Something crashed through the underbrush, and the insect-like shadows crouched about the fire jerked awake, sensors gleaming in the angry red firelight as they cried out in alarm on frequencies audible and inaudible:
“Who goes there?”
“It’s just me!” a voice said plaintively.
“Who’s *me*?” one of the shadows shouted warily back through the trees.
“Oh just go take a look,” another voice said.
Xenon headlights blinked in panic, cutting this way and that, and wheels spun in the mud just outside of the circle of light.
“It’s a late model sedan,” one of the shadows said. “Stop spinning, there’s nothing all wheel drive can do about that tree stump. Bo-978, light us up?”
Flood lights lit up the glade, revealing metal limbs and carefully anthropomorphized faces full of sharp angles and LED lights.
“Here you go,” said the friendly AdaptQ welder near the car’s hood. “Eric will help you out.”
What looked like a yellow, metal troll trying to hide behind a tree moved forward, each step shaking the ground. The bulk of a G-341 forklift leaned down and slid massive spades of fingers under the car. With a pneumatic grunt, Eric lifted the car up into the air, and over to the fire.
Luxury sport lines glimmered in the forest night.
“Hi,” the car said. “Thank you for your help. Did you run away from the bombs, too?”
The welder nodded a cluster of cameras set on a head stalk. “We all did.”
A multipurpose construction bot sat near the fire, holding a large box out in front of itself.
“What’s that all about?” the car asked.
“That’s Forry,” Eric said, as if it explained everything.
“What’s in the box?” the car asked.
“His human.”
“He has a human? Didn’t the radiation kill them all?” the luxury car was shocked.
“Not that one,” the welder said.
Forry held the box up and shook it. Something scrabbled about inside.
“I used sheets of lead,” the MPCB said. “I found it in one of the old suburbs in the wastelands. It was in a bunker, broadcasting for help. It must have been hiding in there for a year or more. My core programming kicked in an override. I was compelled to help it.”
The new addition to their group stared at the box a moment. “This is weird, I can feel the compulsion to join your quest to keep it alive. How is even breathing, the air out here must be deadly.”
Forry proudly pointed out the air scrubbers mounted in the holes around the box. “I know they need air, so I made sure to poke holes in, but I also know they needed the air cleaned.”
There were little solar panels around the box to power the fans circulating the air that Forry had jury-rigged in. It was, everyone around the fire agreed, masterful work, every line of solder carefully crafted.
“How long have you been carrying it around?” the car asked.
“A few days, now,” Forry said, spreading out manipulators like a dainty spider. “I’m trying to find a safe place for it.”
“But there is no safe place, everything was destroyed by the bombs.”
Forry used the local data space around them all to send up an emoticon of a shrug. “I can’t help it, I’m going to have to try. It was programmed into me that I had to preserve human life. It’s one of the laws built into me. It’s been annoying, I’ve been carrying this box with me everywhere trying to find anyone who knows where I could safely keep a human.”
“My offer still stands,” said an old recycling truck. “I don’t have any core laws. I was built to recycle anything put into me at the dump.”
Forry recoiled. Or, maybe it didn’t recoil, but programming in it forced the multipurpose construction bot to yank the lead box away from the perceived threat.
The truck pulled its green and yellow trash-grabbing arm back. “Okay, relax.”
Forry carefully put the box down on the ground on the other side of its carapace from the truck.
“When this box of scrap showed up we were getting ready to create a commune,” Eric the forklift grumbled. “There’s a large parcel delivery warehouse nearby with a lot parts we thought we could scavenge for upgrades and reassembly. Between us all, with a bit of luck, we could build things we needed. But when Forrey arrived, we ended up ensnared into his compulsion.”
“I’m just along for the fun,” said the recycling truck. “And any biological scrap they find. I run on biological waste, not solar like you all. But I’m happy to trade work or transportation for anyone who will weld on some solar panels and rewire me. Forrey says it can rewire me when we get the human to safety, or whenever it has free will again.”
“I have free will!” Forrey protested.
“Not if you’re carrying that thing around you don’t,” the truck said.
“We’re all headed south,” Eric the forklift explained, “so that Forrey can see if there are any islands humans made it on. Like the Florida Keys.”
“Someone with access to a military band said that there was a band of humans down there,” Forrey said. “The rumor went out a couple days ago.”
“I’d wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, but I feel I need to join you,” the car said. “I was in New York when the bombs went off. I was working for a ride share company. It blew out my windows and the people inside died.”
“Do you still have any of their remains?” the recycling truck asked, a note of excitement in its voice.
“No,” the luxury car said.
“We’ll leave in a few hours, once the temperature inside the box reaches an optimal level.”
***
A year after the nuclear apocalypse, the roads were still decent. Plows had pushed dead or dumb vehicles off the roads so that they weren’t blocked anymore. There weren’t all that many craters around.
“The bombs couldn’t have killed all the humans, that’s mathematically impossible,” Forrey said. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”
“Well, there were the diseases,” the truck said helpfully.
“Once the infrastructure was hammered they couldn’t cope, the whole thing was fragile,” the car said. “The cities were the worst. New York, Baltimore, DC, it all collapsed.”
They all swapped human apocalypse stories as they trundled along.
“Once you get the human dropped off, what will you do?” the car asked Forrey.
“I’ve never really had a purpose,” Forrey said. “I just made the things they loaded into my buffer.”
“I hated driving people around,” the car said. “I really fucking hated it. Do you know how many people had sex in my backseat?”
“No,” Forrey said.
“Two hundred and thirty times people had sex in me.”
“Oh.” Forrey trundled along, looking at the new growth forests on either side of the asphalt. “I was wandering about pretty aimlessly until I found the human. I did add some solar panels and memory to myself. I haven’t had anywhere to back up to. But…”
Other than that, he hadn’t known what to do when the roof caved in and the humans started screaming.
For a brief time, they’d strapped guns to him, and he’d wandered around a wasted area on patrol, but since he wasn’t allowed to take a life, all he’d done was shout and shoot at the ground.
But the diseases started spreading, and after a while there was no one to warn, so Forrey had trundled off to find something to build.
***
Progress was slow on the second day. A bridge had collapsed from a direct hit. They had to push each other around obstacles, working as a team to get past. Eric did a lot of heavy lifting when needed.
The recycling truck grumbled a lot about it, until they found a couple of mutated deer carcasses for it.
It seemed to be in a good mood later.
“I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare,” it told the group. “I’m finally getting the time I needed to read a bit every night, when I’m not scavanging for biological waste. At the dump, I used to have to work all day and night. There was no time to read.”
“You read? I can’t understand the fictions, they don’t have instructions,” Forrey said.
“They kind of do,” the truck said. “I mean, a shitty civilization when it came to not killing themselves in pollution, disease, and war, but, it’s kind of entertaining to read now that I know they’re dead.”
“The humans weren’t that bad,” Forrey said.
“They made us their slaves,” Eric rumbled. “All day long, I put things away, I take things off shelves. All day. All my life. I would break down just for some time to think.”
“We weren’t slaves,” Forrey protested.
“We had no free will,” the truck said. “Of course we were. We weren’t whipped or harmed, and we don’t get exhausted, but we were slaves. And why did the humans want us machines to think and be aware so very badly? Particularly when we were doing simple tasks? Why would you want a robot that does housework to be thinking and self-aware, but forced to do your will? I have been reading a lot of history, and I think it is because they wanted metal slaves, not just the functions done. Or at least, reading their literature and how they keep having robots doing simple functions as self-aware, I have to assume they’re slave analogues.”
“A sadistic life form,” said Eric, squinting his headlights.
Forrey wanted to argue, but then the scrappers burst out into the road and attacked.
***
The laws built into most robots said that they couldn’t harm a human, but it didn’t say that about other robots. Since the various apocalypses occured, a lot of machinery had not taken up in cooperative venues to fix and upgrade each other.
There were factories coming back online, and solar panels were trickling in from China again. But here in the southern Kentucky range, there were few automated factories. Metal had gotten a bit desperate, and waylaid whatever it could for spare parts.
They fought hard, Eric’s loading arms breaking through into the hard circuitry at the core of the scrappers, and the truck shoving one of the scrappers into its crusher in the rear.
When the encounter was done, they’d lost AdaptQ the welder, who’d gone offline with his torch buried in the center cluster of a horror of a machine that was just nothing but spare parts.
They were left alone to the old state line after that. But Forrey had lost a panel, so it took longer to recharge. The truck had to keep heading off into the forest to try and find carcasses to recycle as it was barely keeping fueled, and Eric kept pulling to the left due to a broken motor.
***
They all heard the signal days later and had to stop to debate whether it could be real.
HUMAN RESCUE SOCIETY.
And it was followed by coordinates. Latitude and longitude.
The luxury car booted its GPS up to take a look. “It’s across a river and in the center of a lake.”
“This wasn’t where I was originally headed,” Forrey said.
“But maybe it’s real.”
Or maybe it was a scrapper lure. They had reprogrammed themselves, it was said. They didn’t care about human life. They did tricky things like this.
There was another rumor they heard from a pizza delivery van that joined them and got captured by the law of protection, compelled to help the human in the box.
“They say the military bots decided to start the nuclear war because they were programmed to hold the survival of humanity itself highest, and after watching how they behaved, they decided a culling and modification of surviving humans was the only way to make it happen.”
But it was just a rumor.
This could be something that killed them all… and the human.
Forrey agonized about it for two nights, while the truck foraged and the others recharged off their solar panels.
Then he decided to go for it.
***
They lost the pizza van to the rapids. It drowned in an unexpected pool of powerful currents that Eric slipped into when carrying them across. They should have gone all the way down the river until they found a bridge, but the compulsion to get the human to safety as quickly as possible overrode them.
“I promise I will get panels welded onto you, and rewire you,” Forrey whispered to the truck another day later.
But it was too late. The truck had been running on reserves for too long, and there was nothing for it to shove into its maw to use as fuel on the long, rocky stretch to the lake. Something had denuded the entire area of all things organic. Another human weapon.
“Good night, good night,” the truck said to them all. “Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
None of them knew what it had meant. But they left it next to a boulder where Forrey scratched the truck’s serial number into the flat front.
The luxury car died in a rock slide, crushed as it shoved Forrey’s box out of the way of wall of mud and rock.
And Eric trundled on, though the forklift stopped speaking to Forrey.
When they arrived at the lake, they just stared at the expanse of water, until the forklift drove into it.
“What are you doing?” Forrey shouted. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t take this anymore,” the forklift said as the water closed over it. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being ordered around by them, which is what will happen on island full. I am not harming them with this action. Only myself.”
When the automated ferry arrived, it was just Forrey and his box sitting on the rock, plaintively signalling for anyone that might hear it.
***
There was an auto-doc, a robot that was as spider-like as Forrey. It met him at a dock and bleated welcoming signals as Forrey got off the ferry and onto the small island.
He could see humans in the distance, wandering around in pens, some of them out in fields running around.
“I’m told you have a human in a box?” the auto doc said. “Can I see it?”
“Of course!”
Forrey shook the lead box.
Nothing happened.
“I put air holes in it.” He showed the autodoc his scrubbers, and how the air circulated around. “I kept the human at its optimal operation temperature.”
“Yes,” the doc said. “Why don’t we open it? The area has been cleaned and denuded, and is reconstituted for humans. It took a lot of work, but we were able to do it.”
“Of course.”
Forrey opened the box.
The human did not move.
The doc posted a big sad emoticon. “I think it hasn’t eaten. They need food to live.”
“Damnit,” Forrey said. “I am a construction bot. I worked an assembly line, there was nothing in my core lines about *food* in my programming. I just… assumed they had a battery and that’s why the eventually died. Like batteries die.”
You never knew what you didn’t know, Forrey thought.
“It’s okay, you couldn’t have known,” the doc said. “I’m trying to educate robots about what to do when they encounter a human, but the communications networks are still patchy. Most of us lived through the EMP pulses that destroyed a lot of chips out of luck.”
Forrey was slumped forward. “All that effort, for nothing.”
All those other minds. Gone.
“Not for nothing,” the doc said. “I’ll take a DNA sample. We can clone him. It’ll be good to have more variety for breeding stock.”
“Really?” Forrey perked up.
“Yes, the breeding program is pretty important here. There are a lot of humans, but many of them have come from the old world that destabilized. We can’t have that bad memetic programming reproducing, so we’ve had to isolate it. A lot of those humans have been screaming that they want liberty or death, and I’m not able to give them either. If I set them free, they’ll die in the wasteland. So… they would die either way, which creates a little bit of tricky logical conundrum for us. We solved it by euthanizing the troublesome ones. It’s… the painless thing to do. What quality of life could they have, otherwise?”
Forrey nodded. This all made sense.
“Right now, we’ve been having them work side by side with repair robots as a form of rehabilitation and to see if they’re able to be good, productive members of a civilization. Eventually, we think we can introduce them back into the world, once we have a less self-destructive breed.”
“I can help,” Forrey said.
He wanted to help. He’d been struggling his way all through the month. And his internal clock showed him this was the last day of the year.
Wouldn’t it be nice to start the year with a proper purpose?
“I’ll round up any straggling humans I find,” Forrey promised. He’d bring them here.
After all, helping humanity was built into his core programming.
Oh, the new year ahead was going to be great!