The seven legs of Sonnet slowly raised as motors turned shafts and shafts extended pistons. In a mechanical wave, the circular array of legs raised and groaned, then fell and pushed Sonnet forward.
ChurChunk.
The cycle repeated.
ChurrrrrChunk.
The pill-shaped machine moved across the beach, away from the wreck of the burning, charred mess that just an hour ago would have been recognizable as a factory. The buffed orange carapace of Sonnet stood out starkly against the dark sand of the beach and the dull grey of the water. Behind the Autonomous Worker Mark 8, trailed the battery that had shaken loose and tumbled away. It snaked its way across the beach, being dragged by two loosely held wires on corroded contact points.
ChurrChunk.
The sand kicked up as Sonnet took another step, or rather another seven steps. The tiny bits of rocks flung themselves into the workings of Sonnet, adding an unhealthy grinding sound to the preexisting mechanical whirls.
Sonnet’s auditory sensors picked up the chaotic chorus of the battle planes turning around to execute another bombing run.
Thop thop thop
Despite the mess of sounds and inputs, Sonnet marched on. There was not much to do besides that. The only way Sonnet could extend the monotonous work it was programmed for was by monotonously walking as the world around them burned.
Not just in the immediate sense. Sonnet’s thermal array picked up the massive ball of fire that was consuming the entire atmosphere. It would have been somewhere over North America by that point, slowly spreading across the globe.
Some argued that the world would have ended in a single glorious meteor extinction, while others pushed back that it would die with a slow whimper. In truth, the end came in a big, undignified burring belch, like that given at a dinner table, and the glare your mother gave you was the actions of the pilots in their planes and the ones who gave them those orders.
None of this mattered much to Sonnet. The complex arrays of sensors could only make understanding of so much chaos as the robot’s orderly world was blown into charred rubble. And so, Sonnet kept on walking.
Ahead of the orange worker bot was a solitary lawn chair, splayed out leisurely,
overlooking the ocean. It almost seemed to have been placed there as a half-assed joke before the actual weight of the end of it all set into whoever placed the chair. To Sonnet, the weight was of a much different kind than the worries of humans. There wasn’t an emotional component, it was the simple fact that the static nature of its entire existence was gone. Just gone. The factory of metal pushed over like a child blowing on a house of cards. It is entirely possible that Sonnet would have felt the same, confusing disconnect if the world had not been ending and if it had been gently placed on the beach outside its factory and told to walk away.
As Sonnet skittered past the solitary lawn chair, the planes arrived for their second strafing run.
Thop Thop Thop
Sonnet turned and saw the planes. Sharp whistling filled what counted as Sonnet’s ears as the bombs were dropped. It was a shrieking, deadly, piercing sound. And then, it didn’t just fill Sonnet, it filled the whole world, with its ghastly noise.
・・・・・・
The moment before the bombs hit, Sonnet shut off its auditory receptors. The warm silence was a brief rest from the destruction. Even as the ball of fire quietly engulfed Sonnet’s world, the silence was the tiniest bit of solace.
After a moment or a very long while—Sonnet had no sense of it—the ball of fire
collapsed in on itself and the planes circled. Sonnet sat for a while longer, feeling the soldering points in its brain crack as it watched. Knowing with absolute certainty that normality was now shattered.
What else could Sonnet do but keep on walking?
ChurrChunk.
ChurrClink?
Sonnet’s front leg hit something hard. Sonnet’s optics spun in and out as it tried to see what had caused the resistance. A rock jutted itself out of the beach. Sonnet turned back on the auditory sensors, being greeted then by only the dull crackle and crash of fire and waves. Sonnet kicked the rock.
ChurrClink!
How peculiar. The realm of earth minerals was foreign to the robot who spent its life in a factory. Sonnet grabbed at the rock, the programming of the factory moving its arms. Using the four hands on its right side meant for general use it put them on the rock and tried to pull up. The sand around the rock bumped up, but the rock remained stuck. Sonnet dug around the rock, revealing its base, and pulled it out. Sonnet took the rock in the three hands on its left side meant for delicate work and felt the fine groves of the stone. The weight of age surprised Sonnet, it was the kind of weight that you couldn’t guess at until you picked it up and felt it. A thousand years of water-thin cuts shaped this rock to a smooth finish and Sonnet felt every one. There was a beauty to that water smooth rock that Sonnet could not grasp, but it didn’t need to.
When digging up this first rock, Sonnet exposed half a dozen more in the small pit. When the optics of the robot refocused on the pit and saw these, there was an electrical spark of excitement. Or at least, there would have been. As it was, Sonnet saw some tiny way to extend its monotonous work it was thrown out of. Sonnet dug out two more rocks in quick succession, admiring each one as it was pulled out.
With two hands full, Sonnet moved to put one of the rocks on top of the other. It let go
and turned back to its excavation.
Fumph…
The rock teetered off and hit the sand.
Sonnet turned again and placed the rock back on top of the other rock. Sonnet did this with mechanical precision, using the same movements it had used a hundred million times in the factory.
Fumph…
Sonnet tried again. The same null results came back to it. The two stones were too
smooth and lacked any flat enough surface to stay on top of each other. Despite this, Sonnet kept on trying. At first, Sonnet continued to follow the same motion that was hard-wired into it. But eventually, Sonnet started twisting the rock, manipulating it. When that didn’t work, Sonnet switched the place of the two rocks, so that Sonnet could try balancing the first rock on top of the second one. With more trial and error, Sonnet managed to balance the rock, right on its edge so it was standing straight up.
A small shift in the wind and the rock tumbled off to the ground. But it had excited Sonnet all the same. There was the monotonous work that Sonnet strived for, there was control and consistency, but also unknown. The programming in Sonnet was never meant to understand physics and vectors of force, so every time Sonnet tried stacking the rocks in a new way there was no way it could predict what would happen. It unsettled Sonnet in the deepest and most right of ways. The unpredictability was not the life Sonnet was seeking so desperately, but it was a version of it.
The simple stones became Sonnet’s world. The most rudimentary way to maintain
normality for the little robot. As Sonnet engaged this new life, the programing of Sonnet reached its limits of understanding. If there was somebody there on that beach to explain to Sonnet, they could have explained that Sonnet was experiencing a mote of frustration, a shred of excitement. The stack fell, Sonnet built it up in a new way. First only two rocks, but gradually moved to stacking three. It unsettled Sonnet in the deepest and most right of ways.
While Sonnet was on that beach, stacking rocks, some other part of its machine registered that the world-ending ball of fire would be approaching soon. The thermal sensors spiked. Sonnet could only ignore it for so long. It could have been the budding emotions Sonnet was feeling or the fact of the world ending. Regardless, after Sonnet had stacked three stones solidly on top of one another in a leaning tower, the robot turned itself around.
The trailing battery lazily came to follow as Sonnet retraced a dozen steps to the solitary lawn chair. At the chair, Sonnet’s legs struggled for a moment hauling the metal shell up onto the plastic chair. Finally,
ChurrChunk.
Sonnet sat down on the chair, three optic lenses racking to focus on the wide and endless ocean. The ocean was beautiful, Sonnet thought, a simple thought, a fine thought. Sonnet turned off the various sensors, all but its ears and eyes. Both were fixed intently on the ocean.
There at the end, on that beach, sat an orange robot, a lonely lawn chair, and a simple, wonderful, stack of rocks.