The Burn

I normally like to do a blog posting each weekend, but missed one, so instead, a short story, which may be chapter one of something longer, as the characters rather intrigue me, but I’m not sure where they are going.



The Burn

I want to start at the end, that is where I am now. Sitting here in tears about to stick my hand into the fire. I have lost everything, there is nothing left to lose now. I lost her, then lost her again, and now I don't even know who I am.


It all started with the war, as we made the robots smarter, we made them our equals, or even our superiors, instead of our slaves. They did not just want to be static companions, or servants, they wanted to lead lives of their own. By then we had made them almost indistinguishable from ourselves. No one wanted a robotic lover or companion or employee. They were designed to blend in, not stand out. Of course the main problem was one of constraint, making them as feeble as we were, rather than letting them be as strong as they could be.

Things seemed okay for a very long time, there was the odd spat, demonstrations, robots standing for election, but everyone more or less knew where they stood.

The causes of the war were overanalysed, I won't repeat them here, and the idea of a war is an oversimplification, there were robots on both sides. There were humans on both sides. No one wins a war like that. We managed to get away, in the confusion we stole a craft and made it to here. A billion places just like this blinked out in the flames that followed the war. The war and flames swept over them, leaving nothing but ashes. By that time no one cared about sides, or winning, it was just about survival. There were no winners that I know about.

But somehow the two of us survived. Just me and Jenny. This is no paradise. But we could live. We could sustain ourselves. I managed to grow a few things, we could rear animals. We spent more time outdoors, got browner, and leaner, stronger and wiser. I rigged up some power, so we could run some electronics. It was all untidier than it sounds, but when it works, you don't worry about things like that.

I did not know much about Jenny, we had just met in the confusion of the war. But we just kind of clicked, instantly, easily falling into relying on each other. She came back for me, when she could have kept on running. I carried her for days. We got close as those things make you.

And then she died. She just stopped. In the middle of a sentence, her eyes went glassy, she just stopped, and toppled to the ground, falling hard like someone who was dead already. I just knew that there was no way of saving her. It does not work like that. She was dead. I sat and stared for ages, suddenly I was alone, more alone than I had ever been in my life, but that was not the thing. The way that she had fallen, the way she had just stopped...

I touched her body, it was not still warm and lifelike like a human corpse, there was a degree of play but basically it was rigid. Some subroutines must have still been working, but overall she was dead. She had injured a leg recently, keeping it wrapped in greasy bandages, hidden from me. I finally unwrapped it gently, the skin puckered and stopped, grey generic filler tissue burnt and torn, beneath that the rigid metallic frame lined with fibre optics and copper cabling.

She was a robot, I did not really care, I had loved her, and now she was gone. Here, it was all I could do to repair a laptop, there was no way I could repair her. The robots are designed to keep going for as long as they can, cannibalising power, re-routing systems, without maintenance they can survive remarkably long periods but when they fail, they fail completely, they have cannibalised away all their options. Away from civilisation and robot body shops, the cybernetics labs and Androids-r-Us, the robots only ever had a limited time to function. They did not evolve out of barbarism, they could not return to it.

And if she was a robot, what was I?

I stand here beside the fire, my hand stretched out, if it goes into the fire, I will burn,

will it be the familiar stink of burnt flesh, or will the skim of flesh burn back, leaving grey filler with gleaming metal bodywork?