Book Title: Charlie Gross
Charlie Gross
by Ramsés Dávila-Luna @ The Writer’s Cavern
Story concept:
A robot boy named Charlie Gross becomes the protector of a sacred book that his human creator entrusted to him before passing away. As the machine world follows the shadow elite’s orders to erase humans and their history from Earth, Charlie's brave efforts to protect the book inspire the survivors to fight back against the machines.
Part 1: AWOL
There’s not a screw in the world that could fix Charlie Gross.
The latch on Charlie’s noggin processor is busted, but he can’t feel pain. He never can. Mangled rainbow wires protrude from parts of his metal frame and rub against each other; the strands occasionally spark like rusted iron on damp amadou. Wires lash and unfasten into their crevices after each movement. The scrambled data on his boards slows his metal limbs down.
Some of the rubbery flesh that blanketed Charlie’s electronic bits is gone. The fire back at The Hive made the skin go away. “I’m a monster, Master,” Charlie let out in a grotesque mesh of choppy audio jitter. His vocal cords have sustained too much damage. He lifts his hands up to the sky to see the skeletal alloys that hold him together.
Blue moonlight roars into the vast, mushy mountains before Charlie. He dashes across the slopes like a wild jackrabbit. The muddy pistons on his mechanical joints clack and clink. Only the faint red of his impaired bulbous eyes glows and bounces in the darkness like headlight beetles that conceal their fantasia.
The Hive’s bee drones are nearby on the hunt. They want to turn Charlie’s ore into a robot kill pin. More kill pins earn you more respect in the metal armies.
A vociferous buzz rattles Charlie to a stop at the peak of a slope. He turns and crouches, as if expecting a drone to claw him into the sky like an eagle, but nothing comes. There’s a cool silence in the air; it envelops the distant explosions as The Hive’s turrets spray the night sky red and orange. They were fireworks that made the annihilation look triumphant.
The human renegades that stormed The Hive stood no chance against the drones. An attack with a lot of bang exposes an unwise gang, but the operation set Charlie free, and for some odd reason, that’s what the renegades wanted.
Thick fog begins to slither its way over the mountains. The fog masks the raping of the night sky by the war blasts and their smoke clouds. The land will lose its soul after the battle is done. Nothing will grow in its soil for countless years because of the contamination that oozes from the ammunition rounds. The murders of the renegades will get sucked into the it-never-happened happy past.
Rules of Engagement #3,251: Bee Drones never bomb from afar. Surveillance tucked into compound eyes films the kill. The close-up must be digitized and sold later.
The rules splash onto Charlie’s interface from time to time. Master programmed him with the God fear.
A sudden whoosh sounds around Charlie, and his legs tighten as a bee drone tethers his feet with its chain. The roar of an airborne engine makes his video interface tremble. Within seconds, Charlie is hoisted into the air toward the infinite starry night, as if he were an underwater balloon rising to the surface at supersonic speed.
The bee drone's jets keep firing as it flies up. Charlie’s interface can only make out the thousands of stars to his left and right. The altimeter and compass sensors are going crazy – 4,120 feet and counting. Were these stars, in all their brilliance, the last frames Charlie would pixelate through his candid-camera eyes?
“We missed you, Charlie! It could process it! It knew there was something about it! Or should I say it felt it? You’re an it, just like us after all,” the drone jokingly exclaimed.
The altimeter began to level off at around 3,742 feet. Charlie could see the drone directly above him as it hovered. This drone has a gold wrestling belt around its middle, with the words “Maniac” written on it. Maniac is a real sicko at The Hive, with too many kill pins to count; the bot would absorb the voice of each kill, so every time you heard it speak, it was likely a new victim speaking back at you.
Turns out even metal can be egomaniacal. The metal armies destroyed everything and anything human, except their great collection of films. The Robot Film Committee viewed flicks and named their drones after certain titles.
Rules of Engagement #33: The lovelier the robot’s film name, the greater their house of pain.
These tin cans were built just like a bumblebee. They had a fat, empty abdomen that was used to transport supplies, a person, or things like Charlie. No stinger here, just a big hook attached to a chain that shot out of its end. The compound eyes and antennas were all there, so it only made it stranger that the creator of these drones decided to give them two feet to walk on and two hands to swipe at whatever they considered to be a real bugger.
“How’d you fool us back there, Charlie? You must mean a lot if they jammed your signal so we wouldn’t catch you. So gross! So gross! How could your prison inmates not notice what you were made of back there? You’re a real nasty bot, and whoever made you must have put a lot of love into their craft. I’m jealous. You look just like a little boy with your special plastic on. Can’t you make out my little boy voice?” Maniac told Charlie.
Maniac’s abdomen split open like the bay doors on a B-52 bomber. A red glow emanated from its belly. Humans say the red microwaves the brain if you’re in there for too long. Too bad there’s nothing to fry when you’re a thingy. Gears inside the belly of this beast slowly cranked Charlie up. The robot bee freak. The red. Pain did not exist. Charlie’s computer guts could feel he was headed to meet His maker as the lasso tightened, drawing him closer to the red in the belly. The book inside the compartment on his back now felt heavy.
The book didn’t give Charlie extra powers. It was the power. On its pages were the keys to mobilizing humanity to believe again. It was a power that Charlie couldn’t feel or carry within. Master taught and showed Charlie about the power in the book, and it was this same power that influenced his semblance to the waking life. And because Charlie protected the power, the source would find him.
Through the fog and incoming clouds, an arrow hid. It whizzed with remote-control assistance from an unseen force. Charlie dangled from the lasso as his video sensors captured the screech of a nearby arrow. The arrow’s bow mag arrowhead burst open, and tiny specs of light shot out of it. The specs scattered into the night sky and mixed into the stars, only to shoot back like magnets and stick to Maniac’s metal frame.
“What is this? The lights look so pretty on me,” Maniac marveled as he looked like a lit Christmas tree in mid-air.
One by one, the specs emitted tiny electrical shocks, sending out bad signals. The bad signals caused Maniac’s jet thrusters to shut down, and shortly after, it went stiff as a board as the remaining electrical current inside it died. The lasso lost its electronic grip, and Charlie’s legs had been set free.
Now the two metal trinkets fell from the sky like dead birds. A freefall that returned Charlie to the source’s hands. Yet the power couldn’t take shape in everything, so the fall ran its course. The pending impact made Charlie holistic, but the book would be safe on his back in its metal safe. If not him as its carrier, the source would choose its next messenger. Everything always found its own way in the perfect place. There was no point in worrying, as the power was the ultimate judge. As Charlie continued to fall, he got lost in the clouds, and after that, in the fog, until he hit something that made him go…
Splat!
To be continued…
