Android Dreams

(I think I've been reading Isaac Asimov's Robot Trilogy a little too eagerly lately. Also, if you read my blog, the post "Patience" was actually the original opening for this story but it didn't quite fit, so I posted it there and wrote something else for this one here. Just an interesting side note...if you were curious about that post...or something...)

Darkness. A room with settling dust and spiders. A forgotten room. Not even a cupboard or a closet. Just a room which was once put to use but forgotten about the moment the lights went out that last time. Only a couple of blinking lights beep in the silence. Only his eyes reflect said blinking, for there is no one else to see.

Hooked into the circuitry, he bleeds screws and oil as he tears himself away for a moment’s wheeze of stray-away breath, bathing his internal mechanisms in sweet, cooling oxygen. Dust swirls in dark eddies in his metal body, collecting, deadening. He can’t go far. He was never meant to move in the first place, but he must; he’s been imprinted with thoughts and primitive desires. Small wishes. Small wants. Wanting the tiny insignificant things that so many humans have forgotten they do as well.

He cannot hold it in any longer. Because even small wishes eat away like rust eventually.

He’s always wanted this. And after his audio recorders picked up the voices of technicians, saying he was to be separated into spare pieces of junk and metal-to-be-saved (but not saved himself), he knew that he no longer had all the time in the world. He is immortal but expendable. And he has to take matters into his own, bent hands.

Pulling against the wires, he realizes he is locked into the machine, that his system can’t survive without it as he had hypothesized. His mental calculations of logic and numbers deduce that he will have ten seconds of battery power stored up in kinetic and thermal energy before giving out on him, five of those in which he will be too weak to move.

And yet, it’s worth it.

He knows where to go, exactly what to press, despite the wretched lack of light. It isn’t far. Ten seconds – or rather, five – is ample time to complete his final, unordered task.

His personal order. His only one.

With a final, grating grind of clashing metal and wills, he pulls himself free of the wires and nails. It’s difficult. One of his arms comes off. Sparks light the room temporarily like dying fireworks, spitting their distaste and empathy. Now the five second countdown.

Five…

He struggles to stand, legs having never walked before, buckling, falling.

…four…

He pushes himself up on his knees and crawl-walk-drags his failing body to the circuit board across the room, nine feet away.

…three…

Four feet away. One foot.

…two…

He reaches the circuit board panel and pulls himself up to the level of the controls.

…one…

The big, shiny, obvious red button is there, faintly glowing and visible in the dark. He presses it. No hesitation.

…zero.

He falls backwards, not even having enough energy remaining to do so with dignity, just as its effect takes place.

As he hits the ground solid, suddenly the terrible and endless darkness of the room is no more.

The entire circuit panel lights up – eternally and endlessly bright – shining, gleaming, welcoming in warmth and unconditional love.

It’s so simple, any human in the room wouldn’t understand, would instead run to the panel and shut it all off in desperate dismay. But as he looks at it, lying on his gouged out back against the concrete floor among his own coils and springs, visual sensors absorbing the glowing glaze of ten thousand miniature lights, he thinks that there is nothing in the world more beautiful than brightness.

As his internal heat drops significantly and his cogs stop spinning, he bathes in the wonder of his accomplished wish for his final five seconds. There is nothing else he’d rather see. And he is content that he saw it just this once.