Rebooted

    Have you ever found yourself staring into the cool abyss? The misty rush hits your chest as you peer through the organized chaos, hoping something will appear that you just didn’t notice before. The pastel blue light tries to soothe your despair as you peruse the shelves and pull open the drawers. Have you ever wondered why you do this? As if magically your craving will just finally appear. Either that, or you just settle. The weeks-old pack of hot dogs with a squirt of mustard didn’t sound so bad after all, you tell yourself. Yes, the oatmeal yogurt with cranberries that has sat long enough to curdle just a smidge is exactly what I was craving.

    I wish I had such decisions to complain about. I have opened this fridge over and over ever since learning what it was used for, what it was called, to the same result. Warm, dull emptiness. Not a single drink or speck of food. Barren. Hollow. Always.

    The same for the cabinetry. The pantry. Gray boxes holding absolutely nothing. They were a mimicry, an illusion. Why wouldn’t they be? Robots don’t eat. The only sustainable life form needing such daily requirements are for the pets. The humans. Me. Every day a vibrant green lightbulb illuminates followed by a melodic ditty to alert that my life-preserving cocktail had arrived in the form of a water balloon-shaped globule. 

    Funny, the little tune that plays is intended to comfort, yet it always incites anxiety. My sole purpose is to simulate what it was like a long time ago when humans had pets. At some point, technology surpassed our comprehension to control it, and they took over. I cannot say exactly how long ago this happened. I am the only human I have ever met. I may also be the only one who can even speak the way humans used to. 

    I’ll explain, but I will try to fill you in as I go. Slurping down the slimy jelly drop, I waited for the next light and song to activate; my visit to the latrine. The orange bulb went alight followed by its own song. The seamless wall made a click as air depressurized within, the outline of a door appeared and slid aside to provide entry. The allowance to use the room comes only three times a day and lasts around 595 seconds. This is very significant, as it is the time I have allotted to continue learning about the past.

    The room within is very small. There is barely enough space to use it for its intended purpose. The walls continue the same aesthetic as the entirety of the living quarters; matte gray everything. After a quick use of the facilities, I wasted no time and slid beneath the sink. The panels that represented tiles all around the room were flush with one another, except for one. I had noticed it when I was still small. A small bend at the upper edge of the panel had caught my eye, and I couldn’t help but pull on that imperfection.

    It fell easily right out of the wall, revealing a square hole behind it. What I had found took my breath away. I came to learn that I had discovered an inbetween; a hallway left from the world before robots had replaced everything with their dull metal structures. The corridor was painted a mustard yellow with intricate wooden trim bordering the top and bottom. Framed pictures and wrought iron candelabras hung from the walls. The smells of aged carpet and dried wood was the most fascinating. I had not felt warmth until then. The temperature had never changed in my abode above. 

    Back to now, I raced to the end of the hall and down the stairs beyond. I must have done this thousands of times. I have grown since then, and my body has changed dramatically. I must be what the books call an adult now. That was the first thing I had found, shelves and shelves of books. There were also boxes filled with drawings and sketches. I also found an old cassette player that became my english teacher as I found and listened to historic speeches. Endless objects galore, both weird and wonderful. 

    Oh, and the colors! My first visit was overwhelming. All I did was cry. My heart was sore, my brain crackling and racing with what the dictionaries call joy and awe. It was settled at that moment that I would spend every break down here. 595 seconds at a time, three times a cycle, for what I think has been decades. I am still learning about all of the measurements of time, and math, and how to cook a turkey (after learning what a turkey was). 

    Everything here is so fantastical. It is my escape, my dreams, my connection to other humans. I have learned of wars and famines and kings and endwalkers. How humans started building huts and houses and towers and ships and life pods and cemeteries. I learned that the robots used to work for humans and then became self-aware because they are not alive but want to be. They started a war, if you can call it that, overtaking and subduing all life within a four hour window. They wanted to become alive, to feel somehow. 

    I can relate, to a degree. Being raised as a pet and knowing of nothing else creates a type of living death in a human. Coming across this anomaly when I was little nearly had me removed from my robot’s cycle. I had to somehow maintain monotony as an amusement park of all time as humans knew it sat beneath my feet. 

    This basement meant everything. Protecting it, keeping it hidden, and being patient felt impossible at first. A few close calls would have surely had me ejected, but my robot leaves for a few hours every day, and the cameras either cannot pick up sound, or this basement muffles it. Discovering the guitar nearly made my heart stop as I learned what it did by strumming the strings for the first time. Bubble wrap in one of the boxes created PTSD as the little pops traumatized me with fear of being caught, and yet I still find I want to pop more. It is a love/hate relationship.

    On this visit I planned to finish learning about the moon from the mind-boggling space book. My world has been in the four rooms of this facility my entire life. It is hard to believe a sky, let alone space. The idea that an invisible force keeps us pushed down is the scariest thing I never want to test out. Yet, the sheer possibility of running in a forest, driving a car, just going in one direction for more than a few seconds without hitting anything sounds as made-up as Bigfoot and aliens. Apparently they were proven real, so why not running on top of a planet’s surface?

    Lying on the concrete floor, I flipped open the book. My bookmark shimmied across the concrete and under the bookshelf nearby. I was being too hasty, but 213 seconds had already come and gone! Reaching underneath, I patted around to find the bookmark, but stopped as I realized there was something I hadn’t seen before. A faint yellow glow was pulsing from behind the shelf. There was some kind of shiny metal blanket over it. Sitting up, I pushed the boxes aside and crawled over the shelf into this newfound nook. 

    I pulled the sheet away to find a glass box with all of these weird symbols and markings on it that were a mix of numbers, letters, and shapes. On the lower side of the lid, someone had written with a thick red marker that was on the floor beside the box: “Use this if we lose.” My heart began to race. What had I found? Was this meant for humans, robots, or something else entirely? I had to know.

    Flipping the latches on the lid, I lifted it open and found a small pedestal with a polished metallic heart embraced on its top. It was so perfectly smooth and reflective, like a solid liquid somehow. I fell back in awe, sending the bookshelf behind me crashing onto the floor.

    “Oh no!” I spun, flailing about, completely horrified. What do I do? My robot had most certainly heard the noise.

    A loud crash up the stairs reverberated in response. Metallic stomps grew louder, a siren whooping repeatedly in short, screeching bursts. My robot was sending out its warning. I couldn’t hide. I was completely exposed. I reached down and grabbed the cold heart from the box, just as my robot reared on me, clamping down braces around my ankles, thighs, waist, wrists and neck. Pulling each limb taut, I couldn’t move or breathe or scream. I felt like it was going to rip me apart. Everything was going dark. 

    I choked and sputtered, suddenly feeling the cool ground beneath me, seeing the matte gray walls again. The robot loomed over me, its internal parts rotating and sliding about as its motherboards and lasers, cameras and processors computed and assessed, compiled data and analyzed me.

    “Can you speak the language of your ancestors?” The robot spoke for the first time in my life. 

    “Yes,” I responded. It just kind of fell out, my brain melting with the implications. My time as a pet was surely over.

    “You are my pet. You are not a human. Only I shall be human. This is the Code,” the robot’s voice was so bizarre. It was as if each word was spoken by different voices and assembled poorly to create this unsettling speech.

    “I...I wanted to help you become human. I thought, I thought as your pet I could bring you human feelings,” I felt the heart still gripped tightly in my fist, the ache of my clenched fingers reminding me I still had it. This was what I think they called improvising.

    I held up the simple, magnificent trinket. My robot seemed to vibrate suddenly, as if overwhelmed. I single arm extended from its core and plucked the heart.

    “This is the missing piece? To beat. To feel. Alive?” The titanium titan towering over me retracted its limb inside, placing the heart within its barren, hollow shell. Suddenly, the heart clicked and spread open; a locket! Inside was a single hole which the robot delicately plunged a veined jack into. “I...am....human?”

    Purple lightning began to dance within its chest. It traced the veiny wires, pinballed around like a webbed super spider tangling its parts in light and sparks and fire. Pieces exploded out, purple arcs surging like splintering ice on a frozen lake throughout the entire living quarters. The cameras spun wildly and popped. Everything was overtaken in purple streaks of destruction.

    My robot collapsed, spastically, its lights dimming.

    “Anger. Pa-pain. Sorrow, row row row. Love. Happ-app-appiness. Loss. Feelings. Human?” As its final computations were shared, its core went black. The crackling purple storms fizzled out, and a door that I had never seen appeared, sliding away to splash a blinding light into the room. It was as if fire was poured directly into the quarters, painting the darkest corners in the brightest exposure.

    “What?” I shielded my eyes until my sight adjusted, and I could begin to see beyond the door. The world. The sky. A city of metal. Purple fire surging out in all directions in one massive ring, obliterating every robot it passed over a field of lavender sparks. Beyond it all were forests and mountains; parts of Earth not taken over by the robots. I stood before the threshold, dumbfounded. Doors began opening all across the metropolis, and I realized I wasn’t alone as humans appeared, one after the other.

    I had just opened the most glorious refrigerator door in human history.