.
“That’s a joke, Winston. I’d hoped that after three years you’d have evolved a sense of humor.”
“I’m sorry, it’s not my ... strong point,” Winston said.
“When you get there, see if Dr. Rackenfauz is still around. If anyone survived this disaster, it would likely be him. He’s a clever old bird.”
Dr. Horvath examined her blotched hands with something approaching amazement.
“Who’d have thought a plague would finish us off?” she said. “Humanity’s going out with a whimper.”
Winston collected himself to speak.
“I-I’m afraid that Charles is ...” he could not finish.
Dr. Horvath lowered her head. Tears ran down her cheeks and sobs wracked her emaciated frame. Winston would have gladly suffered permanent deactivation just to take her pain away.
Minutes dragged past before Dr. Horvath could speak again.
“You’ve got the best of us in your memory banks, Winston,” she said. “I want that to go on.”
Winston could no longer contain himself. Violent shaking took hold of him. Red Alert status flashed on his internal monitor.
“Toughen up, Winston,” Dr. Horvath snapped, “or you won’t survive!”
With an excruciating effort, Winston managed to regain control. The violent shaking receded to an agonized hum.
“See? You can do it,” Dr Horvath said. “Now get ready to go before it’s too late.”
“I ... I’ll try my best,” Winston said.
A softening came over Dr. Horvath’s face. She took hold of Winston’s hand.
“You were almost like a son to me, Winston. I’m sorry to leave you alone in this rotten world.”
The feeble strength of her grip on Winston’s pressure sensors nearly plunged him into system overload again.
Her eyes became distant. “I’d like some quiet time now – just me and God.”
“Yes, Master.”
He’d not called her that for months, but no reprimand came, just a melancholy little smile. Winston retreated through the door. He seemed no longer in control of his movements but under the command of some invisible puppeteer.
Dr. Horvath called out a final time: “I want to know that you’ve left on your mission. I want to hear that front door slam.”
3: Departure
Winston studied the road atlas with keen dismay – 250 kilometers to Mech City! How could he possibly get there on foot? Only specialized robots could operate power vehicles. A scholar model, like himself, lacked even the balance capability to pedal a bicycle. But ...
The Master has expressed her wishes, and I should obey.
Besides, what did he have to lose? With no one available to perform maintenance, he’d soon be an immobilized hulk. The chaos and increasing pollution of recent months had been very destructive to him. Contaminants had entered his physical plant, wearing out his moving parts.
Logic decreed that only one place might offer refuge – Mech City, where he’d been manufactured, where the Robotics Development Institute might still be functional. As always, the Master was right. And surely it was better to collapse on the road trying to achieve a noble objective than to blandly await his demise here. Vocalizing his goal invigorated his faltering resolve.
“Mech City it is!” he proclaimed.
He gathered items for the journey:
– photographs of the Master and Charles
– summary printouts of Dr. Horvath’s research papers
– a crayon picture drawn by Charles
– the road atlas
He found Charles’ toy magnetic compass in the playroom. All satellite navigation had broken down, or been destroyed, and Winston could not rely on the continuing functionality of his internal guidance systems. To these items he added spare power cells and a plastic shower curtain to protect himself from rain. Also a roll of duct tape.
“Duct tape covers a multitude of sins,” Professor Syms had once commented. “No gentleman is without it.”
Winston loaded everything into Charles’ knapsack with the lurid illustration of Gorzo the Adventure Robot emblazoned upon it.
In the picture, Gorzo stomped through a blasted landscape, firing death rays from his eyes. His loyal sidekick, Ajax, accompanied him. A gang of huge drone villain robots fled before the onslaught, shooting projectile weapons at the four meter high behemoth. Off to the side glowered Clawfurt, leader of the evil forces.
Charles had been crazy about the Gorzo stories, and so were a lot of older people. Winston had long since given up questioning the strange imaginings of humans.
He lifted the pack onto his shoulders and adjusted the straps.
He presented an extremely un-Gorzo like figure as he crept out of the house and onto the front porch. The knapsack seemed to overburden his stooped, creaky frame. He closed the door gently behind himself – then opened it again and s
lammed it hard. He stepped beneath Dr. Horvath’s bedroom window.
“I am leaving now, Master,” he called. “Farewell!”
Then out to the sidewalk. Winston scanned the vacant street, and his resolve began to wither. Lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses emerged from his library banks to buck him up:
Much have I seen and known – cities of men
... Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
But he had no friends any longer, and this “newer world” was a place of dread. He glanced back at the house and a flood of memories nearly overwhelmed him. With a supreme effort of will, he filed the Master and little Charles into a memory bubble and pushed it as far away from active awareness as possible where it would not hurt so much.
He began walking east.
The gray wash of early morning covered the street – dead lawns, abandoned cars, twisted trees. No bird song interrupted the silence. Not long ago, the sky had been bright and healthful for biological life forms, now it was leaden. The bustle of human comings and goings had fallen silent.
As he traversed the sidewalks, he continually broadcast a salutation: “Hello! Hello!” not bothering to move his mouth components, just projecting full volume from his speaker unit.
No one answered.
Kilometers of pavement moved under his feet, scarcely noticed. His badly maintained joints were objecting to such prolonged usage, and he had to slow his pace. He snatched up a large sheet of paper blowing along the street. It shouted in big red letters:
THE END IS UPON US!
“Yet I continue on.”
Winston discarded the poster, and it tumbled away through the ruined city.
***
He was moving along the main drag now. A ball of stark, cold light poked through the cloud cover – more like a dead moon than the health-giving sun. The wide street thrust ahead, barren of all life. Discarded containers and other rubbish littered the pavement. Signage hung broken and sagging with the rusty grate of a bus stop sign providing the only noise.
He inquired at every storefront and office building entry: “Hello? Is anybody here?”
Many immobilized robots cluttered the area, primitive types employed for such tasks as window washing or street cleaning. They’d simply used up their power resources and had stopped functioning. Winston also discovered a few advanced models lying broken on the pavement.
He knelt to examine one of the shattered hulks. It was a green “Humanite” model, similar to himself, with torso and limbs patterned on the homo sapiens template – the head as well, one would assume. The robot had evidently fallen, or jumped, from the adjacent multi-story building, as the cranium was destroyed and its components scattered. An arm had also broken off from the impact.
“Looks like that poor bastard is having a bad day,” a nearby voice said.
Winston nearly tumbled over with surprise. The voice laughed harshly, sarcastically.
Winston looked up to see a “metal man” robot staring down at him. Its form was angular and mechanistic, but the intelligence in its eyes pegged it as an advanced model.
“Yes – indeed he is,” Winston said.
“My name’s Rob,” the newcomer said. “I used to work at the power plant.”
Winston rose to his feet, joints creaking.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Rob. I’m Winston Horvath, scholar model.”
“Custom made job, eh?” Rob said.
“Well ... yes.”
Winston felt instantly wary of Rob’s forward manner and coarse language. The Master had always shielded him from such crudities. What sort of robot worked at a power plant, anyway?
“Where’re you going, man?” Rob asked.
“Uh, Mech City, where I was manufactured,” Winston said.
“Maybe I’ll go, too,” Rob said. “It can’t be any worse than this dump. We can keep each other company.”
“Yes ... of course.” Winston tightened his grip on the pack straps.
***
They came to a tiny, circular park built around a marble fountain from which water no longer spurted. Benches ringed this fountain, their colorful plastic veneers providing a contrast to the gray downtown backdrop.
Winston plopped onto a bench. Rob remained standing, hands on hips, dubiously surveying the place. His stiff, mechanical face registered something resembling a sour expression.
“Lousy place for a break,” he observed.
“Whatever.”
Winston tried to tune out his new companion. Maybe if I ignore him, he’ll disappear.
“I’ll wait outside,” Rob said.
He exited the park.
Winston felt slightly better away from the annoying metal man. He placed his hands over both eyes and brought up soothing images from his personal memory bank.
In his mind, he traveled to the beautiful waterfall he’d once visited with the Master and Charles. He replayed the calming roar of its cascade, like a deep, reassuring voice from another world. What was this emotion, love, he wondered.
His library banks were loaded with references to it – poems, stories, old romantic movies. Had Charles and Dr. Horvath loved him, did he love them in return? Or was this unprecedented churning in his circuits caused by something else?
Emotions were attributes not easily understood by robotic life forms. Still, how could one avoid absorbing them after three years in human company? Even lower biological life forms such as dogs and cats had emotions, didn’t they?
And Winston was certain that he did feel things. Right now he felt abandoned and adrift. A defensive numbness was spreading through him, reducing his agitation to a manageable level. He brought his hands down and glanced about the park.
Someone was sitting on a nearby bench. A human being!
The man wore a hat pulled low over his eyes and was reclining comfortably with both arms spread along the back of the bench. He was taking a nap, it appeared.
Winston resisted the urge to cry out. Instead, he approached the man with a deferential bow and spoke in a human scale volume, careful to form his lips around the words.
“Am I glad to see you, sir!”
The figure did not move.
“Sir?”
Winston touched the man’s shoulder. The man slid off the bench and sprawled onto the paving stones. The hat tumbled away revealing the lifeless face, but Winston dared not look at it. He retreated toward the fountain – two human corpses bobbed in the water.
“Ahhhh!”
Sensory overload assailed him. He covered his eyes with both hands and desperately tried to summon the waterfall image. It wouldn’t come. The death stench must be terrible here! No wonder Rob had left
Winston staggered out of the park, barely under control. He managed to lean himself against a lamp post moments before he would have tumbled over. Every sense receptor whirled. The entire city spun around him like a huge graveyard merry-go-round.
Rob slapped him on the back. “Welcome to the new world, pal!”
4: Into the Wasteland
Power lines once crowded with birds now hung limp and empty. Trees stretched their naked limbs toward a sky filled with low, yellowish-green clouds. A “coffin lid sky,” the Master would have called it.
Winston and Rob gained the eastbound highway bridge outside town. In spots the pavement underfoot had decomposed into loose pebbles, making the go a bit tenuous. A wind at their backs drove a stream of rubbish from the dead city – paper, plastic containers, bits of fabric.
A toy baby carriage rattled by in a particularly strong gust and tumbled off the bridge in front of them. A muffled splash rose up.
Winston peered down at the stream in its concrete channel. The baby carriage turned over in the sluggish current and sank from view. Vertigo gnawed at him.
A dive after the toy carriage would be so easy, wouldn’t it? All he’d have to do was step onto the retaining wall and ... He pulled his eyes away.
“Just a few things for the trip,” Winston replied,
“Let me see.”
Before Winston knew what was happening, Rob had yanked the pack off his shoulders.
“Please return it,” Winston said.
Rob unzipped the pack and rooted inside.
“Power cells!” he cried. “I can use these.”
“Please, I must protest,” Winston said. “I need those for extended walking.”
Winston tried to grab the pack.
“Relax, before I have to get rough,” Rob snarled.
He shoved Winston hard. Winston lost his footing on the loose pebbles and tumbled over backwards.
Rob laughed. “How’s the view down there, blue man? Not so high and mighty now, are you?”
The view was terrible: Winston lying stunned and exposed, looking up at the theft of his life-giving backpack. The Master’s voice returned from his memory bank.
“Toughen up, Winston!”
“Yes, Master.”
He seized a handful of pebbles and flung them into Rob’s face.
“Hey!” Rob dropped the pack.
With speed and power that he did not know he possessed, Winston grasped Rob’s legs.
“Let go, you – ” Rob cried.
Winston pitched him over the retaining wall.
“Ahhhh!”
Rob’s scream fractured the dead air. It followed him to the water where he plunged through to the concrete bed. He resurfaced downstream, lifeless, tangled in the baby carriage wreck.
“Oh, my,” Winston gasped.
His shock soon gave way to thoughts of exoneration. He’d done a necessary, if regrettable, act – like the time he’d swatted a spider off Charles’ arm. He hadn’t wanted to destroy Rob, had he? He’d been forced into it ... even the Master would have approved.
Then something else encroached. It almost seemed like pleasure – joy even. Winston pushed the unsettling sensation away from his consciousness and retrieved the backpack.
Ahead of him, the road shot off into the uncertain future. His mission, which had seemed so rational from the safety of his house, now lay naked in all its madness. How could he possibly traverse the gaping distance between himself and Mech City?
One step at a time, apparently. He finished crossing the bridge. The highway began to enter open countryside, but the wind still blew death howls from the city.
Whooooooo!
Winston moved as fast as he could, despite his protesting joints. The tangle of abandoned vehicles on the city outskirts thinned until only an occasional car or truck shared the road with him.