Summary: "Here we are again, with your lonely eyes and your rusty skin. You've been gone for a long time. I buried you so far away, where nothing grows and no one goes. But still… while I sleep, I dream of all we had."

Human

Overgrown with vines and shrubbery, the Garden had become a cold and desolate place. Fractured pillars embedded themselves crookedly in the ground; colorized shards of plastic and glass hung from string on mobiles; and all was obscured in the mist that consumed his vision and thought. Crows encircled the Garden. Their dark, aerial bodies reflecting in amber lenses, hundreds of feet down below. They chased a songbird over the tops of the trees, cawing ravenously as they snapped at the lone bird. Down in the Garden below, digits twitched, and a hunk of metal lurched to life.

Stumbling away from the cracked stone wall, the robot emerged like larvae from egg. His feet clanged against the ground with each unstable step, tripping over the cracks in the cobblestone path infested with grass and insects. Alternating between muffled clangs and metal chipping against stone, the metal boy hobbled until he regained his balance. In a beam of sunlight amidst the broken pillars of the Garden, his body illuminated: green metal calves were sculpted into boots, his middle armored with the same dull green, rusty orange stripes running down the abdomen and across the bottom of his chest. His thighs, hands, and face were sprayed a dark tan color, for he was covered in a durable but soft metallic plasticine.

His right arm was missing. Only a thick metal rod hung from his shoulder among the open wires. Metal fingers bare of plasticine remained stationary, attached to the end of the rod, as the mechanism hissed at his shoulder. Unable to be moved as nimbly as the other, and the robot brought his other hand toward his head, where plasticine met the dark beige metal panels that assembled a thorny crown of hair. Large bolts held each of his joints together at the edges of the plasticine, where his kneecaps, elbows, and shoulders joined. Multicolored wires, mostly of red and blue, were apparent in the gaps in between.

His facial features were flinty, unable to stretch and contract the same as a human child's – but a sense of juvenile curiosity laid in the quirk of his slender brow. Powerful as his optimized zoom lenses were, they were made in the likeness of human eyes. A large, amber diaphragm surrounded the pupil-like aperture in the center. Tan-colored shutters acted as eyelids. As the boy bounded through the forest, a spring in his step, the model number on his left upper arm flashed copper in the light filtering through the trees: 7.7.

What his name had ever been aside from that, he didn't know.

Hopping over train tracks in the forest that were hardly recognizable underneath the increased foliage, the robot boy left the Garden. He passed a fallen airplane. Veiled in vines, only the shape of the nose and wings on either side gave away what it used to be. On the forest's edge, the metal boy halted, mulling over the remnants of what was once human society.

Peppering the landscape were city and building complexes as far as the eye could see.

Venturing into the city in search for spare parts for his arm, the robot didn't come across a single soul. Lost in an accident some time ago, he hadn't come across any material that could match the malleable, high-tech plasticine panels that covered the rest of his body. Digging through boxes in an old warehouse, dusty from the wooden shavings swarming in the dull light, his smooth, metallic fingertips picked out a soft creature. Upon further investigation, he found out it wasn't alive. The robot studied it for a moment, creating a mental sketch of it in his mind – it was shaped like the large, round furry creatures he saw in picture books with its beady eyes and furry complexion. He set the teddy bear aside.

Later that day, traversing an underground train station, teddy bear in hand, the robot was halted by a turnstile. Too lost in the processes whirring inside him, he ran into it multiple times, not registering what barred him from entrance, until, neck gears turning, he lifted his eyes.

Presently, he leapt over the turnstile, and landed onto the train tracks. Soft from a blanket of moss, he looked both ways. He started down the track in the direction opposite of the underground tunnel, motivated to travel farther from the city today.

Yet, after hours of walking, he was still in another part of the city – what was once a market street, it looked like. Passing by many shops littered in shards of steel and glass, and collapsed neon signs, long burnt out and corroding, the robot stopped. He'd been through here many times before, combed the boxes holding human supplies: the large grey plastic boxes with one glass side, the boxes with chemicals spilling from them, labeled in strange runes. None of it was useful, or new.

At the end of another day, the robot trudged back toward the forest from a suspension bridge. The orange sunset made tall shadows stretch across the bridge, its vine-covered cables extending into the sky. They ensconced much of his view of the golden horizon, so the boy stopped, his human-like features gazing pedantically at the sun. Just how long… just how long would he dwell here, not knowing where he came from, or to whom he belonged?

The robot's programming wasn't complex enough for him to wonder about the state of the world or the nature of his creator – but the robot hoped, someday, if he kept searching, he'd find something. Some reason for his existence, and the human loneliness that pervaded his slowly fizzling circuits…

Rotating his jagged-haired metal head toward the ground, he felt sluggish. The sun was setting, and he was out of battery.

Returning to the Garden with dragging steps, it was exactly as he'd left it that morning: crumbling, but serene. The only place he could call home. Dark shadows hung beneath the dense canopy of trees. The sounds of whooping animals echoed in the distance. There was no light save for the place in the wall he'd burst from that morning. A gaping hole with a few drops of blue liquid glowed inside. Opening a panel in his chest, the robot boy placed the teddy bear he had found in the warehouse on the pile of stuff beside the docking station. Things like thimbles, keychains, old-fashioned furniture cushions, a fishing line, and framed oil paintings were gathered there. Doddering back around the wall, the robot paused at the cocoon-like docking station in the alcove, the radioactive blue liquid that irradiated there. He called up in his memory the time he had first emerged from it.

All alone and without programming, his vision had faded from black into lightness, shapes, and colors. The gears in his head whirred between his sound sensors, and he wiggled his fingers, noticing the instinctual response to do so. Whether his arm had been missing, even back then, he could not remember. When he had tried to touch his shoulder, he realized he was trapped in the wall, held back by some force in the center of his back. Yanking on it with all his effort, he'd felt something ripping, disconnecting. Finally falling onto his soft hands and metal knees, aware of something staining him, he'd turned to see the tube leaking blue liquid from the alcove he'd found himself in. The same liquid stained his back. The robot didn't have the olfactory senses to be able to smell it, but somehow, he knew it to be a vile odor, and his only life force.

The robot boy didn't reconnect to it in the coming days in fear of being trapped again, for who-knows-how-long. The longer he waited, the slower he became, hardly able to function. Eventually relenting, he crawled back to it all the way from across the city, where he'd been searching for other sentient forms. When he had placed his back into the dock, the moment the tube snapped into place, he immediately felt a surge of energy surge through him.

He'd been lucky enough not to collapse permanently in his many years here alone. Though, he'd ventured far and wide away from the city borders in search of others – as far as he could, anyway. All he ever found was more birds, and empty countryside.

The replay of the memory finished, and the robot boy gingerly backed into the alcove. Feeling the suction of the tube connect in the center of his back, his metal body relaxed. He felt himself becoming filled with energy again, and the robot powered off.

= Инициализация =

The next morning, his plasticine shutter eyelids slid open to reveal heaviness in the air.

He couldn't feel heaviness as a weight, possessing no sensors to register pressure himself – it was a weight he couldn't explain… Something different.

Separating himself from the charging station on the wall, the boy staggered forward, and found the air all around him was misty, thicker than the day before. It was still rather dark. Not a bird, insect, nor forest creature broke the silence. The plants, too, were silent. Not one leaf swayed in the wind.

When he arrived in the city, not even the airy sound of zephyrs wafted between the buildings or stirred dust on the streets. Wandering listlessly, he once again found himself at the turnstile in the train station from the day before. This time, he looked the direction opposite from that which he'd taken the day before: the tunnel. Now masked by certain dark haze, the circular tunnel entrance loomed before him, vacant and devouring. He proceeded with caution, not having recalled going this direction before in all his years here, now that he checked his path history. His thorough mapping process as he ventured through the city led him to believe he'd seen every nook and cranny of it by now. Yet here, in the center of the city, however minute, was a place that his map was empty.

Robots cannot feel fear or pride – but staring inside, the robot boy felt a lurch in his throat. The central connection between his power cell and motherboard stuttered. He hesitated to continue, his metal feet lightly echoing on the mossy train tracks at the tunnel's entrance, where the vegetation abruptly ended. Inside was pitch-black, and though the air outside was stale, no iota of wind or sound could be heard or felt from within.

The robot walked for hours. Only the sound of his boots hitting the wooden planks between the tracks accompanied him. Creatures shifted in the dark, putting him on edge. He didn't know how far he could go, or how far he had already gone. All he knew was that he needed to get to the end, even if he had to drag himself all the way back to his charging station when his power was depleted in the end.

And then it stopped. There was no more train track beneath him. His feet hit solid ground, concrete, by the sound of it. He ambled forward in complete and utter darkness. Until he heard himself surrounded by the faint whirs and clicks of hardware. He could see small red and white lights flashing patterned in the walls, a great computer that processed information. Tracing a hand alongside it, he felt the familiar hum of a mechanical energy. This working computer wasn't as advanced as he was, what with his artificial intelligence and spatial mobility, but it was capable of amazing things. He could tell just by peering into it with the electromagnetic measuring property of his functional hand.

Retracting his hand, the robot looked around. He had no idea where below the city he was, or what this other powerful computer was doing here, until he spotted a giant metal pod. Having been in a corridor leading to this main room, the pod was the size of what he'd assumed the size of an average human once was, larger than himself. It loomed unassumingly in the dark flashing lights on all sides.

Right hand swinging helplessly at his side, the robot approached the pod. There was a window on the upper half of it, though all he could see inside was steam. Pressing his plasticine hand against the glass, he squinted, scanning the inside for anything with his eyes. He gasped when he sensed something inside. The steam cleared, and his circuit board clicked continuously with an input and output of information.

Th… there…!

He could hardly believe his visual processing system, never confronted with another sentient being in all his years. Inside was the most beautiful robot he had ever seen: Loose-hanging, metallic silver hair hung over the other robot's snowy white skin, his face peaceful, and hauntingly attractive. The robot boy could tell he wasn't organic only by the faint seams around his jawline, inner arms, and shoulders, and felt himself magnetized toward the robot in the pod, who looked even more advanced than himself.

Would this boy… give him a clue as to his purpose, or his creator?

7.7 clenched his left fist against the glass in front of the pale robot boy's face as he tried to figure out how to break the pod open. Taking a moment to search its sides, when he looked back, the pale robot boy's eyes had shot open. 7.7 would have been relieved, if not for the danger he sensed there.

Before he could jump back, the glass on the pod was broken, and 7.7 found himself knocked back, held against the floor. Disoriented, 7.7 felt the other boy secure a grip on his missing arm and broken shoulder, and the sharp fingertips of the robot's other hand were directed at the central coil in his throat. A slash that would disable him instantly.

"Don't move," the other boy said, his voice a chilling threat. When 7.7 looked closer, to his astonishment, the other robot's eyes were the same radioactive blue as the piercing liquid in the Garden. His eyes were ice cold.

I have had this story planned since freshman year of college, but only now, nearly a junior, am I finally writing it. This fic is inspired by many sci-fi stories and aesthetics, to the point that even I cannot recall all of them. It is also based on an album I discovered when I was first moving to college, Cataclasm (2016) by Crywolf, which helped me through many sleepless nights. I hope you enjoy this humble story.

Please leave your thoughts below! I will highly appreciate any feedback, criticisms, praise, or anything in between. Cheers!