°°° Chart Your Own Course °°°

by Cri86

And that's it for today, folks! I will post the remaining Chapter 20 - which concludes the first part of Chart Your Own Course - on Jun. 27th in celebration of WALL-E's Third Anniversary. Until then, may the course you chart always take you to bright stars!

°°°°° Chapter 19 °°°°°

The elevator took speed as they rushed past the Maintenance Area. The hallways and corridors zoomed in a dark blur around BRIDGET, and for the moment she was happy with that. She didn't want to think that in a different time, in a different world, robots had been working there.

Twenty years were nothing to a robot, she knew. What could a mere 7 304.84398 days mean, when she had lived so long? Yet, to her, each and every of those days had seemed to last forever, and in the forsaken interiors of the Axiom it really seemed to have been not twenty, but twenty thousand years ever since the ground lines had last been trafficked.

Already she could hear the distant jingle of the advertisements from the Passenger Area. Odd coincidence – remarkable – to hear it just then. It was as if the ship's computer had been thinking along the same lines and wanted, in some way or other, to reach out for her. As they emerged in the light of the Promenade Deck, she was able to make out scores upon scores of holoscreens flashing, blinking, blaring all at once. Tidbits of words carried out to BRIDGET through the glass wall of the lift.

"… Large, everything you need…."

"… sky was never…"

"… is your superstore…"

"… final fun-tier!"

"Feel beautiful!"

"Your day is very important…"

"… our limit…"

"… Time for…"

"… all you need, and so much…"

She laughed, shook her head. Too many voices, computer! I'll never get what each holoscreen is trying to say in this mess. But she felt, as the elevator continued to race upward, that the meaning of the words wasn't nearly as important as the words themselves, and that with all those words, the Axiom had really only wanted to tell her – you are not alone.

Russell was still dozing in the settee when a movement in the distance caught his eye. He sat up straight, suddenly curious.

At the far end of the corridor, on the other side of the lounge, an elevator was moving - but it wasn't the elevator that interested him. Russell normally wouldn't have glanced twice at it, except that the elevator was occupied by a long-limbed robot female with blue and white markings. The toddler recognized her instantly.

"Boo botty!" he giggled, pointing. She didn't look up, so maybe she had not heard him. Yet Russell could only think of one reason why she would run away instead of coming out to play – because she wanted to be run after. He had already noticed that the "botties" seemed to like that game best. And for the same reason, he liked it best also.

If he was at all surprised at how she had got past him without his noticing, Russell did not show it. He did not wonder if she had been on the Axiom already when he had arrived. Did it matter? Perhaps. But playing with robots was fun. Russell wanted to play with the blue robot more than anything in the world. He did not care about things that could not even fully grasp.

Swiftly, he let himself slide down the divan onto the floor and scampered across the corridor on his little feet. He knew all about lifts because his mother had taken him on one before. They were round and transparent and had always reminded him of swings. Now he would get in all by himself, like a grown up.

His shoes slipped and squashed against the polished floor, leaving a trail of muddy prints. His mother didn't like mud. She didn't like anything fun. Russell thought that she really had to visit the ship sometimes, so she could see for herself that there was really nothing wrong with fun. Usually it was Karen who took him around, but this time he would take her by hand, like… like…what was that funny thing everyone told him to be?... oh, yes, like the family's little man. Russell wasn't sure what a little man did, only that it supposedly made his mother happy. He decided that he would be the family's little man and show her all the fun things you could do on the ship. Playing with robots and getting in and out of lifts, especially.

"Iff!" he babbled, rushing into the first elevator he saw. He jumped up and down and added in a happy squeal: "Boo botty!"

Nothing happened. The elevator didn't even twitch.

Baffled, Russell looked up at the glass and metal structure looming around him. How strange, he thought. Why nothing had happened yet? The lift knew that he wanted to go after the blue robot. How could they not be moving?

He impatiently tried again, even pointed to the ceiling, and once more was let down. He might as well have been speaking to the walls for how much the lift seemed to listen. Perhaps it had fallen asleep, even though Russell couldn't remember having ever thought that a lift needed sleep. Did the lifts also have mothers who put them to bed? Russell hated it. His mother seemed to think that he needed his naps at the wrong times entirely, when he would have much rather stayed up to play with the robots. And when she did, she listened to no reason. Mothers were all the same, he scowled, brooding over the injustice of it all. Unhappily, he dragged his feet a little and mumbled: "Boo botty."

What if the blue robot was actually waiting for him? Would she be sad if he didn't turn up? Maybe, if I just sit here and wait, she will come to look for me, the child pondered. If the lift wasn't going to take him anywhere, perhaps she would. And she would tell the mother lift that the naps could wait.

Lifts…

Suddenly, a dim recollection hit him. When his mother had taken him on a lift, she had never said where she wanted to go. The lift just seemed to know it – and for a while, when he was younger, he had wondered how that could be – until he had noticed that his mother was pushing some colored buttons on the wall upon entering. He remembered those buttons because they looked a lot like the portable video games that some bigger kids carried with them.

Russell's eyes glinted. There were several rows of buttons above his head, and one of them would take him to the blue robot, he knew…

Which one, though? He tried to see if any of the buttons had the picture of a robot on it, but he could only make out numbers and random letters. There weren't any of the words he knew either. That was by far the most difficult game he had ever played. How could the bigger kids like it so much?

Perhaps, he reflected, he had to push the topmost button if he wanted to follow the blue robot, because she had gone up. Russell wasn't sure if the button on top was also the one that went up, but quickly decided that it had to be. Not only it was up itself, it was also the higher you could get. What else could it be? True, the red and yellow ones to the right were prettier still – but neither of them was sufficiently up.

"Boo botty!"

On tiptoes, he reached out. He stretched his tiny arms above his head. He even attempted to jump – but the button was too high, and he could barely reach the bottom row. The second time he actually fell on his bum.

"Waaah!" he wibbled, rocking himself slightly back and forth.

Where were the Captain and Cousin Al? Up until that moment he had not spared so much as a thought for them, but now he wished that they would turn up already. He would have been happy even to see his mother. If only someone had found him sniffling miserably on the floor and had picked him up, he might have pushed the button, and then all would have been well. But he was alone, unhappy, and in a place where everything was too big or too tall for him. I can't do it on my own!, he thought, and wailed even louder in indignation.

What could he reach on his own? Well, the floor – and, if he stood up and stretched just a little, the handrail. But the floor and the handrail didn't matter. They wouldn't have taken him to the blue robot.

Unless…

For a while, the child was deep in thought. He had stopped wailing, and at length he quit his wibbling noises. He quit sniffling also. If the entire Axiom had shut down around him, chances were that he wouldn't even noticed.

Then he shook himself and looked up at the handrail. It wouldn't be more difficult than climbing a slide from the wrong side. And that, he knew, he could do faster than a good many older kids.

Gingerly, he stood up, reached out for the handrail and pulled first one arm, then one leg over it.

Report to Axiom superior, her eyescreen instructed her.

Luckily, now that the lights were on and the holoscreens flashed, the bridge didn't look half as bad as she had feared. Twenty years after her last visit, that part of the ship seemed to have been left mostly untouched by the toll of time. It might have come right out of her last recorded memory file except that it was dustier, that the windows were streaked with rain, and that Auto was…

Suddenly, a lightning bolt crossed the sky, and to its light the Autopilot's optic glowed deep red. It lasted only an instant – but it brought BRIDGET up short.

Sir?

She caught herself before the word left her speech synthesizer, though. Not possible, she wanted to say. It does not compute. How can it be? All her sensors told her that Auto was deactivated, that he had stayed that way since the Axiom's landing – since 2805, to be exact. Yet she had to float closerl to make sure that the red glow had been only the product of her overworked circuits, just a trick of the light. For so much of a moment, she had really felt Auto's stern gaze upon herself as she entered the bridge.

She ran her scanner beam over his faceplate twice. When that first examination failed to turn up anything, she split her fingers and hesitantly placed them over the smooth surface. But she couldn't feel any twitch of the processor strips underneath the metal, and certainly no rattle of electricity. His optic was dark and lifeless.

Inactive, undoubtedly. Why had I even thought otherwise?, she sighed.

Perhaps she was beginning to malfunction too. If she was imagining things that weren't really there, then she had been inactive herself for too long. And whose fault is that?, echoed her own voice in her thoughts. Angrily, she told herself that things got scrapped because humans no longer saw them.

Report to Axiom superior. Strange, she could have sworn the words flashed in her circuits with more urgency than ever. Thinking of the humans, it seemed, fueled her bitterness- but also kept her steady on course… Isn't it strange, she smirked wanly, that the only reason I'm grateful to the humans is for the resentment they inspire?

With a slight shake of her head, she fired up her scanner beam again. This time, though, she did not search the steering wheel's faceplate. The cool blue light swept up the length of the pole and over the stand that connected Auto to the ceiling, looking for a hatch of some kind. Then it fell upon a small panel, hanging slightly ajar on its hinges. Ah, yes, there it goes!

BRIDGET floated up to it, her eyes wide. Her OCR software confirmed that the switch underneath was set to "manual". It would have been so easy to flick it back to "auto" now. What she would be to do next, it was only up to Auto to say.

Still for long instants, she did nothing at all.

Her circuits puzzled over that unexplainable inactivity. Once more, the message report to Axiom superior flashed before her eyescreen. You are almost there, said the voice of her thoughts. Follow your directive. She knew that the voice was right. Even more, she wanted to heed. It did not compute that she should hesitate, now of all moments. She was only a switch short of fulfilling her directive, and yet…

Report to Axiom superior.

The thing was that she felt nothing like after a successful reconnaissance. Until that moment she had been driven by purpose, and it hadn't been different from her scouting trips across space. When her scanner had touched upon the control switch, there had been relief. But now she only felt confusion, as if her GPS had broken and she had been patrolling on a wrong course entirely. One where the Axiom couldn't follow.

Report to Axiom superior, insisted her directive core. But in order to do that, she would have had to reactivate the Autopilot, and no one had instructed her to do that. She was only a reconnaissance unit. She hadn't the right. Activating the Autopilot was a prerogative of the Captain, of a trainee Captain, and of any other commanding officer. But she was neither. GO-4, rest his remains, might have done it, if only—

GO-4 broke twenty years ago, the voice in her head reminded her. Don't be foolish.

She looked around, at a loss. Stars, what am I to do? Her set of directive had always been one and the same. Patrol the Axiom's charted route for obstacles. Report to Axiom superior. If possible - obliterate obstacles. Protect the ship from harm. There had never been anything about reactivating the Autopilot. Or the emergency reactor, as for that. Somehow… it did not feel right to follow a directive that she had set upon herself.

It has felt right thus far, argued the voice of her thoughts. It's carried you thus far. Why your resolution falters now?

Because – I don't know. It's different. With the reactor… what other choice did I have?

You don't have another choice, now.

It's different, she repeated to herself. It's different. Reactivating a reactor hadn't felt so much like overstepping her boundaries. But this? Distressing… unsettling… like shutting off anti-gravs and diving down a steep cleft. A fall through the air. Like – like the Rejects from the Repair Ward, who strayed off the path. I can't.

There's no one else, the voice pointed out.

I can't!, she wanted to protest. I can't follow a directive that isn't even my own! I wasn't programmed for this. I'm just a recon-bot! I receive my directive from Axiom superior. I can't just… do something because I decide to.

But there's no such thing as an Axiom superior anymore, replied the voice. 'less you reactivate the Autopilot, no one will tell you what to do.

No. No. Never.

Then why not just tell yourself? Why can't you be your own guide – if you're left with no one to follow?

No. Straying off the path. I can't just-

With mild triumph, the voice replied; If else, who shall?

BRIDGET's protests were cut off sharply. Even after she had voiced it in her thoughts, the question lingered. Who shall, indeed? After she retraced the steps outside… no one would remain between the Axiom and the humans. Could she watch them dismantle the ship bit by bit, could she watch as they took Auto off the ceiling and had him scrapped while still deactivated, could she resign to see the circuits ripped off the Axiom's computer?

After they were done with the ship, it would be her turn. What use could there be for a ship's reconnaissance unit without the ship? What good was she, away from space?

It wouldn't have been so bad, in itself – the scrapping. Perhaps she had arrived to that cycle of a robot existence when there was simply no other alternative. If it had been just her at stake, it wouldn't have mattered so much.

Then the face of the hateful human woman loomed before her eyes, and for a moment covered even the words report to Axiom superior.

"Sometimes I wish… I don't know. I wish that we had dismantled it right after landing. I just can't forget what the ship did to us."

If the hateful woman had her way, the Axiom would have been at stake. The mere thought was sufficient to set off every red alert warning in her programming.

It's your directive to protect the ship from harm, isn't it? said her voice in her thoughts, barely concealing a smirk.

Yes… protect from harm. From threats. And threats, she knew, could come in many shapes. The human woman and her companions were probably not so big scale as an asteroid or a black hole or a dying star. But BRIDGET had no illusions that they might not be just as destructive.

A thunder rolled overheard.

Without hesitation, she split out her fingers and reached for the "Auto"/"Manual" switch.

*Click.*