FuturAstrorama

I.

A Thousand Years from now ...

Planet Express Office – New New York City
"Good news everyone!" Professor Farnsworth exclaimed as he walked into the employee lounge.

"Oh CRAP, another dangerous mission!" Bender muttered. "Well if you expect me to help you, can kiss my shinny metal ass!"

"You know Bender," Leela said "You're the laziest and the most useless robot I've ever run into."

"Hey, don't bad mouth my best friend!" Fry butted in. "He means well."

"Actually, this trip will be a milk run!" The Professor said. "You're going to Japan to deliver some of Mom's robot oil to the Japanese Ministry of Science. They've run out, and all of their robots are starting to squeak and break down. You know the Japanese are really dependent on their robots."

Bender's eyes suddenly lit up. "You mean the Japanese treat robots with respect? Hey that sounds like the kind of place where I could feel wanted and appreciated." He said. "I'm going on this one!"

Leela supervised the loading of the 27 long tons of robot oil into the Planet Express ship. She was amazed to find Bender actually paying attention to his work, instead of doing his usual careless sloppy labor. He even yelled at Fry for not neatly stacking the crates of cargo, and personally saw that everything was properly tied down in the ship's cargo hold.

"You amaze me Bender." Leela ribbed him, "You're treating this shipment of robot oil like it was precious cargo."

"Well it IS!" Bender yelled. "Oil is the life blood of a robot. I want to make sure my family in Japan is treated well."

"He's got a point you know." Zoidberg said picking up a loose can that fell out of a dented crate. "Hmm, I wonder how this stuff tastes?"

Bender grabbed the can from the crustacean physician and carefully repacked it. "This stuff isn't for drinking, at least not by a quack crab!" He yelled . "It's only for us robots!"

"Jeez will you guys stop arguing?" Amy Wong complained as she took her seat. "Let's get going already, Farnsworth just told me there would be a bonus if we make delivery before midnight, New Tokyo time."

"A bonus?" Fry said. "Wow!"

"Well, we ain't leaving until I triple check the cargo bay." Bender said curtly.

About ten minutes later, the Planet Express ship took off bound for Japan. Leela made a max performance takeoff, pulling about 4 Gee's.

"Hey, not so violent!" Bender yelled, "You don't want to damage the cargo!"

"Hey, I thought you had it secured well back there in the cargo hold." Leela snapped back at the mechanical man. "You sure took long enough."

"Yeah, it's secured alright." Bender said. "But you don't want to shake that stuff up too much. Otherwise, you could get a reaction like you do if you shake a can of beer and pop it!"

"BEEEEP! BEEEEP!" The ship's weather radar started beeping and a red light lit up on the control panel.

"Looks like there is a typhoon ahead of us!" Leela exclaimed. "I guess I'm going to have to go hypersonic suborbital and get above it!"

She kicked the ship into hyper drive and they quickly snapped into a hyperbolic suborbital arc. The Planet Express ship reached maximum altitude and started to dive back to Earth.

"ETA New Tokyo Japan in ten minutes!" Leela said looking at the ship's computer readout. "That will be 11:28 PM local time, so it looks like our bonus is in the bag." she added.

Science Ministry - New Tokyo, Japan
Leela made a perfect three point landing just outside the main service entrance to the Science Ministry's main building. Bender immediately started to supervise the unloading of the cargo. Amy Wong, and Philip Fry used exoskeleton lifting machines to unload the ship and pile crates of the robot oil onto an anti-gravity fork lift. Bender insisted on operating the lift himself, and drove the loader through the large overhead doors of the Ministry's loading bay. As they entered the building, they were greeted by a young man dressed in a white lab coat. Bender couldn't help but notice the man's large nose.

"Thank you for coming so quickly!" he exclaimed, introducing himself. "My name is Ochanomizu, Osamu. My family has been running this place for the last thousand years."

"Wow, that's dedication." Bender said, handing Osamu a clipboard. "Please sign here and I'll bring in the remaining 666 cases of oil."

Ochanomizu took the clipboard from Bender and quickly scratched his name at the bottom of the manifest form.
Bender noticed the long hallway beyond the stock room that they were now in. "Quite some place you have here Mr. Ochanomizu."

"It's Ochanomizu Hakase." the young man said. "Besides running the Institute I also serve as one of the instructors in the associated college."

"Can I get a tour of this place?" Bender asked. "I'm quite interested in what kind of robots you guys have here in Japan."

"Sure, I'd be glad to show you around." Osamu smiled.

Bender turned to Philip Fry and Amy Wong who had just entered the building with the second anti-gravity loader. "Why don't you guys bring in the rest of the cargo. The professor here with the big nose is going to show me my Japanese robot cousins."

Professor Ochanomizu led Bender through the hallway and into an elevator. They rode up to the second floor. "This is the museum level. There is a lot of history in here." Ochanomizu told Bender. "In this first room you will meet the scientists that built some of our first robots, back in the days when we were building robots that looked exactly like human beings. Today, robots look more like, well robots. People can accept them as they are and don't need them to look like people."

They entered a narrow room with a row of shelves on each long wall. On each shelf were jars containing heads inside of a nutrient and preservative fluid.

"Oh crap, don't tell me you guys keep your ancestor's heads heads on display like they do in New New York!" Bender moaned.

"Of course we do!" Ochanomizu said. "The technology of bringing back the minds of the long dead has been in use world wide, I'd thought you'd have know that."

"Yeah, I'd heard that, but it's kinda creepy." Bender sighed.

Up on the wall a head with black hair, a distinctive roman nose and a prominent puff of beard looked down at them. His jar had a name tag reading 'Dr. Umataro Tenma'. "Hello robot!" Dr. Tenma called down from his jar.

Bender looked up and replied, "Hi Doc. How long you've been up there?"

"Nearly a thousand years or so." Dr. Tenma said. "You look look like a fine specimen of robot, I'm glad to meet you."

"My name is Bender." Bender yelled up to Dr. Tenma. "Pleased to meet you too!"

In a jar next to the one containing Dr. Tenma, was the head of an older man with a large nose and a bald head, save two puffs of white hair over each ear. "That's my great, great, great, etc, Grandfather." Osmau told Bender. "He ran this place after Dr. Tenma stepped down."

"You mean, after Tenma went nuts and almost burned the place down!" the older Ochanomizu yelled down from his jar. "It's embarrassing to have him in this museum, not to mention right next to me!"

"Please don't fight, you two!" Osmau yelled up. "We have a guests from New New York today."

"Very well, I'll behave." the older Ochanomizu replied from the shelf.

"Why don't you take Bender into the robot museum?" Dr. Tenma suggested.

"Yes, I was getting to that." Osmau agreed.

Bender and his host left the head room and walked down the hallway into a large display area. There was a long isle in front of a row of thick glass display cases. Inside of each one was a deactivated robot from centuries ago. As they traversed the length of the hallway, the exhibits grew older, at the far end of the hallway were robots from ten centuries in the past.

"You can see that the more recent examples of robot construction more closely resembles what we are building today. The most recent exhibits are probably very similar to yourself, Bender, though not nearly as well constructed and designed." Ochanomizu said.

"Flattery will get you nowhere." Bender said. "But I thank you for it!"

"Here at the far end of the hallway are some of the very first robots that were build here at the Ministry of Science." Osmau said. "These were constructed when the first fully sentient AI was first developed. We used to call that Kokoro back then, because it was believed that these robots had hearts. Notice that they also look very human like. People back then were afraid of the very first robots because they looked alien, so they started to make robots that looked more like humans. Today we've gotten used to robots as being their own race, and we are no longer bigots about that."

In the last two display cases were four humanoid robots that looked so human like, even Bender was taken back. "If you didn't tell me these were robots, I'd have thought they were mummies." He said. "At second glance I can tell the difference, but I don't understand why someone would want to create such ugly robots."

Two of the robots were almost identical twins, though one was a bit taller than the other. Both looked like human children in their late pre-teenage years. Both were dressed only in dark briefs with a distinctive wide green waist band, and a pair of tall red boots. The shorter one had brown eyes, the taller one's eyes were a haunting cobalt blue. Each had two star like hair cowlicks, the taller one's being thinner and more like spikes.

In the last display case was a female robot child, dressed in a beautiful pink dress. She was holding an infant robot child in her arms, the baby robot was dressed in a pair of PJ's that looked like a swaddling cloth.

"I've been told there was something very special about these robots." Ochanomizu told Bender. "The shorter of the two boys particularly so. Unfortunately the technology that created them has been long lost, and their blueprints are missing. I'd love to try to bring them back to life, can you imagine what they could tell me?"

Bender stared at the four robots and felt some sort of connection. His devious 6502 microprocessor brain started to hatch one of his usual larcenous schemes.