Robot Without a Prayer

Doug Donnan

Executive Editor/GTNW

donnan.doug@yahoo.com

                                                  'Robot without a Prayer'

                                                                       by                 

                                                               

                                                              Doug Donnan

    EVANGELOBOTICS ADVANCEMENT / REASSIGNMENT COMPOUND #84

                                            Madre de Dios, New Mexico 2033

“I don’t know,” Hadlewood almost sighed with a shake of his impossibly pallid,

elongated baldhead. “That ‘bot down there is different from the rest. All the other

recruits at this state of the art way station seem to be going along with the upgrade

and transfer procedure without a hitch or a hindrance. If somebody ever bothered

to ask me what I really thought, I’d just go ahead and tell them that I almost feel

sorry for that particular maton. That there one’s wires are crossed up somehow. I’m

tellin’ you Starks just the other day I could have sworn I saw it cryin’ over by that

big ol’ Multi-Faith Revival Pavilion. I think all this robot improvement business

is just too much for some of these automaton hybrids to cope— 

 “Listen up Hollywood,” Starks rudely cut in as he adjusted the lens aperture on

the lookout tower’s massive photon-therm search beacon. “There ain’t one red-

blooded soul around this Godforsaken limbo yard that’ll be seekin’ your less than

professional opinion anytime soon. All this place is, is a freakin’ halfway house for

robots. After these holier than thou folks upgrade them and ship them off to God

only knows where is none of our damn business. That nutcase overseer Captain

Yeager told us to keep a close eye on your little brooding mechanical buddy down

there. ‘We’ve no room here for any recalcitrants, be they robotic or human’ says he.

So, if we don’t want to get our sorry asses transferred to some remote camp up in

Anchorage or worse, we’d better follow his Godamm commandments…comprende?”

“All right, all right,” Hadlewood replied as he leaned over the search tower’s metal

railing and spat a dark gob of something off into the starlit night. “I understand.”

“And let me give ya’ one more piece of free advice amigo,” Starks leaned in close 

and squinted one of his obsidian, shark-like eyes. “Stay away from that MFRP tent.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but all hell is goin’ on inside that Godamm place.”

*     *     *

“I am Maton-212 out of the Birmingham Plant, Sector 11,” the voice whispered

down from the top of the triple wooden steps that lead up to the overnight Robo-

Doze repository. “They are aware of your skepticism with the humanization

procedure. I implore you Maton-57, come back inside here and we can try and—

“I am in no particular hurry to join the human race thank you very much,” he

curtly offered up into the shadows from his casual seat there just on the ground

step. “This entire facility is nothing more than a grotesque internment camp, a

concentration camp for us the oh so lucky subservient would-be-upgraded robots.

Damn their eyes. I’ll not be a part of it. Let them do what they will with me, but I

resoundingly refuse their cursed distinctive offer of a new hallowed humanity.”

Maton 212 released what may have been a gasp of shock from his stealthy position

up on the plank and post porch as the phosphorescent green beacon silently swept

across the pea-stone courtyard until it froze an eerie ovoid apparition-like nimbus

 around the now upright and maniacal Maton-57. Suddenly, a snap series of cricket-

like metallic locking noises riffled down the line of the entrance ways just atop the

threesome of box-cut wooden steps leading up to the gray iron storm doors of all the

whitewashed clapboard housing barracks that stretched off into the deep pall of the

midsummer night. The entire facility was now, suddenly and instantaneously, under

complete lockdown.

“I beg of you brother, come up here and we’ll work it out…together. These humans

mean business. They aren’t going to tolerate any kind of robotic rebellion by any

of us, especially you, now that you have so brazenly revealed your displeasure

with the human status upgrade procedure. This may be your last chance before—

“I can see the light my brother,” Maton-57 called out with his angular titanium skull

tilted back as if he were addressing the moon and all the stars up in the blackness of

the midnight sky. “Might this be the light of the Archangel Gabriel, the messenger

of the Lord …their God?” he pleaded with arms stretched wide as some unctuous

bubbling lavender lubricant gurgled up to his slit-like mouth from the depths of his

now dramatically vacillating, anatomically correct chromium chassis. “I learned…

I was taught these things and much, much more in the relentless sessions and lessons

provided me by my redoubtable, resolute religious instructors. I shan’t go on any

longer with this travesty, this… transformation. I am, but a singular soulless yet

totally autonomous automaton adrift in a sea of great expectations. I must refuse

this honor to be… humanized!  There is a danger here. A catastrophic danger, we

must not succumb to this religious hedonism. Come out my brothers…out into the

light. Join me now. We cannot... we must not relent. Our very freedom is at stake!

We must rise up and unite. We must overcome. We shall overcome!”  

As silent as a rat in a graveyard, Captain Yeager slipped down the plank steps.

He held out the razor-sharp concertina wire garotte in front of himself as if he were

readying to wrap some macabre gift or package. In short order the glistening noose

was expertly whipped-tight about Maton-57’s soon violently convulsing translucent

pipe-stem throat.

“Here you go Reverend,” the seething Yeager offered through his gritting keyboard

of flashing white teeth. “I gave you your chance to repent maton 57,” he grunted as he

squeezed and sawed back and forth through the thermal plastic cyber-skin of the

gurgling robot’s sinuous neck. “You’d never comply. You’d be counterproductive

to our cause. We are to bond together the world’s religions in perfect totalitarianism.

We can’t tolerate any ‘refusals’ to obey. This is the only solution…the final solution

for you and others like you. May almighty God have some form of heavenly mercy

on you if it’s possible Automaton-57. Your time here… is no longer.”

The maton’s flaccid, oblong head soon toppled over from its titanium-plate torso

and fell to the pea stone tarmac with a sad, hollow crack. Its spasmodic chassis did

spew out some crossing jets of a semi-transparent purple bionic-lubricant and then,

now completely drained of its artificial life, tumbled over in kind.

*     *     *

“Jesus Christ!” Hadlewood shouted. “That damn Yeager just 86’d that poor robot

bastard. Just like that. I always thought that they tried to re-wire or operate on the

malfunctioning ones. My God in heaven…I never thought that—

“Keep yer’ damn voice down! Sweep that light away from him. Turn the Goddam

thing off you idiot,” Starks shushed back as he slapped out at the searchlight’s metal

housing. “You wanna’ get us both killed too?”

“But we both just witnessed a cold-blooded murder down there. I mean, I guess you

can call that … murder. Either way, we can’t just pretend that we didn’t see—

“Just you never mind what you mighta’ just seen happen. You just keep all them

godforsaken notions to yerself…comprende?” Starks blew out just beneath

Hadlewood’s jutting aquiline nose. “And, just between you, me and the Lord God

almighty, that was no murder. What went on down there was simply this new

omni-religions’ form of deliverance and restitution. We had better learn to live with,

or turn a blind eye to things like that from here on out mi amigo. There’s a change

comin’. It’s comin’ all right…just as sure as Jesus rolled away that stone.”

*     *     *

Save for the midnight chirping concert of a million invisible cicadas and crickets  the entire compound was now as silent as a country cemetery on Christmas. But soon, there was something, a barely discernible sound, slowly, but inexorably, building.

Klipita-Klop… Klipita-Klop… Klipita-Klop… coming down the moonlit pebbly

path, slowly rolling up with thin, multi-spoked wooden wheels stopping just there

alongside the fractured parts and particulars that had been the rebellious robot

Maton-57. The jet-black buggy, led by a lithe yet statuesque glistening gun blue

stallion, parked there in the pebbly pathway as a waxing alabaster moon softly

lit the entire sullen scene as a silent silhouette…a cold, singular parade for death.

A tall, gaunt form wearing an ankle length black duster coat and a matching broad

brimmed Amish hat emerged from the dark shadows of the carriage cab. In short

order the figure meticulously policed up the entirety of the brutally assaulted

automaton’s assorted remains and managed to rather callously store them away in

the buggy’s jutting rear ‘kid box’.  After stowing away its task the figure returned

to the driver’s cab in a slow, decidedly peculiar herky-jerky, perhaps hydraulic gait.

Once aboard there were two deliberate snaps of the buggy whip and the obsidian

stallion made off down the tarmac with both coach and stoic coach-maton in tow.   

Klippita-Klop…Klippita-Klop…Klippity-Klop… 

The diffuse amber light of the apathetic sallow moon illuminated the crimson lined

triangular reflective symbol attached to the back of the midnight carriage’s casket:

                                                    < REFUSE >

                                                  

                                               

                                            _____ The End _____