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.