Book Title: Charlie Gross
Continued from the 06/19/2026 blog post:
Book Title: 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.
Chapter 1: AWOL
There’s not a screw in the world that could fix Charlie Gross.
Splat!
Charlie felt a tremendous calm as his body lodged itself into the mud. He was lost somewhere in the crevices of a mountainside, and the impact made several of his parts feel out of place. The thick fog turned everything around him into a white blur. Charlie was thankful for the white because the fall made him feel different, and he didn’t want to see what that meant for his lower half. For the first time, Charlie could feel himself become undone.
Charlie dragged his upper torso up the face of the mountain as his other half stayed behind. He gently touched the path ahead of him with his outstretched hands and arms. Mud and more mud sifted through his hands, no matter what direction he crawled in. His hands, shoulders, and arms stiffened. Movement seemed more impossible by the second, until his body finally gave way and flopped frozen on the slushy mud. His electronic death was in the air, hiding in the fog.
The white reminded him of the white dishes he’d clean in the kitchen at Master’s house. He imagined himself readying the dinner table as the electric currents within slowed. Somewhere in the fog, Charlie could hear Master carrying the utensils and setting them by the dishes on the table.
“Who goes there?” a hoarse voice whispered.
“You’re going to get us all killed. Close the top and get back inside,” a brusque voice came after.
An orange glow seeped out of the ground close by. A fast, chicken-like head popped out of the hole and scanned the sides in panic.
“Help, please!” Charlie belted out.
“See! There’s someone there. I told you I heard something,” the hoarse voice triumphantly mouthed off.
“Just let it be. It’s none of our business,” the brusque stranger replied.
“Help!” Charlie repeated.
A tiny insect-like drone closed in on Charlie’s face.
“I’ll be damned, Roger! It’s a boy. Come and help me bring the lad in,” the hoarse voice said.
The pitter-patter of quick footsteps became louder to Charlie’s ears.
“Are you alright?” the brusque voice said near Charlie.
Two pale-skinned and veiny strangers stood over Charlie, freaked out by the broken humanoid they had stumbled across. Their tight skin showed the ridges throughout their bodies, and their hair had grown out of proportion. They whispered to themselves as the bot pleaded, “My other half. Please help me find it. I need it to feel whole. It hurts to be broken.” Those words made the strangers pause and think.
Angry and reluctant, a set of frail, thin hands placed a blindfold over Charlie’s eyes.
“Damn you, Patrick. Are you sure about this?” the hoarse gent said.
“This one feels, Roger,” Patrick replied as he fastened the blindfold.
Roger and Patrick slowly dragged Charlie’s body over the mud.
“Fellow weighs a ton,” Roger said as he heaved the torso towards him.
“Don’t make a difference how much you weigh on the other side,” Patrick replied.
Charlie’s body jolted up and down as the men dragged him into the unknown. He felt his sides against a circular edge, and more hands carried him into the deep below him. The bickering between Patrick and Roger echoed now. The sounds of more footsteps and movement bouncing off the walls gave away more people in the room, but they didn’t speak.
A soft-white glow now seeped through Charlie’s blindfold. The frightful gasps and mumbles by the others as they held Charlie were painful for the bot to hear.
“This will do,” Patrick sluggishly said as they set Charlie up against a huge rock.
“I got this weird feeling about him,” Roger cautiously remarked as he took off Charlie’s blindfold.
“It’s a monster. Your dang feelings are going to get us killed,” Patrick replied in disgust.
The wires that powered Charlie’s lenses were too busted, and his hands or arms didn’t budge. He was now at the mercy of the humans.
Two hairy women, Marie and Alice, lit candles around them that gave light and life to the cavern. There were jewels of all sizes and colors stuck to the walls. The candlelight exposed the wall’s holed texture and rough limestone.
A lone rat scurried across the cave floor, and the group lunged at it without hesitation. Their hands became forks and spoons to eat the critter raw. Marie jammed the rodent’s tail into her mouth as one of her legs accidentally dipped into the soiled ground near the walls.
Alice savored the rat innards as she hid behind a pile of clothing gathered from the dead.
The cave life had made the two women an offense to the eye.
Roger lightly tapped Charlie’s chin. “You’re safe now. Say, what’s your name?”
“No telling what happened to the kid out there,” Patrick interrupted.
“ N-A-M-E I-S C-H-H-H-H-A-A-A-R-L-I-E,” the bot shot out in a creepy, synthetic voice.
Alice grabbed the rock walls in fright. “It’s one of those things. Kill it, Patrick! Please!”
“More will come. It’s a trap!” Marie said as she quivered behind Patrick.
“Why would this thing show up to us? You’re right. It’s a trap!” Patrick blurted out. He drew the hammer on his waistline and held it with both hands over his head to strike Charlie. Anger gripped hold of him as memories of the countless humans who had fallen to The Hive came to him.
“What more do you want from us? You’ve taken enough!” Patrick cried out as he aimed at Charlie’s limp body.
In a flash, Roger crashed into Patrick and jumped on him. Patrick squealed and tried to wedge his arms out from under him.
“I can’t breathe,” Patrick desperately let out.
“You’re going to be calm if I let you get up, right?” Roger said with full authority.
“Yes, yes! You troll!” Patrick angrily cried out.
“Stop fighting,” Marie sobbed.
Alice couldn’t even budge as she gazed at Charlie. His glowing red eyes spooked her.
Charlie absorbed all the curses and labels being thrown at him. Nobody liked the real Charlie Gross. There was a different kind of life inside of him, and the humans feared it.
Roger pushed himself off Patrick, who now grappled with the air around him like a fish out of the water.
“Papa, his red eyes! His eyes! Somebody, please cover his eyes!” Alice shrieked.
“Enough! Shut up!” Roger roared into the cave. “Don’t you see? Mr. Charlie here is one of a kind. The blue jumpsuit,” Roger said as he broke into a fit of wild laughter.
“Find him another rat to munch on,” Patrick let out as Roger continued to laugh nervously.
“They thought he was human,” Alice shared in awe.
Marie nodded her head, unconvinced. “This thing can never be like us.”
Roger crawled up to Charlie’s face and looked deep into his eyes. He could still hear some gears softly turning inside of him.
“They thought he was human. The blue jumpsuit. That’s what The Hive makes humans wear in their camps,” a spellbound Roger said.
“It looked like us before this happened to him,” Patrick added as he stared at his drone goggles and bow on the ground in the distance.
“It’s made just like the rest of them, with evil,” Marie confidently said.
Charlie’s eyes suddenly lost their color and turned black as his head tilted backward.
“Hey, you okay there? Stay with us,” Roger worriedly told Charlie. He slapped the boy’s face to wake him, but the codes and digits within Charlie had already carried him elsewhere.
Alice’s curiosity made her edge closer to Charlie’s body. She extended her hand to poke at the hump of metal.
“It’s going to bite you,” Marie whispered.
Alice aimed her finger at Charlie’s heart. Everyone’s eyes fixated on the finger as it drew near his chest. Her finger sank into Charlie’s jumpsuit on contact, and she could feel all the messy wires and metals behind the clothing.
“You guys seeing this?” Alice told the group as she pulled her hand back. Patrick and Marie had their hands over their mouth, speechless. Charlie’s torso gradually flopped onto the ground as his back panel gave out a heavy click and popped open.
“Something in his back,” Roger skittishly said. He scraped at the dry mud on Charlie’s jumpsuit till a zipper near the neckline became visible. In a fit of frustration, he angrily pulled the zipper down.
“Let’s see what we have here,” Roger told the onlookers. He peeled the jumpsuit off and spotted an outlet on Charlie’s chest. “Might be where we plug in the television set,” Roger said as he giggled.
Patrick nervously interjected. “Are you an electrical engineer now, Thomas Edison?”
“We’ve got to get him to The Hole. Barnacle Joe will know what to do with him,” Roger explained as he hovered over Charlie’s intricate electronic bits.
“Great, Dad, let’s just go to The Hole with your two beautiful twig-like daughters and hope they make it out of there alive,” Marie playfully said.
“I’ll go,” Alice blurted out without thinking.
“You? A second ago, this metal hunk was everything you were scared of,” Patrick countered.
“I sense something, for the better. It’s in here with us. It reminds me of mot-,” Alice replied in a wondrous tone.
Marie passionately interrupted. “You’ve all lost it! You lay it all on the line for a skin, not a bot! That’s our number one rule. Don’t you remember what momma used to say?”
Alice stared at Marie in disbelief as she heard her say the word that kept ringing in her ears: mother.
Roger dug into Charlie’s back panel and pulled out a book. His hands trembled, not from the weight, but from the gravity of what had been hidden inside Charlie. The jewels around the cave walls brightened, and the candlelight began to sway as the book revealed itself to the group.
A stillness won them over as they stared at the book and the symbol on its cover.
“Mama wouldn’t want us to be cave dwellers for the rest of our lives. She would have wanted us to fight,” Alice preached.
The word ‘mama’ struck a deep chord, and the sound wasn’t so pretty. For the book to have found them was a gesture from their mother from the other side. They all understood the responsibility that had fallen into their hands. The word, once entrusted to them by their mother and nearly lost to memory, was now theirs to keep alive. It was up to them to protect the book and ensure its survival, at any cost.
“Mama would want us to help him. Charlie needs our help. The book is his,” Marie solemnly said.
“And what if you’re wrong? What if he’s just washed-up metal bits?” Patrick replied.
“The book chose him. Put it back where you found it. Mother keeps watch over us,” Alice whimpered as she caressed the book in Roger’s hands.
One by one, they all placed a hand over the book and gave it a gentle kiss.
Roger flipped through its pages with love and care. His eyes widened as he closed in on the words he could make out. He gathered himself and placed the book back into Charlie’s back panel.
“Where are you going?” Marie told Patrick as he turned his back to leave the cave.
“I’m going to find his other half, to make him feel whole again. We’ll have to take him to Barnacle Joe, and we must leave this place soon. The book isn’t safe here,” Patrick told the group.
Marie and Alice propped Charlie against the rock. They rummaged through the pile of clothes nearby, pulling out shirts and holding them up to his frame, searching for one that fit.
It was the book inside Charlie that softened the strangers. Unbeknownst to them, the book was working to restore the believers. Though Charlie’s frame was motionless, sensors in his upper torso continued to log sound. If Charlie could make it to see Barnacle Joe, he would have the chance to hear those files and come to find out how Roger, Patrick, Marie, and Alice banded together to acknowledge him as one of their own.
Human Rules of Engagement #1: You lay it all on the line for a skin, not a bot.
End of Chapter 1
To be continued…
Copyright © 2026 The Writer's Cavern by Ramsés Dávila-Luna at The Writer’s Cavern LLC. All rights reserved.