The Little Robot Who Waited (Part IV)

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 the final installment of our latest sci-fi series. If you haven’t already, I recommend catching up on the first three parts before diving into today’s post.

The Little Robot Who Waited (Part I)

The Little Robot Who Waited (Part II)

The Little Robot Who Waited (Part III)

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Now, on with the show!

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By the time the temperature began ticking back up and the bees resumed their honeymaking with vigor, the little robot was in worse shape than ever before. Whereas it had once taken him half an hour to cover a distance of two miles, now it took him nearly an hour, and that was only if he exerted himself to the maximum. The bolts connecting his treads to his torso regularly required tightening and his neck joints would no longer rotate properly, leaving his head stuck in a forward-facing position most of the time.

Once, not long after he’d decided to make his home among the bees, he’d chanced upon a mirror inside a department store. Amidst the overturned racks of disintegrating clothing and heaps of trampled household knickknacks, he saw himself clearly for the first time in years—a crumpled, scratched-up thing that had long outlived its purpose.

He could hardly even haul ten pounds of artifacts back to the bee house without his Grav field failing at least twice on the journey. Apart from the Prometheus flame flickering in his left optic, what difference was there between him and all the other junk that humanity no longer cared for?

He recalled the way Lucas would press his forehead against his every night, the way he’d patiently wait for the little robot to catch up, never reprimanding him for his speed, the way he had risked his life to save Charlie from the inferno. But the truth is Lucas will not remain a child forever. He’ll grow up. Move on. Learn to value things based on numbers and utility just as his ma had. A grown-up is not bound by a child’s promise as he had learned.

He remembered the first day she had unboxed him. She’d been eighteen at the time, a fresh recruit at the Sterling Research Cooperative. The softness of girlhood had only just begun to melt from her features.

“Oh, look at you,” she’d whispered, tracing the rim of his optics. “You’re beautiful. We’ll take good care of you.”

Then, over the years, as new models joined the lab, the pride in her eyes dimmed each time she looked at him until it froze into a hard glint of vexation and pity.

Can’t even tell the difference between a Ferishlock and a Semboln Retriever.

That CX model? Don’t bother. Use the ISX model instead. It’s faster at calibrating. Saves us time.

Paid 700 Holz for him and now look. Useless…

To prevent another accident such as the one he’d suffered last winter from happening again, he’d developed a system for detecting and disabling traps leftover from The Collapse. His methods were imperfect and warranted improvement, but insofar as keeping himself from getting blown to smithereens, they worked flawlessly. Each time he explored a new district in the city, he’d first scope out the buildings for traps. The detecting phase alone sometimes took days, even weeks, but with how fragile he’d become, caution topped his list of priorities.

As the days wore on, the bee house grew to resemble a miniature museum. Memories of a forgotten age populated every inch of the bee house, from the armrests of sofas to the top shelves of basement cupboards.

Some of Charlie’s favorites included a silk scarf whose threads still radiated its owner’s rose perfume; a lunch pail with pictures of laughing bunnies plastered onto its handle and the name “Ethan” stitched onto the back; a long, white dress with wine stains down its front and a trail of dirty fingerprints choking its neckline; a dollar bill with someone’s phone number scrawled in pencil to the left of George Washington; a scrap of paper inside a shredded wallet bearing the words, “Happy Mother’s Day! From Lily to Mom.”

He selected each artifact with meticulous care, analyzing its purpose, quality, and material to maximize the time he spent expanding his Universal Data Library. However, there was one category of artifacts that he collected without discrimination and that was photographs. Torn, stained, laminated, paper, crumpled, faded—he wanted them all.

Fortunately, one common thread among Pre-Collapse humanity was people’s desire to fill their homes with the faces of loved ones. Regardless of whether Charlie explored a ratty apartment in the inner city or a single-family home on the outskirts of town, he would find photos every time. Sometimes they proudly adorned people’s living rooms in heavy, ornate frames. Sometimes he’d have to dig through boxes of clutter to find a few, crinkled clippings. But they were always there.

In the beginning, he collected the photos as a way of augmenting his research. Snapshots of people interacting with each other or handling Pre-Collapse artifacts provided rich insights into the ordinary lives of an extraordinary time when humans still roamed the earth and deep space exploration was a thing of the imagination.

But as the wheel of time turned, Charlie began to collect photos for his own pleasure as much as for Lucas’s. By the time the winter frosts returned and the bees began dying in droves once more, the little robot developed the habit of laying out his daily photo collection each evening in the bee room and sifting through them with reverent care. Most days he’d find at least a dozen or so. But on some days, such as this one, he’d only find a handful.

There was a photo of children wearing sleek headsets and waving their arms in the air, engaged in some game Charlie could not decode. A photo of a father, mother, and son standing knee-deep in a pond, each holding a long pole that extended towards the water. A photo of friends gathered in front of a pastel castle on a sunny day, their arms tossed over each other’s shoulders, their faces aglow with the day’s exertion. And lastly, a photo of a dog licking the freckled nose of a toddler with honey-brown hair, her face frozen in laughter.

Despite the rapturous joy on the subjects’ countenance, there was something haunting about each photograph that Charlie’s programming could not place. Just as he could not identify mixed emotions nor could he decipher the dual realities fossilized in each pixel.

Could something such as a child bonding with her pet veil a more sinister truth? He examined the photo from different angles, peered at it in the dark and the light, and even tried peeling the film from the photo to no avail. It didn’t help that his vision was still impaired from the accident last winter. Defeated, he swept the photos into the safe he kept by the missile and decided he’d try to crack the mystery again the following night.

But an answer wouldn’t surface until next fall when he returned to the apartment where he’d found the photo of the girl and the dog.

He approached at a snail’s pace, each rotation of his treads draining his energy more than the last. Worse, he could not seem to charge fast enough to replenish himself and thus had to pause every half hour during the five-mile trip to allow his battery to stabilize. Though he’d left the bee house before dawn, by the time he’d reached the girl’s apartment the asphalt burned with the day’s heat.

As Charlie rested on the apartment doorstep, he wondered if the aging of artificial lifeforms was all that different from the aging of natural ones. Back when he had first joined Sterling Labs, there had been an eight-five-year-old professor with such loose-fitting skin that everyone joked it might slip off her frame if she so much as stumbled. Her face strained with each step she took as if simply having joints pained her, and her hands quaked relentlessly under all circumstances.

Then one day, she stopped showing up to work. Hardly a week later, a willowy youth with a timid laugh filled her usual station. The other researchers explained to the newcomer that the old professor had been “sent to bed”, and she’d nodded in return, her lips pressed into a solemn line. She required no further clarification. Even Charlie had seen enough of The Pandora by then to know what they really meant. Resources were limited, and the ship was always short of fertilizer.

The girl’s apartment looked exactly as he had left it last winter. A square of sunlight streaming through a hole in the ceiling warmed the threads of a tattered rug. Bicycle pieces lay scattered by the TV like a dismembered corpse. Some tennis shoes lay in the corner, the bite marks of an overly curious puppy still visible along the heel. And everywhere, dust motes—millions of them, cavorting through the air like snowflakes in a blizzard.

He was here in a final attempt to investigate the haunting quality of the photograph. If the photo itself could not provide him with clues, perhaps the girl’s home could. As he limped into the living room, a rustling in the kitchen stopped him in his tracks. He was used to small critters such as lizards or centipedes scampering at the sound of his arrival, but the rustling sounded louder than usual.

Before he could proceed any further, a brown creature with immense antlers leaped out from behind the kitchen island and darted for the front door. It paused there for a second, scrutinizing Charlie with mistrustful eyes, before vanishing into the streets. His neural network sparked as he stared after it.

/WHITETAIL DEER — A North American hoofed grazing animal with branched bony antlers that are shed annually and typically borne only by the male; Distinguished by the white fur around its eyes and nose, on the neck, and on its belly; Status: Last sighted 36 years ago in 2320 AD.

Charlie updated the status to reflect this most recent encounter. It was moments such as these that he most acutely felt his loss of connection with the rest of humanity adrift aboard The Pandora. Despite expanding his Universal Data Library daily, he knew that his efforts would only prove fruitful if he could communicate his findings to his higher-ups. If none of his thousands of photos and recordings ever reached The Pandora, it’d be as if he’d never spent any time on earth at all. He recalled the Prometheus flame flickering in his optic then limped towards the kitchen.

He’d planned to start from the farthest corner of the house—the pantry—and wound his way through the rest of the house. As he rounded the island, he caught sight of something that resembled a fraying rope. On a closer look, he realized that it was much too flat, much too…familiar. He scanned its material and confirmed its composition. 100% organic material. 100% human DNA.

He drew closer and picked it up with his Grav field, turning it round and round. He recognized the shade of that hair. Honey brown. The same as the girl’s in the photograph. His neural network flared. The hair flowed from a chunk of leathery flesh flecked with blood. When he set it under the square of sunlight, the strands burned with an anguished halo like that of a newborn star. It was stunning. It was revolting. It was epiphanic.

As Charlie prepared to head out the kitchen door, he caught sight of a red hair clip beneath the stove. It had a plastic smiley face glued to one end. He picked that up, clipped it to the girl’s hair, and proceeded to the back garden. There, he found a spade and started digging. Once finished, he dropped the hair into the earth and began filling the hole.

He did this not because he understood the importance of human burial but because of what he’d learned on The Pandora about the human life cycle. When you’ve finished contributing to the advances of the human race with your mind, you contribute to their nourishment with the minerals in your body. From where you receive life is where you must return it. Charlie understood enough to realize that the girl received life from this earth. So, to the earth, she must return.

The following months slipped past Charlie like air through a vent—hazy, mellow, and forever elusive. Though years later he could recount everything with the striking clarity that only an artificial mind could do, the sensory details of this period seemed perpetually out of focus. Perhaps it was because his neural network had at last begun to decay. Perhaps it was because his daily routine varied so little that trying to distinguish the idiosyncracies of day 689 from day 811 exhausted too much energy for too little return. Or perhaps it was both.

By the time the anniversary of Lucas’ departure arrived for the fifth time, Charlie’s collection of artifacts extended across four townhomes, the first floor of a department store, and a small warehouse overlooking the sinkhole that had nearly claimed his existence. But this was not the only change that took place at the end of these long five years.

As the leaves began to shiver on their branches and the sky grew moody with clouds, Charlie encountered his second deer. It happened on a gloomy afternoon, the kind where the light shone so weakly through the clouds, visibility was the same at noon as it was at twilight. He’d returned home early that day to avoid the oncoming storm and had heard a nibbling sound.

A doe stood in the hallway just outside the bee room. She was hardly taller than Charlie and likely less than a year old. Her neck curved in an elegant arch as she peered over her shoulder at the newcomer. Curiosity glimmered in her eyes. Charlie inched forward. The doe started at the sound of the creaking floorboards and whipped her head to the front. With a flick of her tail, she sprinted out the window of the bee room.

The doe returned to the bee house again the next week, keeping to the shrubbery in the front, then again two weeks after that. Though she never allowed Charlie to come nearer than ten feet without bolting, he appreciated her company, especially in the late afternoons when he could push his body no further and was forced to idle away at home.

As much as he cherished these moments of companionship, they also accentuated the despondency of his situation. During the hours when the deer faded into the local park and the bees fell silent under the lull of the night, the little robot would keep himself company by playing recordings of Lucas’ voice. In the beginning, he played them chronologically, beginning with the day he’d met Lucas. But as time wore on, he began to play soundbites out of order, his favorite being Lucas’ final words to him.

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

He played this recording as he tinkered with the gears of a smashed grandfather clock. He played it as he sifted through his photograph collection, remembering the ways those strands of honey brown had burned in the sun. He played it as he rested in his shelter of books, waiting and listening for those familiar footsteps to appear at last.

The sun shone with tantalizing brilliance the morning Charlie woke up and found that he could no longer move his treads, not even half an inch. He watched the bees flying freely in and out of the room for a long time before consulting his internal timekeeper. Twenty-eight years, three months, eleven days, five hours, sixteen minutes, and one second. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Age had crept over him the way the shadows of dusk crept over the earth—a patient assault that happened minute by minute, unassuming at first then violently, all at once, cracking his joints, fraying his wires, till he was no better than the metal can that Lucas had kicked down the gutter on their last day together.

Charlie latched onto the safe with his Grav field and twisted open its door. A torrent of photographs cascaded onto the floor before him. After a few minutes of digging, he found the picture at last. There she was, the girl with the honey-brown hair, her nose forever scrunched, her lips curled into that same smile she’d worn for more than a hundred years.

It was so obvious to him now: the duality of innocence and tragedy that had skittered around the periphery of his consciousness for so long. To be sure, Charlie still was not able to reconcile how tragedy and innocence could coexist in one picture. He saw beyond the smiles just enough to hypothesize that perhaps they were both there.

He thought of that rope of hair he’d found in her apartment. Where was the rest of her, he wondered. Scattered around her neighborhood like lost pieces of a jigsaw puzzle? Beneath her smile, beneath the smiles of every photograph he had ever collected, glinted the sharp scythe of death in the forms of disease, madness, fire, and shrapnel.

Had the photos he’d found displayed the worst of human sufferings they would not have captured the horrors of The Collapse with such clarity as this photo of the girl and her dog. It was a magnifying glass into humanity’s sins, of the hope and the future that they stole from her. His Grav field flickered, and the girl fluttered to the ground.

The months wore on like a curtain making a slow and final descent. As the air dampened with the promise of a particularly harsh winter, tiny green oases sprouted between the floorboard's cracks. Moss crept up Charlie’s body, mottling his dull grey facade with brilliant specks of green and brown. A leafy plant that he’d assumed would become a dandelion stretched into long, delicate vines. By spring, green tendrils cocooned the missile so completely, that it was hard to believe it had ever been there at all.

Charlie soaked up the sunlight streaming in through the windows. He listened to the bees droning sleepily to the sussurus of rain. He watched nature paint his precious artifacts a slick green. He allowed himself to flow with the stream of time without lifting his head to check on his location. His timekeeper ticked. Another year passed. Then another.

One time the doe returned to the bee room. She did not have the same cautious demeanor as she had the first time. Her neck had grown thick and sturdy like a tree bough. She strolled past the fallen chandelier and the dozens of knickknacks crowding the floor. She sniffed at the cocoon of vines and began tearing it apart, tendril by tendril. When she finished, she laid down between the missile and Charlie, beneath the droning of the bees, and breathed deeply. Her breath warmed the little robot in a way that he had not felt warmed in a long time.

Not long after that, Charlie decided to enter sleep mode for the last time. Ten years and not a single ship had entered Earth’s orbit during all that time. Charlie would have been able to detect their presence if one had. Perhaps humanity really had given up on their native planet. Perhaps all his efforts at collecting artifacts for Lucas’ future study and recording the critters that had slowly slunk back into the city were for nothing.

His master would be twenty-two by now. Grown-up. No longer a boy but a man. No longer bound to the promises he made as a child. Moved on from Charlie the way his Ma had moved on. The little robot played that familiar voice as he shut down his systems one by one.

You’re CX-948? Hey, I’m Lucas. Don’t be afraid. You’re not going to the incinerator. Not today. Not ever. I’m going to find a way to make you mine. Then, you’ll be safe. CX-948…CX…doesn’t have much of a ring to it. How about we try…Charlie? That was the name of my great-great grandpa. He was one of the last to leave the earth. I wonder what it’s like back there. Earth. I have a marble that kind of looks like it. Come on, I’ll show you. Don’t worry about what Ma or Pa might say. You and me? We stick together. That’s what friends do.

The world succumbed to darkness as Charlie turned off his optic. In a minute, his neural network will silence, sinking him into a state of unconsciousness. Only the distress signal pulsing like a heartbeat in the back of his head will remain active. He embedded all his recordings as well as his approximate location into this signal with the hope that it might still somehow reach Lucas and the rest of humanity one day.

Charlie was not programmed to feel love, but as Lucas’ voice embraced him one last time, he knew that he had received more than enough of it to understand why humans longed for love above everything else.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

Twelve Years Later…

“Charlie?”

The word grazed the edge of the little robot’s consciousness. Something stirred within him. Something he hadn’t felt for a very long time. He reached towards the speaker’s voice like a castaway reaching towards a lifeline. However, every time he thought he’d come close, it would slip through his clutch, leaving him stranded once more.

“Charlie? Hey, there. It’s alright. I’ve got you. Shhhh. I’ve got you.”

This time, he did not hesitate. As the voice grew nearer and brighter, he leaped towards it. Gripping it with all his might, he felt himself steadily rising out of the darkness. Light flickered above. So weak. So tentative. Like a flame that might go out at any moment. It broadened into a line then a horizon, dazzling and splendid. A veritable jewel in the sun, those eyes that he’d waited decades to see.

“Hi, boy. Hi.”

As his systems returned online, he felt the soothing touch of someone’s palm on his head. The texture was soft and warm—a child’s touch.

Charlie stared, zooming in and out, testing his optics. Those were Lucas’ eyes, alright, but it wasn’t Lucas who greeted him. It was a girl about seven or eight. Her cheeks glowed with the rosy sheen of someone who’s just been running. Outside the window to their left, the clouds shifted. A beam of light burst into the room, illuminating her explosion of honey-brown curls. She smiled, revealing a gap in her front teeth.

“Wait here!” Turning on her heels, she cried, “Daddy! Daddy! You did it! He’s online!”

Charlie studied his environment while he waited. He was in a lab of some sort containing a motley of ongoing experiments. An assortment of leafy plants occupied one corner, connected by a tangle of multicolored tubes pumping liquid into their soil. Rows of tables bearing delicate glass instruments stood sentry by the door. His side of the lab harbored a collection of broken-down machines.

The walls glistened like fresh snow. Bees hummed just out of earshot. For a second he wondered if he was back on The Pandora. But no, this was earth alright. The sunlight streaming in through the window confirmed it.

Footsteps resounded not too far off. He heard plants rustling then a gruff voice say, “How is Hive Twelve doing today?”

Someone else replied, “Still need to test for traces of the Nova-2 strain, but so far so good.”

“How about Hive Sixty-Six?”

“Negative results for both the Nova-2 and the Nova-1. Same thing with Hive Fifty-Nine and Hive Fourteen.”

The footsteps were getting louder. The two white coats passed Charlie as they headed for the door.

“When do you think we’ll be ready to call The Pandora down?”

“A year. Maybe two.”

“How many do you think will want to come? Ten thousand? Twenty?”

“You’re worried people would still rather try their luck at the colonies.”

“Well, earth isn’t the most popular choice right now.”

“No, but I think it will be. People are homesick. We were made for Earth. Not some doppelganger thousands of lightyears away.

“To think we’d have given up on earth if Lucas hadn’t found that signal. Do you think his bot knew what he was doing when he was recording those bees?”

The voices grew faint as the door shut behind them.

“Can’t say. But I’ll tell you what—never in a million years would anyone have guessed a beat-up thing like that would change the course of human history.”

“No, guess not.”

Charlie rolled forward cautiously. His gait has never felt so smooth, not even when he’d been brand new. A sheet of reflective metal leaned against a locker by the front door. He approached it the way a dog might approach a stranger, hesitant yet curious. The Prometheus flame in his optics glowed steadier than it had in years. The plating protecting his torso no longer bent at an inverted angle. He turned to the left and the right. He shone as if he’d just stepped off the assembly line. When he tried to speak, he found that someone had replaced his old voicebox with a new one.

The front door opened. A shadow fell over him and the little robot looked up.

“Charlie?”

At first glance, the man standing before him bore little resemblance to the Lucas he’d known. Bearded chin. Brown locks flecked with grey drooped into his eyes. A deep, jagged scar ran from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his right jaw. But beneath these superficial changes, beneath the flimsy mask of manhood hovered the faithful spirit of the boy.

Lucas crouched down and pressed his forehead against Charlie’s. The little robot felt the man tremble. Gently at first then harder, as if he were a building about to fall. Something wet and warm dripped onto his optic as Lucas tightened his embrace. Tears.

“I’ve missed you, buddy. I’ve missed you so much.”

Lucas pulled away from Charlie. There, in the lines etched around his eyes and the riverlet glistening on his cheeks, the little robot saw something he never thought he’d see. Emotions. So many of them. Woven together like threads in a tapestry without beginning or end, creating something new, something dynamic and ever-shifting, something that no amount of words could capture because it wasn’t meant to be explained but rather felt. For the first time in Charlie’s existence, he did not need to define what he saw to understand what it meant.

“Master Lucas,” he said.

Lucas smiled. “Charlie.”

The girl with the explosive curls peered at Charlie over Lucas’ shoulder.

“This is Reia.” Lucas squeezed her hand. “Charlie was my best friend when I was a kid. I bet he has a ton of amazing stories to tell.”

The girl canted her head as she stared Charlie up and down. Then, she broke into that same gap-toothed smile from earlier. “Daddy told me a lot about you. He says you like bees. Also marbles. I have one that looks like the earth. Blue and white. Wanna see?”

Charlie looked from Lucas to Reia, from father to daughter, from his past to his future.

“I’d love to.”

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Let’s Chat!

1. The story went through a lot of time jumps at the end when Charlie was dying, so I’m eager to get your feedback. Did the pacing feel too slow or too fast or just right during this section?

2. How did you feel about Charlie reuniting with Lucas at the end? Was this the ending you’d been expecting or did it feel too sudden?

3. What parts of the story emotionally resonated with you the most? In what way?

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