The Little Robot Who Waited (Part II)

A boy and dog story with a sci-fi twist

Welcome to Macy Sees The World where I share short fiction inspired by my travels from around the world! This is Part II of our latest sci-fi series. If you haven’t already, I recommend catching up on the first part before reading the rest of today’s post. Click here to read Part I (estimated reading time: 8 min).

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1. Personal Update

Hola friends! How has your week been?

On my end, I’m gearing up for my next overseas trip (location to be revealed next week—wheeeee!) and researching for our next fiction series. This one will feature a prominent royal family from eight hundred years ago and intersect the topics of romance, court politics, and faith. Hint 🤫: This family loves horses.

For those of you wondering, this particular story was inspired by two Doctor Who episodes, “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “The Girl Who Waited”. Both are heartwrenching in a it-makes-me-cry-but-I-see-why-it-has-to-end-like-this kind of way. We’ll veer back into the realm of travel-inspired fiction once we wrap up this series and once I begin nomading again next month.

For now, here’s Part II of “The Little Robot Who Waited”. Enjoy 🤗!

2. The Little Robot Who Waited (Part II)

The first thing the little robot noticed when his neural networks flickered back to life was the noise: flames crackling like shattered bones, wind whooshing through the air, and something heavy crashing to the ground not too far away.

His internal timekeeper told him that he’d been offline for half an hour. That was enough time for The Sterling to have covered at least a hundred thousand miles, enough time for Lucas and the rest of the archaeology team to have entered cryosleep for their months-long voyage back to the mothership.

With each passing second, his chances of contacting The Sterling grew slimmer and slimmer. It didn’t vex him that he was losing his only chance at being rescued—after all, who in their right mind would come back for a banged-up robot that should have been chucked into the incinerator years ago?—but it did vex him that he was losing his only chance of saying goodbye to Lucas.

As the blur in his right optic began to fade, he surveyed the crumpled metal frame clamped around his torso. A closer observation of the wreckage revealed a snapped windshield wiper and a set of charred leather seats. Piecing the puzzle together, he realized that he was jammed into the window of an overturned vehicle, his cylindrical body bent at an awkward angle like a can crushed in someone’s fist. Oddly enough, despite his position, he felt as if he was dangling in mid-air.

Charlie swiveled his head one-eighty degrees to assess his dilemma from a new angle. At first, his neural network could not classify what it was he was staring at. For the first few seconds, his optic could only focus on the lattice of rusted pipes that crisscrossed the air directly beneath him. Something was off. Why did the pipes appear to be hanging above nothing? Where was the ground?

He decided to zoom out for a wider vantage and as he did, he realized what serious trouble he was in. Beyond the pipes wound a vast river of darkness approximately 100 feet wide and infinitely deep. Tiny splotches of red gleamed faintly at the bottom, likely pieces of fiery debris that had fallen in while he had been offline.

His neural network flared as it scoured his Universal Data Library for the proper definition.

/Chasm — A deep, steep-sided fissure in the earth.

Charlie recalled Lucas’ parents deliberating whether to relocate the research site to more stable ground just last week—something about soil erosion and groundwater level. The force of burning rubble crashing into the weather-worn asphalt must have caused it to cave. /Sinkhole might have been a more accurate term, but he had no time to clarify.

He scanned the vehicle again and discovered that it was not, as he’d initially assumed, lying on a pile of rubble. Instead, it was balanced across the lattice of pipes. He magnified his vision to gauge the distance from here to the lip of the chasm. About twenty feet up. He then turned his attention back onto the vehicle. The trunk was pressed against a wall of earth to his right. If only he could find a way to crawl up—

Charlie wheezed with alarm as the pipes groaned and sagged, jolting the vehicle and causing him to slip a few inches from the window frame. The vehicle’s nose tilted towards the shadows, seesawing back and forth in a patient, taunting manner.

When he tried accessing his Grav field projector, he discovered that his battery hovered somewhere between four to five percent. That was just enough energy to power his Grav field for ten minutes minutes. Even less, if he wasn’t strategic with his movements. The pipes groaned again, like a beast in labor, and he felt the car tilt forward another ten degrees. He needed to act now.

Sinkhole

A shaft of blue light projected from the crown of his head and encased the vehicle’s hood.

5%

The metal plate creaked in protest as he ripped it from its hinge and tossed it into the abyss.

Before his Grav field could latch onto the engine, one of the pipes broke, causing the car to shudder. Charlie slipped a few more inches and watched with dismay as the metal chain around his left tread snapped. It swung against the side of the car, metal clinking against metal, like a freshly drawn noose. Concentrating his Grav field on the engine, he tried again.

4.7%

It was cumbersome, gutting a machine that weighed nearly a hundred times more than he did, and it was sloppy too. By the time Charlie finally tipped the engine, battery, and radiator overboard, the car looked as if a madman had mutilated its front with a chainsaw, leaving nothing but a few capillary wires and jugular pipes.

4%

The reduced weight stabilized the car, lessening the severity of its tilt but not by much. The pipes were rusted through and through. According to his analysis, the integrity of their structure barely skimmed 30%. Eventually, they will break, and the car will plummet, dragging Charlie along with it. At best, he had simply delayed the inevitable.

Even if he were to rip out everything else under the hood, the tires, the seats, leaving nothing but an empty shell, then what? Would he dangle here above the shadows until his battery fizzled and his body rusted into an unrecognizable mass of tin and wires?

He measured the length of the front and back doors, his neural network flaring as it pieced together a new plan, a daring plan, an irrational plan.

Overhead, the flames continued to crackle, a little gentler now but still as pertinacious as before. So long as ash smothered the sky, he’d have no chance of recharging above five percent, and so long as his battery remained depleted, he ran the risk of shutting down unexpectedly.

On low power mode, his neural network was finicky at best and erratic at worst. However, for this new plan to work, he could not—must not lose control of his Grav field. Wavering, for even half a second, could cause everything to go tumbling, literally, into the abyss.

Logic dictated that the plan with an estimated success rate of less than two percent was not worth trying. But logic also dictated that paradoxically logic alone is insufficient for fulfilling his utmost directive, which is serving Master Lucas. He pulled up a recording of the boy’s final words:

I’ll come back for you, Charlie! I promise!

/Promise - A declaration or assurance that one will do a particular thing or that a particular thing will happen.

Will happen…Will happen…Something as definitive as a promise parallels the legitimacy of a command. It will govern Charlie’s every act until either the promise is fulfilled or his master releases him from the terms of the imperative, negating the constraints of his programming in light of a more powerful force.

Some might call this force “obedience” while others call it “lunacy”. But Charlie simply classified it as “faith"—faith in his master’s character, faith in those two small but earth-rattling words “I promise”. And so the little robot forged on.

It would be no use beginning his escape on this side of the vehicle. Its wheels were balanced right on the edge of the lattice, offering no room for escape. Although he couldn’t see what the lattice looked like on the other side of the vehicle, he surmised that there must have been more space, perhaps even enough for him to roll across.

Charlie began pushing himself backward into the car, grinding his treads along the edge of the window while shimmying his torso at precise angles. It was a feat he could not have accomplished earlier when the car was swaying, at least not without the risk of slipping forward and falling. With one final push, he fell onto a pile of disintegrating leather and cotton, the vestiges of what had once been a car seat.

He scanned the inside to see if there might be anything he could use for his escape then clambered over the gearshift towards the opposite window. He gazed out from there. As he had suspected, the car was about two feet from the edge of the lattice on this side, giving him just enough space to roll from here to the back of the car.

Seeing that the gaps in the lattice were wider than his circumference, he tore off the driver’s door with his Grav field and carefully laid it across the pipes. Once perched on the door, he split his Grav field into two beams, the first one securing the driver’s door in place and the second one encasing the passenger door. After tearing off the passenger door, he laid that on the pipes in front of him. He rolled forward, latched onto the driver’s door behind him, shifted that to the front, and rolled forward again, repeating this pattern until he’d reached the chasm wall.

3.6%

His optic flickered, and his control over the Grav field weakened. The passenger door teetered on the edge of the lattice before finally giving in to gravity. Charlie watched as it disappeared with a wink into the shadows then promptly tore off the passenger door on the other side. What’s lost was lost.

Now, for the hard part. Between here and the lip of the chasm stretched twenty feet of craggy earth. The only way up, he reasoned, was to ascend at a steady incline of fifteen degrees. At that rate, he should be able to reach the surface before his battery ran out. However, should something go awry, and he failed to complete his mission…he wheezed sadly as he thought of Lucas currently hurtling away from him at lightspeed. If only there was a way for him to show Lucas that he had been faithful to the end.

The boy had worked odd jobs all summer, so he could buy Charlie from his parents’ lab and save him from the scrapyard. Once Charlie became his, Lucas spent hours lubricating his joints and repairing his cracked treads as if he were the most expensive robot in the world rather than an unwanted relic. In the evenings, he would snuggle close and whisper to Charlie about his day, not in the way a scientist might speak to a machine—dry and unaffected—but in the way a friend confides in a friend—rambling, unguarded, and sincere.

/Faith - Complete trust or confidence in someone or something, often without definitive proof

Lucas used to tell him that if he wanted to truly understand the meaning of a word, he needed to look beyond its definition. He needed to look to experience. Charlie hadn’t understood what the boy had meant at the time, but as his neural network flared, casting the word /Faith in a new light, he sensed that he was getting close.

The little robot played the recording of Lucas’ last words as he worked.

I’ll come back for you, Charlie!

I promise!

I’ll come back for you, Charlie!

I promise!

He began by connecting one edge of the passenger door to the driver’s door, on which he was still perched, and pressing the other edge against the chasm at a fifteen-degree incline. This created a ramp, by which he could ascend a few feet. After rolling onto the passenger door, he shifted the driver’s door to the front, tipped it fifteen degrees, and rolled onto that. Like before, he repeated this ritual, placing one door in front of another, and slowly but surely, driven by faith, powered by the sun, lifted himself towards freedom.

Up Next…

3. Let’s chat 💬

• Do you think Charlie made it out of the chasm or do you think his battery will fail before then?

• Were you able to easily visualize Charlie’s situation and his journey out of the chasm or was the description challenging to understand?

• Is there something you’ve lost from your childhood (a toy, a pet, a memento, etc.) that you still think about and miss to this day?

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