The Sentimental Robo

The final days of Earth were doused in orange. The sky scattered the suns’ light in red, the dust engulfed the air in beige and then heat set the forests on fire. Earth was dying. The Global Space Research Organisation or GSRO had come up with a prediction of seven centuries of doomsday carnage. Prophets and astrologists around the world started to make wild claims to sell their talisman. Nostradamus’s prophesy started to do rounds on the internet saying “ In the feeble lists comes great calamity throughout the world for seven centuries. The fire in the ship will save man, plague, and captivity for the made; Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn warning, empty world, empty its days!”

Buy N Large had joined hands with Space X to transport remaining humans to a journey of the cosmos while the load lifter robots cleaned the earth. It was a brilliant plan. Earth would self heal while the humans voyaged around the galaxy. A total of 34,000 compact load lifters for each quadrant was sanctioned and I was the production engineer. The very first prototype was a perfect little machine with neural network systems to assist artificial intelligence. It had a massive database of all the elements to recognize and categorize waste. Proto 1, I called it and used it personally as an assistant. It would roam around with me on its all-terrain wheels much like a miniature military tank, taking notes and making odd squeaks and clangs. Occasionally, it played media files for me. I wondered if it could be taught anything more than just categorize. So one fine day, I set about with a screwdriver and a ratchet to open up its cranial drive and upgrade the memory. I installed an additional five hundred terabytes of the drive for a database. I installed it such that the neural network would use this extra space as it’s neurons. Well, it certainly helped. Proto - 1 could virtually follow any command I gave. It became a constant companion and I used it as the rugged home companion series, Marty 7’s. I was amazed at what this machine could achieve and this one incident strikes me as significant enough. It was my birthday and I had taken a day off work. I flew over to the shopping district and parked a thousand meters away from the Shopping zone. I bought myself a brand new microbe obligator. As I crossed the terrestrial transmit road which was quite busy as wheel-based terrestrial transmits(TT) were back in fashion after a massive dust storm had rendered the unmanned locomotive servers in San Francisco useless and B&L saw no point in rebuilding them.

As I crossed the road, a two-wheel-drive hit me and sent me flying towards the pavement. Luckily my gravity repulsive safety jacked kicked in action but was not lucky enough for me to not twist my ankle. As I lay there, shocked and unable to move, proto 1 rushed past the TT road, shoved the onlookers aside, and crouched over me. I could make out a faint ticking noise accompanied by a glistening of its camera probes that acted as its inputs. I was taken aback! It was mimicking human emotions to please me.

We had clear instructions from B&L to decrease production time and not to indulge in any activity otherwise unprofitable. I too understood the dangers the human race faced and thought nothing of it. When finally the load lifters were deployed, renamed as Waste Allocation Load-Lifter: Earth Class or WALL-E for short, I deployed proto - 1 as one of those. It rather looked sad when it joined the march of the robots and I could swear I saw him turn back and steal a glance at me. Humans had to evacuate all the quadrants of the earth while the WALL-E’s cleaned it!