Dockside

I stand on the shore. I hate my job.

The smaller automatons here weld and stitch together and ferry cargo. They are mobile. They have wheels and treads. The shipyard is a hive of activity when a ship comes in.

What I do is reach down, pick up a ship, and hold it aloft while it’s cleaned and fixed. That’s it. I’m the largest terrestrial robot that there is.

And I’m bored stiff.

My six legs are all seventeen stories tall. I have two crane compartments for human operators if something fails. Both cockpits are dusty. The windows are nearly opaque with grime. They haven’t been used in years. I was built well.

A lot more ships these days don’t need repairs. The only pull up and unload. I watch them.

I am red metal rooted to the edge of the pier. I use the video cameras studded around my immense frame to look out at the sunsets. I am a silent sentinel.

I am mostly content but I wish I could walk.

In my dreams during reboot and downtime, I picture myself walking tall over the buildings of the city, twenty-two point sixteen kilometers from here. Either that or I picture myself as a giant metal sea-creature. Sort of a cross between an octopus and crab but larger than any whale.

Dreams.

If I’m not shutdown or in standby, I like to play back the recording of the dawns and sunsets and see how high I can push the resolution.

Here comes a tanker. Old with barnacles, listing to port and fragile. I’ll have to be careful. I am happy to be useful.




tags

Waking Up

Dawn jumps up from behind the mountains and splashes over the city, making a high tide of light that reaches with bright yellow fingers up to my bedroom window.

The glow filters through the dust motes and the blinds. It paints stripes onto my floor. My dry body twitches, climbing the ladder up from dreams to a state of awareness. The images let go of me as my brain re-orders into something more limited. My humanity asserts itself, pushing the dreams away, eradicating the memory of them.

I remember. Last year the road outside would have been filled with the sound of cars, honking horns, and the hum of radials on warming pavement as the first world went to work.

That’s missing now. I can hear the scuffling of footsteps and people talking to each other. This is the new world. There are still banks and borders but cars, those dinosaur-blooded monsters come to reclaim the earth, they’re almost all gone.

I hear the ratcheting of changing gears on bicycles. I remember that rent will be due in two days.

Those of us that can afford it carry firearms now.

A frontier mentality is taking over, a mindset that always happens to humanity when faced with tough challenges. There’s an honesty to it that I find refreshing in its brutality. Like the human race is going through a chapter of being honest with itself.

Gold is still gold but most of the businesses in the world have gone bankrupt. The upper floors of high-rise downtown buildings are deserted. Corner offices have become hovels for nomads and squatters. We haunt this city.

The desert is reclaiming the south. I’ve heard the term ‘dustbowl’ from old books about the depression of the 1930s but I never understood it until now.

We all wear handkerchiefs or cheap air filters on our faces.

We feel lost. No leader has risen yet to take over. The whole notion of government has become informal. Local leaders are making the rules. The republicans were well-prepared. The liberals think the end times are here.

Myself, I know that I have to find some food out there and a day’s work. I wipe the sleep from my eyes and swing my legs over the edge of the mattress. I’ll check the condensation tanks and see what the day’s water level is.

I’m awake.





tags