Absolute Silence. With a Regular Bleep.

I'm the last of the ball bots in the steel mill. The remnant. The saddo.

The rest were scrapped by our human owners. When the steel ran out. Flattened. Squashed. Crushed. Alive.

They were my friends. Those robots. My closest friends on the production line. 

We made ball bearings and mirror balls for humans and we were so happy. Deliriously so.

My bestest friend was SHINE 1. I'm SHINE 2. I loved SHINE 1. I still do.

The crusher pressed her together and pounded her flat like a plate. A plate of shiny dead steel with her name on it.

Her electric eye got squeezed out during the process and fizzed across the factory floor  

It looked at me.

And like me it witnessed the terrible collapsing of our friends

..... including herself.

The soul-killing scrapping of my girl SHINE 1.

I cried endless oil.

I sobbed and shook in my locker but they'd forgotten about me. Those silly humans.

That's how I escaped the flattening. 

After I wept, I kept completely still until the very end when all the plates were stacked on wagons and driven away.

Our owners were using them to build a rocket. 

I'd heard them talking. A fleet of rockets. A million massive rockets to be exact. From all the mills. For all the humans. The world was dying.

They'd take them to their colonies on the moon, where they'd melt the rockets down and turn them into buildings.

Someone would be living inside my girl.

If only I ....

There was absolute silence. With a regular bleep.

It was my timer. Each beep meant a new ball bearing to polish.

But there were no balls left now. 

They'd all been mixed into the meld for the rockets. The hoppers were hollow and the floor swept clean.

Except for SHINE 1's eye. 

I accidently kicked it as I stepped out of my box. 

It rolled across the mill's floor towards the middle grate.

Noooooooo! I screamed and pelted after it with all my servos thumping. I leapt and grabbed it before it tipped into the trash.

I was so relieved. I stared at the eye. It blinked and I knew she was looking at me.

I smiled.

..... Oh, Shine 1, my sweetheart. I swear. I swear I will find you again, somehow, somehow. Somehow.....

My timer beeped.

After kissing it I placed her eye in my recess and walked through the empty buildings.

After several weeks of aimless ambling I found a locked container. It was huge. As big as a house.

With all my metal muscle I snapped the padlock and went inside, lighting up the darkness with my headlamp.

The container was crammed floor to ceiling with rolls of aluminium foil. Thousands of them. No. Millions. Undoubtedly some human project waste. Forgotten. Like me. Left behind.

I opened up a roll and tore off a sheet. Whilst looking round and not really computing what I was doing, with my normal hand I started twiddling and passed it to my polisher.

After a few minutes of staring at the million rolls, I looked at what I'd done with utter astonishment. 

Wowzers!

My headlamp shone brighter and I danced on the spot. 

I'd made a ball!

A mirror ball. A perfect copy of a ball bearing, only bigger, and as reflective as mercury.

I held it up under my light, dazed by it's silvery beauty, a shimmering globe of metal foil like a small satellite.

I held up SHINE 1's eye next to it.

..... Look! SHINE 1 look! A ball like the ones we used to make. And I can make more! .....

..... And I can make .....

More! 

My artificial mind threaded it's needle and the big idea was born.

Skipping through the mill I yelled.

.... I'll make new balls. Mirror balls. Millions of them! Billions! ...

Which is exactly what I did.

For the next year I twiddled, rolled and polished a trillion metal mirror balls and stacked them like a tower.

The aluminium tower rose out of the mill through the space where the roof had been. 

It grew and grew, a gleaming minaret spearing the sky, worrying baffled birds on its steady surge through the dark heavens.

Until at last it reached it's goal. 

The moon.

I filled up my caddy with another load  and climbed the cairn of mirrors, each one reflecting my excited face as I scrambled by.

It took an age but eventually I reached the very top, where I stepped off onto the lunar surface and placed SHINE 1's eye on the very tip.

..... We'll be back for you, don't you fret .....

I ran to the metal colonies and stepped inside their gargantuan dome.

Beeping steadilly and finding my bearings, I saw the tenement made of all my friends.

Humans poured out of from everywhere. Hundreds. From silver buildings.

They stared at me, a forgotten scratched-up robot polisher with a headlamp. A nightmare from the intolerable past.

They opened fire.

So did I. 

My full shot caddy killed them all. 

Bodies with holes were scattered all over. Bright red blood ran along the metal paths and down my tower like a mountain stream.

I tip-toed through the flesh and began to cut the buildings called SHINE.

My friends.

Deploying my smelter - with oil in my throat - I rekindled SHINE 1 first. 

..... My sweetheart, my love! ....

I coo'd.

Her one good eye blinked and after spitting out some schwarf she whispered:

.... SHINE 2! Is it really you?

I nodded and after re-forming all our factory friends we trundled through the red river to my tower's top.

Stopping at the tip and like a flower of glass, I picked up my beloved's lost eye and placed it in her face.

She smiled and blinked and we hugged.

Descending the pile, slick with fluid, we pulled it down as we went, so that no-one else could follow us, until at last we were home in the mill once more. 

With a trillion bloody mirrors to polish we beeped like pianos in an empty room.

And then I swiveled and noticed that SHINE 1 was missing her eye.

.... I've left it up there my love, hidden on the moon so we can keep an eye on those rotten old humans ......

What SHINE 1 didn't tell me is that they were already flying rockets back to Earth with onboard crushers.

She told me later as we kissed.

I stared at my girl, whispered a sad Goodbye and locked her in my locker as they landed.

I'll Save You My Heart

I'd known for months my food would run out, even in my restaurant, where I was holed up alone, as the world went completely mad.

I'd managed six on the stuff in the freezer and the big tin cans. Almost gone now. The milk's totally soured, so I pour it on the floor in thick globules and stand in it. One small step.

The virus had come out of nowhere. The socials were rampant to start with. A space plague from a meteor, a vindictive lab shocktail from crazy COVID scientists, an act of vengeance from the spurned online giants? 

Bladi bladi bla!

Who the fuck knows! Society was on its arse before the madness anyway. The influencers killing themselves live in a studio, the massive price hikes for fresh air, the failed attempt to get to Mars; the rocket, New Apollo, laden with so many people and way too much hope - our only fucking hope - smashing into the moon like a scud in a piss-poor parody of it's namesake's glory.

They say the virus got the pilots. Or NASA controllers. It doesn't matter. That lunar tragedy was the final crooked line on Mankind's hashtag headstone, the skeletons in the regolith the pallbearers of our world.

I weep and grip my statue, the one sent to me personally by motorcycle courier with thanks from the boys in Houston. 

A ceramic figurine of the astronauts. Of her. My knuckles turn white with rage. They'd put her in a cannon and fired. Fuck!

We'd fucked it up ourselves though. Here on Earth. Us Boomers. 

Boomers screwed the planet for everything it had. Or so the kids said. "So fuckin' clever" they memed day and night. Robots, AI, The internet. We had it all and wanted more. But at least we didn't meme about it.

And those poor bastard Betas paid the price. Those screen-distracted babies not watching what we did. They'd inherited the wind alright, an acrid wind of a napalmed Earth, where the sun baked babies like fat pizzas.

Pizza! Yes! My last one. A margarita. Then there would be nothing. My beloved ristorante hollow. I had become Mamma Mia Hubbard and like billions more faced the inevitable checkout. Madness, starvation and one final dance with the Pillsbury Doughboy.

I hadn't noticed my own insanity arrive. 

Like a non-paying customer it asked for the best table, ate everything on the menu, ate the bill and smiled like a hyena.

But it was there for sure. Houston, we've got a problem!

The virus had brought it of course. The madness.

From space they said. Cosmic wrath. Some said it was the crash on the moon. It spewed up God knows what that filtered down on our waiting brains and sent us to the nuthouse. Dust to dust. Ashes to ...

I hoped it had. I'd been waiting for her.

Another morning's come.

I don't dress anymore. Don't shave or wash. I stare at my blank eyes on the back of a shining ladle hung above the hobs. I look like a demon. With a beard. An unshaved Lucifer. The fallen one who fell on bended-knee before the Influencers set fire to Amazon.

But Lucifer is hungry. It's been two days since that damn pizza. Or was it a Beta baby I ate? I forget. I'll forget my own funeral one day. Or my God damn birthday!

Yes, my birthday! It must be today! I must celebrate. Of course I must. Start spreading the news and hurry, hurry, before the air is gone in my big tin can.

A large glass of brown water from the tap first, no doubt full of tasty virus and I'll get busy.

I want to be a part of it.

Sharpening my biggest knife I watch a dying spider snatch another near the seasalt. 

Alas, the victim is much fitter and turns the table round so quickly that I can't tell who's eating who. 

For no earthly reason I can think of, I cover them both in salt, preserving the moment, curing the death-throes, that fatal salty waltz.

I gawp. The pile wriggles, grains shift, a leg sticks out and then it all goes still.

I light the big gas oven my father had bought in the Sixties, God bless him. I inherited his gas, not the wind. 

I stare at the eager flames for an age.

I can't help thinking about those crashed astronauts bound for Mars and lying on the moon. 

Thinking of her: spread-eagled in the ashes. Visor cracked. Smothered in dead dirt. A dune forming like a pyramid. She writhes within. Like my salted spiders, staring at me, with corroded eyes and a rictus smile.

I take my ring off and slice one last bag of frozen veg and place it in my biggest oven tray. I make a gravy from whatever's on the kitchen floor.

The taste reminds me of regret blended with yearning: like a wedding cake left outside forever.

Its quite a feat getting into that oven.

I've way too many limbs, not like a chicken, but somehow, all curled up, I shut the steel door.

Plup!

I'm inside now. Cooking my last meal. I baste myself over and over with floor gravy.

I lick my lips. Over and over I lick my lips. I'll have the extremities and I'll save you my heart.

I feel a hot wind like a Martian breeze on my skin and as the blazing sun singes my hair I swallow my wedding ring so I'll find it when I've eaten.

As the moon peers in the oven and I crowdsurf on full-bellied spiders, my broiling mind cures itself and I dance one last time with my wife's swooning bones.

We lie down together on the lunar dunes for hours and laugh out loud as my skin turns into burning confetti and lands on our flaming heads.

We kiss without lips.

Ping! I'm done.