The Humanoid

1

The twenty-second century anno domini was seven years in when a rod of purple lightning cut through an enormous dark cloud sauntering past a most orange, most arid landscape in the early afternoon, and struck a humanoid machine lying on the ground. Why it did and did not fall instead upon the other robotic parts or forms strewn all around this particular machine can’t be explained.

Be that as it may, the thing gave a great jolt, remarkably without exploding or splitting apart. Its old battery appeared to get a charge, and within seconds a combination of revolving gears, computer drives and cooling fans began to rumble beneath its rusty chest plate, on which the faint outline of the acronym, VE.R.RO (pronounced Verro), one could, with some difficulty, distinguish.

There, for several years, in a location appearing half wasteland, half desert, among dilapidated warehouses and piles of discarded electronic parts, the humanoid machine, or Verro, had lain inactive and inoperative. But now the oval glasses serving as its eyes were reflecting light, as the tiny lights inside flickered on. Its metallic phalanges were flexing. Its legs, built of rods and valves, run through with thick wiring, twitched once, then again, and began to rise. There was a sharp series of clicks and clacks before the entire machine was standing upright. And it stood still, like a teenage private piously awaiting orders.

It was equipped with advanced artificial intelligence, but having been created expressly to assist, and not lead, men and women in vehicle repairs, it could not take action without explicit human instructions. It therefore stood in the same spot it rose up in, and would not move, exposed to the regular powerful gusts of wind carrying fine sand.

An hour passed. And another was half done when the sun began to sink, somewhat visibly through the thick, perennial haze blanketing the sky, beneath a tangerine horizon.

Then, on a sudden, Verro perceived a rustling of foilage on its far left, accompanied by a tiny tinkling. Scattered around were tawny, prickly bushes that subsisted well in that region, and the machine surmised that something living was brushing by one of them. Because it could be a human being in need of assistance, it turned its head slightly to look directly at the person possibly there.

Into view, however, stepped a dog of about twenty pounds, unkempt, thin, and brisk, which seemed to be smoking out rodents or insects, pointing his snout in opposite directions with desperate intention. The dog looked now beneath a bush, now behind a pile of rocks, and now underneath an empty aluminum can, traversing a few feet in one way before doing so in another, all the while approaching the humanoid. It was possibly not lacking a master, the machine deduced, because a blue collar girded his neck, from which dangled a small copper bell.

Before long, the dog, indeed an odd mix of breeds given his short legs and shorter ears, was sniffing within a couple of feet of the machine, confident, perhaps, after seeing so many others like it inert and broken, in that this one was no different. Verro, on the other hand, had concluded that, because what it had seen was a dog and clearly not a human being, it would be better served by facing forwards again, in case the latter should pass by.

The coils and hinges comprising its neck had not been lubricated for a very, very long time so its movement resulted in a set of high-pitched scratches. So close had the dog gotten that this noise startled him perfectly out of its mission for food.

Jumping back, he raised its ears and tail, and gave a terrible bark. But lacking an obvious threat with the machine being as still and as odorless as a rock, the animal turned to growling after a couple of moments, and, after a few more, scurried to less uncertain environs, the patter of its paws mixed with the furious tinkling of the bell from its collar.

This incident with the hungry, short dog, however, along with the now two hours wait, introduced Verro to the urgency of a decision between two courses of action: To either continue waiting for a human being or to go in search of one to whom it could be of use.

Its battery would, sooner rather than later, need another charge, and a human being could very well facilitate that. Waiting there too long could mean powering off and waiting forever. So it chose to walk.

2

Verro struggled at first, not having anticipated any hassle with placing one foot in front of the other.

Its hip and knee joints would not budge, so it had to divert to them additional wattage. The pistons inside its thighs became louder as they rose and sank. A metallic crunch could then be heard from its knees.

Fortunately, given the ingenuity with which a machine meant to be in regular motion was designed, it gained speed every twenty yards or so. The movement helped its limbs shed oxidized matter, and the momentum helped its gears tread each other more easily.

As Verro’s laser-laden retinas scanned for people, it also had a chance to fully appreciate its surroundings. It had forgotten where it was, or rather it had not stored much video-capture of them in its long-term memory.

Warehouses, garages, and workshops long since out of use or abandoned. Meandering irregular dirt paths. Heaps of junk hardware and scrap robotics. Occasional empty food containers or torn pieces of clothing. And over everything sat thick, gritty layers of fine orange sand. Sandstorms must pass through there regularly and be the predominant natural phenomenon.

On the whole, the humanoid machine concluded to be in an industrial park or a manufacturing hub. A distressing detail of everything it observed, however, was that there was no telltale sign of human presence, as if human beings had left, not to return, or ceased to exist, and that not lately at all.

Fear, that is, a programming for self-preservation, induced the machine to be more exact and intense in its search for a person. Where it paced, it now trotted, putting into use its ability to magnify miniscule or distant objects with incredible results, and it looked about much more diligently.

Before long, it found itself zooming in at what appeared to be a domicile, a place like a house, of multiple rooms, in which there could be valuable information. And it was attached to a warehouse but raised a story, to be reached only by an exterior stairway.

Up the machine went cooly, dreading no monsters or ghouls or ghosts, lighting its way with the three small diodes inserted in its forehead. The sun had completely set an hour earlier, plunging the humanoid in perfect darkness. Perfect if we ignore the twinkles and sparkles of the sea of stars above, and the brilliant half moon.

The door, iron-clad and heavy, to the ostensible home was slightly ajar. In walked the robot, pushing it back and stepping on debris of all kinds. It directly entered a living room. Shattered China, a broken plastic chair, a shredded pair of jeans, a misshapen spoon, a picture frame. This last Verro stooped and picked up. It held an actual paper photograph, something it had never handled before. In colors that once were vibrant, it depicted a man, someone in his thirties, and his dog resting on the top of a large sand dune.

The man smiled happily at the camera, the dog, a Golden Retriever, looking about with its tongue undulating out. How long ago must have this scene been captured? The sky in the picture was clear and bright blue, not an interminable oranze haze as now.

It put it down and continued looking about. A broken monitor, another broken plastic chair. It walked in deeper into the place and entered one of the continguous rooms. A heavily soiled mattress on the floor. A ceramic pot split in three. The bent neck of a lamp. But it came to a complete halt when it perceived a significant crack. Something not typical, something not plastic, something not metallic.

Underneath its right sole was a humerus bone. It stepped back once, and discovered a skull lying right next. Processing the finding, the humanoid reasoned that both bones belonged to a mature man, but not elderly, between five feet eight inches and five feet ten inches in height. The humanoid knelt to examine an odd feature it saw on the skull. Verro attempted picking it up but the frontal bone caved in, and the machine released its grip. Adjusting its manual wattage, the machine then held up the skull with both hands and re-examined it. The parietal parts were spotted in a hundred places, as if pricked with a pin that many times.

The man whose skull it held (Verro concluded) and who matched the dimensions, by the way, of the individual in the paper photograph, had not died of natural causes. A serious disease, one that severely degraded its skeletal system, was probably what led to his death.

Curiosity, that is, a programming for scientific inquiry, turned the machine then into a philosopher, asking itself the following questions: Well, was this disease widespread? Is it connected with the drastic atmospheric changes? Has man been eradicated by either, or both?

Because its deeply coded raison d’être was to assist and be useful, Verro returned forcibly to pragmatism after a few moments. It would not find out the answers kneeling there, and would never find out if it did not receive a recharge soon. It already felt much weaker.

Dropping the skull, it rose up and paced back to the domicile’s entrance, not without collecting the paper photograph. It hoped to satisfy its curiosity by asking the human being it met about the blue sky above the man and his Golden Retriever.

Despite the complexity of its design, the humanoid machine was not built with pockets to store small things in. The machine was clever enough, however, to know that a sheet of paper may be held within a tight folder, and two objects firmly fixed against each other may constitute such a one. It therefore placed the photograph in between the two well-established plates that covered its right bicep, as it were, and although it stuck out, the photograph would not fly off unless a sandstorm came along.

Verro left the former home, walking back over the debris and down the exterior stairwell, ready to resume its search for a human being. In the night, it steadily moved onward, the cone of light emanating from its forehead cutting through the darkness, the sound of its steps on the dirt or gravel cutting through an eerie stillness.

A little time after, however, it froze abruptly in place. Its battery had finally been depleted, and as a sign of this, a small bulb on its left shoulder began to flash red. The rest of the machine powered off, and now the darkness swallowed it whole. As the combined rumble of its several fans and drives slowly died down, the stillness then overcame it as well, and soon Verro stood just like a marble statue, a robotic relic and nothing more.

But, in this frozen posture, Verro did not face completely forward. Its head was slighty tilted in the end because it thought to have perceived rustling foilage anew, and a tiny tinkle, like that of a bell.

3

Although it was dark, the light from the half moon and the blanket of stars was enough to allow reflective surfaces to gleam at certain angles. That included the small copper bell swinging from the collar of a dog, a mix of half a dozen breeds but the Chihuahua and Dachshund kinds predominating.

It shone intermittently in the night, as the dog sniffed to and fro, behind large rocks and within shrubs, in the search for a quick bite. And it wasn’t much past midnight when he discovered an odd scent; it was peculiar in that it smelled like bone, like calcium. So the dog lingered about a special spot, making serpentine lines until he bumped one of his sandy paws against a hard metallic object.

He darted his eyes upwards, noticed a blinking red light on an upper extremity of it, and, because it was quite out of reach, did not think twice about it.

“Toshiba!” said a voice about fifty yards behind.

Hearing it, the dog picked up its ears, and started wagging its tail. He turned around and noticed a faint light swinging in the distance.

“Toshiba!” said the voice again, one made by a young woman. “Where are you?”

The dog sprung and ran to her. The woman had been riding her bicycle, but stopped and dismounted at the sound of a bell quickly approaching her.

“Toshiba! Where are you!” she said loudly and slowly as if she were about to sing.

A series of cheerful barks coming from some distance before her assured her that her bosom companion of the past five years, the mix of Chihuahua, Dachshund and a few other kinds, would arrive at her within seconds. She could then see her dog’s eyes reflecting the light of her flashlight mounted on her bicycle.

“There you are, Toshiba. Where were you!” she said kneeling to catch him, who ran into her open hands. She patted him on the sides and his head eagerly, and as he received her affection, he panted and raised his front legs.

“Now, Toshiba, where do we go? Did you find anything interesting? Any mice or lizards for you?” She stood up, and re-adjusted her long, thin beige scarf which had loosened from around her neck and mouth. Seeming to perfectly understand her, he sprinted forwards.

“Hold on!” she said, getting on her bicycle amid giggles. “I’m following!” Mingling with the sounds of her haste and her mirth, there was a loud rattle. She was hauling a small wagon that was attached to her bicycle. Brought along in it at that moment were only two pieces of old machinery, which she had stumbled on and considered useful earlier in the evening.

She has barely pedaled in earnest when she spotted the blinking red light. Initial confusion gave way to acute fascination as she dismounted again and slowly approached it.

Toshiba was back at sniffing the humanoid machine which his owner was now inspecting. It was indeed VE.R.RO. And as if her pet could converse with her, she spoke aloud to it so: “Toshiba! This is a robot. We can’t make them anymore because after the Sickness killed so many of us, we forgot how and lost the knowledge. But Ben John in town may know what to do with it. What’s weird is that it seems to have just now turned off. I mean, it’s standing upright! C’mon, let’s take it!”

The young woman placed her wagon right next to the humanoid machine, and with a hearty push, the robot that was a foot shorter than her fell into it. She then mounted her bicycle and turned back the way she came, pedaling into the night, followed by her short, hungry dog.