[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 58

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Lars got in her face and held the index finger of his left hand to his lips for several seconds. Once satisfied she understood, he withdrew his arm. Madeline turned this way and that, scoping out the crowd of robots surrounding the car on all sides.

“I knew we should’ve gone back to the lodge while there was still daylight” she whispered. Lars quietly groaned. “What the fuck do we do now? There’s too many behind us to back out. Too many in front as well, and not enough room ahead to turn around anyway. Red didn’t give you any ammo did he? For the road?”

I shook my head. Madeline started to break down. “There’s...something else we can do, isn’t there? Think of something!” Lars scratched his neck anxiously and remained silent. “We’re fucked aren’t we. God fucking damnit. We’re fucking...we’re dead. This is it.”

Lars then tried to argue with her but she grew increasingly upset. Perhaps accepting a reality neither Lars nor I were willing to yet. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we made it so far, only for it to end like this. Of all the stupid fucking ways it could’ve happened.”

The two then bickered for a while over whether it was foreseeable. Lars protested that there’d been no sign of robots, save for mangled wreckage, when we locked ourselves in to sleep. From denial to anger, now on to bargaining. I expected depression would set in next, and it did.

We sat there, shivering yet despondent while the machines milled fruitlessly around the car. Jiggling the handles every few seconds, clawing at the windows. None of them were armed, though that would’ve at least shortened our suffering by a couple days.

The sun beat down on us, now well clear of the horizon, until the temperature inside the car finally became bearable. Lars ignored our pleas to run the heater until then on the grounds that we would need it to warm up before sleeping. Already planning out the rest of our miserable lives trapped in this putrid metal box.

I checked the laptop. Still running the sim, battery down to 20%. So I leaned on Lars to plug it into the alternator until he caved when I suggested that, if I could fix Helper, she could open the front gate long enough for us to bulldoze our way in.

Madeline again chided me for taking so long to fix Helper. “You could’ve saved me from freezing my ass off ‘til the sun came up.” Her voice sounded so weary I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or sincerely irritated.

Still no telling whether the gas left in the tank would be enough to keep both the laptop and the cooling system running for the 28 hours or so it would take for the virus to fully run its course. Though I’d already burned through more than a year of simulation time yesterday, that only reduced the wait to 26 hours plus or minus a couple minutes.

I did a little napkin math and worked out that Rhonda’s fuel tank, when full, would keep the engine idling for around 70 hours. Not quite three days. Lars estimated that we’ve got a third of a tank remaining. That’s roughly 23 hours worth.

Of course there’s also the reserve which the gauge doesn’t account for. But still, that’s cutting it awfully close. If it died more than one or two hours short, it would add several days to our wait. How long does it take to die of thirst? I couldn’t remember.

Every minute that ticked by felt like individual life sentences. When you’re a kid, you think waiting for Christmas takes forever. Talk about relativity. Lars tried to strike up conversation a few times, but unsurprisingly there wasn’t much in the way of small talk anybody could make themselves care about given our predicament.

“I need to pee.” Fantastic, I thought. Just when I thought this couldn’t get worse. Madeline repeated her request more urgently. Lars asked what the big deal was. “That’s easy for you to say. You can go into a bottle or something.”

In fact I already had once earlier without anybody noticing. The best we could do was a helmet I found in the trunk. Lars explained it was a freebie at a defense tech expo he attended, representing Evolutionary Robotics.

When I asked why he didn’t put it on earlier he explained it’s basically a prop and would do nothing to stop bullets or prevent head injury. Made an alright latrine though. Then came the problem of how to dump it without opening the door.

The smell rapidly got worse as we argued over how we were going to handle bodily waste going forward. I could roll the window down a hair without giving any of the robots enough space to wedge their fingers in. The problem was, I couldn’t angle the helmet properly to dump through it.

I wound up using the siphon kit, taking special care to get the other end out of my mouth and stuck through the crack in the window as quickly as possible. It did the job, but I hardly wanted to go through all that every time.

Then my stomach growled. Somehow it escaped my consideration that we’d been sent off with no food. The three of us assumed it would be a cakewalk, that the front gate would open right up without any trouble and we could help ourselves to the effectively endless rations inside.

Nobody said it, but I knew what they were thinking. If we got hungry enough, what measures were we willing to resort to? I imagine I’d sooner starve to death than eat another person, but I couldn’t say the same of the others. Not with certainty.

Lars broke the tension by starting a game of I spy. Madeline groaned, but I encouraged it. Got my mind off the prospect of being divided up and eaten should I pick the short straw. “I spy...with my little eye...something red.”

Madeline sighed. “It’s a robot isn’t it.” Lars snapped that the game wouldn’t be any fun with that attitude, then started over. “I spy...with my little eye...something grey.” I asked if it was just a different robot. Lars crossed his arms and grumbled.

The needle now hovered precariously near empty. I checked the sim. 9 hours remaining. No good...no good. Doomed from the start, if you want to split hairs. I didn’t tell the others. Better that they should at least have a shred of hope to hold onto until the end.

As for Helper, I realized that when the laptop battery finally ran dry, she’d wake up surrounded by our corpses. Skeletons maybe, depending how long it winds up taking. Then a few weeks or months later, already near the tail end of the instruction set when she awoke, Helper would finally snap out of it.

Utterly, completely alone. Nothing left of me to hold onto but decomposed remains, tattered clothing and memories. I doubted if she could reach someplace to plug in before running out either, so at least her suffering would be short lived.

^{Stay Tuned for Part 59!}