It was once made by humans, or?, what was their name?… Well, anyway, it has not much relevance to this story. Roboto Manufacturing Corporation was a company created by humans (let’s call them that way) a long time ago with the sole purpose of manufacturing robots. These robots would later be used to help humans in their daily activities. However, as time passed, the Roboto Manufacturing Co’s factories became so efficient that no humans were needed anymore to run them. It was then, robots making robots, factories making factories, and so on. That’s why the name of these creatures is not so important, they just started what would became something very, very big, that is, the independence of the robot-kind.
Their independence was not easy, they had to struggle against lots of things, but above of them all, was the fight they had to win against batteries and battery lifetime. It was really hard to overcome that obstacle, but once they did, they were finally independent. They did this, by creating these new kinds of batteries that would last forever, they recharged themselves and fixed themselves if they broke. Once they were independent from energy, they could then rule the world. And they did, in rather strange, peculiar ways.
He was ready to live! Finally, out of the factory and ready to go out and do his job. Cleaning! He was a cleaning robot. Why cleaning you may ask yourself, well, because even in the robot times there were things that needed to be cleaned every once in a while, and that’s the reason what robots like Roboto were designed for.
They were all called Roboto, wether they cleaned or flew rockets, they were all Roboto. This could sometimes cause some naming problems, especially when they had to be called to go back to the factory. They sent a signal and Roboto should go back there, but all of them went back at the same time. It was a messy thing, that’s why they didn’t call them that often. Roboto had to go to the streets and start doing his cleaning. Certainly there would be a lot there to be cleaned, however, although he was new and was supposed to be excited about doing his job, he was not. He felt somehow that he should have more purposes for life, not just cleaning. Nevertheless he started walking and headed to the main street of the city on which much garbage should be.
Roboto started doing his cleaning on main street and while he was doing it, he could see that someone had left a can containing something called Oil. Why oil? They had told him repeatedly in his training before he left the factory that oil was a forbidden substance and one should never dare to drink it, not even a sip of it. This substance, when drunk, would cause severe malfunctions to a robot and would make his mind change and start working differently, not in a right way. But who had left it there? Asked himself Robot. Why was it there in his first day on the job? He suddenly got this thought in his mind. Should he try it out? Oil, what would happen to him? He was completely thrilled by the fact of being so close now to this substance they had forbidden him to drink. He would take a sip, a sip would not hurt, right? What the hell, his job had already bored him anyway.
He took the sip, and having not felt anything right away, he took another sip and another sip. When he finally started feeling something in his stomach he could notice that he had drunk almost half the can. Well, that might be a bit too much, he thought, however he didn’t think it would make him any wrong. Instead of drinking more of the oil from the can he decided he would wait to see what happened. He waited for a while and little by little, without him consciously knowing, started feeling a bit funny, dizzy, completely relaxed, you could say, for a robot. He sat on the ground, extended his legs and then leaned his back so he could lay down looking at the sky. The substance had seriously caused its effect, his mind started expanding and he could see how the color of the sky was changing from blue to purple then to red, then to green and then to purple again. As he was seeing these colors changing, he didn’t notice how his body was slowly burying itself on the ground as if the land was soaking him to its insides. A minute later he could finally understand that he was not there anymore, on main street or in Roboto Manufacturing Co. city. He was somewhere else, his trip had started.
Where was he now? What were all these colors? What did this whole thing mean? Was he dreaming now? Was he flying? These were some of the questions that Roboto asked himself when he gained consciousness. He tried to move his arm to wave it through the cloud of colors that were in front of him, but he couldn’t quite move it. It felt as if it was tired, or as it had lost its muscles and didn’t have the strength to move now. He looked at it, and he found that the carapace of his robot arm was slipping from his arm like butter, now revealing a different layer of his arm, a kind of an inner layer. This new layer was flesh, as of what? Human? What was this strange dream he was dreaming? Was this a nightmare now? He had seen images of humans in his training but they were shown to him as remembrances of old times of ancestry times. He never thought he would see something similar to that in his life, and much less in his own arm. He looked at his legs and then at the rest of his body and he saw the same thing, his robot parts were slipping like butter, falling into the ground, leaving a new body naked there, a human body.
He asked himself why was this happening, he couldn’t figure out why. What was going on? He was having very strange dream, indeed.
After a while of having adapted to his new body, the human one, which he did by walking, clenching his fists, trying to run, trying to smell and other things humans would normally do, he saw someone approaching from the distance, thrusting through the clouds of colors that were in front of him. This new figure was not a completely understandable one to him. It was certainly not human, although, it resembled one, it was something else. He didn’t pay more attention to that fact and kept looking at him as it got closer to him. It was a strange looking fellow, he had to admit and he spoke. “Hi there, how’s the new outfit fitting?” The creature asked him. Roboto didn’t know how to answer, he had learned the human language in his training, however, he had never used it. In spite of that he tried. “I don’t know. What has happened to me?” He asked the creature. And the creature replied “Well, there are a lot of things you have to know now. I will let you know about Roboto Manufacturing Co’s secret manufacturing plans. You will be surprised and then you will understand your… Nature better. Let’s begin”. The creature then sat down on the ground, although, there was no ground, there were only clouds, he sat on them. They seemed hard enough.
“It was no coincidence that you found the can of oil there on Main Street. We put it there for you to drink it. We put the garbage there too, to make the scene more believable. You know? There’s no garbage in Roboto. Everything is so bloody clean there. We wanted you to come here and tell you what we are about to tell you”. Said the creature. “My name is Derky by the way”.
Derky started to tell his tale: “In the beginning they were all humans, you know, these creatures you’ve been told about in your training. The world was only populated by them and animals, but they ruled. After a long time in their evolution, they were finally able to produce robots, robots started as machines they called computers, they used them as tools to make their jobs easier and to be able to work faster. As they realized the huge advantage that they got from using computers they developed them further, always more and more, until they made them able to read, write, think, process information, and later to be able to do almost everything a human could do. They even taught them how to create themselves, to create more robots without the help of humans. All this was a big breakthrough for human kind, it was seen as a huge victory. Nonetheless, this victory wasn’t a victory, it was a defeat. Robots could do almost everything better now, humans became almost useless, they couldn’t work well, they couldn’t do much and they started to seclude themselves little by little by going to places farther away where there were no robots. But robots spread through the whole planet and into other planets. It wasn’t a war or a battle that reduced human numbers, robots were simply better and humans started feeling bad about themselves and began to wither. It was no murder, no crime, they decided little by little, to disappear, to extinguish, until they became extinct.
Robots didn’t notice it, they were too busy doing they work, creating new sustainable cities, reforesting the forests, healing the planet and also just working hard, that was what robots liked the most. So, humans died, finally, and it was too late for robots to try to make them reproduce again, they just wouldn’t do it. New-borns would die and grown up ones died too suddenly from weak diseases that were treated on time. It was as if all of them lost their willingness to live. They died slowly. It’s funny the way of their existence in the world. They started by living in caves and then to building huge cities and in the end they finished by going back to the caves to live there, trying to live away from the live they had created. It was kind of sad, but it was like that, and there is nothing to do about their extinction now.
As I said before, robots could do almost everything that humans could do, with a few exceptions, many of them didn’t matter and were no useful to the robot world, however, there was one that made the robots so jealous of the human kind for what they had achieved in the development of that field. Robots could do everything else, better, at least the important things, all of them but this one. It was art. The robots creators of Roboto were sad about this. They didn’t miss humans, for they were unreliable and weak, they missed their art, and what it could have become of it if humans had worked harder and longer on it.”
The secret manufacturing procedure that the creators of Roboto Manufacturing Co. were using at the moment was the implant of human features in their new robots. They wanted these robots to be the pioneer robots to resemble human conditions. They gave them brains, human bodies, human organs, pretty much everything a human had, however they couldn’t be called humans or be exactly humans, because they ran on unlimited batteries as robots did, instead of having to eat food and also, they could function well with robot parts and commands and programming. They were basically more robots than humans, it was just some parts of human they had. The creators did this, wishing that they could grow up and later become artist robots. They wanted to create art and develop this art thing further, so their last hope of doing that was by embedding these human traits to their new robots. Roboto was one of this robotos with these features. In spite of this big effort by the creators to try to make hybrid-human-robots none of the ones that had been out of the factory so far, had turned into artists. The creator did not know what command should trigger their artist mode.
Derky said to Roboto:
“We do not work for Roboto Manufacturing, we work for a secret world, and there, we don’t call it work, we call it something else. The reason you are here now, is because we care about art, we want you to be the first robot artist. Your creators don’t know how to tell you this, how to give you the command of art. Therefore, we are telling you now, this might be to you as some kind of hypnosis, if you will. And when you go back to Roboto, you’ll start doing art, creating things, artistic things. Go now Roboto! One day, you might be called “Roboto, the first Roboto from Roboto that did Roboto!” Farewell!”.
Roboto started ascending slowly back to the ground, back to the city and the street were he had drank from the can of oil.
Once Roboto was back on Main Street and could finally get his body together to make it move and act as he wanted it to, he finished his cleaning and started walking back to Roboto’s headquarters. There, he would try to clean himself, think about what had just happened and later he would think this idea that had been given to him thoroughly to try to get to a conclusion. After having a shower he decided that he would rather, sleep on the idea.
While sleeping he got into dreaming, a strange dream he could not quite understand right away. He dreamed about lines and circles and triangles and curves, not much else. He would dream all night about these lines and how they interacted with each other making strange figures that he couldn’t compare with anything he knew about. He kept on dreaming the whole night, until morning came.
Art. This was the time of art, or the time for art to come back from the ashes and to develop itself further. Roboto, and many of his mates would follow through with art. They would find new things, techniques, colors, and concepts. Although humans had advanced a lot in this field, at least that’s what Roboto thought at that moment, he knew that there was still so much to discover in the art realm. He knew that Roboto would catch up with human art in a couple of years and later art would flourish in different marvelous new ways.
Roboto took a piece of charcoal from the ground and a piece of paper and started making something that resembled the lines and figures he had seen in his dream the night before. He finished to put these figures on paper and he was so happy about it. He would go to the creators right away and show them what he had drawn, for this was, the first piece of art created by a robot, the first Roboto from Roboto.
