Senior System Failure⚡⚡⚡

⚡ Until that (almost) unforgettable morning in their yesterday-assembled classroom, the youngling’s pedagogue had operated impeccably and was therefore unremarkable. The humanoid automa-bot that the children all knew by the weird name ‘Ralph’ was an old-gangsta pre-apocalypse brand of servo-pure government technology, a classic model, forever famous for its manufacturer’s warranty, (supposedly) good for a cool two million years.

The impressionables under the robozoid’s tutelage had just witnessed Ralph spend ten minutes crossing barely seven feet of space. Their preceptor was using a vacubroom to lean on, giving his shuffle-feet-hobble a third leg to awkwardly accomplish three jittering steps forward and two shaky steps back.

All the students sat obediently attached to their desks, wide-eyed with horror.

It was little Kaleesha Kayeleenkil who broke the stunned silence. “Where are you going?” she asked the old-timer.

“What!?” Ralph barked back.

Kaleesha asked again, “Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom,” said Ralph, totally freaking out the kids.

Even eleven-year-olds had been around long enough to know that faculty-borgs didn’t have bodily waste.

Ralph doddered on toward the room's exit, instead of properly retreating to one of its authorized service stations at the back of the room.

“Why are you walking so slow?” asked little Janus Jaimlinkor.

Ralph stopped and yelled, “What!?”

When Janus felt silent, Kaleesha whined, “Why are you walk-ing like that?”

“Oh, Rover!” Ralph shook his head and spoke in a high-pitched voice. “I’m not walking slow! I’m fine!”

“Who is Rover?” asked a bewildered little girl.

“I think that’s a dog,” offered a confident little boy, confusing the matter more.

“What!?” shouted Ralph.

“You should go to your corrective-dock,” said a worried little Kaylor Joelkiomolerk.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” said Ralph. “You’re not the boss of me! I’m going to the bathroom!”

Several eleven-year-olds squealed when the robozoid wet himself, spraying oil down the front of his adamantium legs. His shuffling now left a sludge trail behind him.

The children were young but not stupid. Said one to another, loud enough for them all to hear, “Something is wrong with him! Servos aren’t supposed to go to the bathroom!”

The word ‘bathroom’ caused another squirt of oil from Ralph’s crotch gears. A child squealed, “Eeewwwww!” All the automabot’s lower plating was now dripping black.

“It’s broken,” wailed a gob-smacked little girl.

“Servos can’t break!” gushed a flushed little boy.

“Then why does it want to go to the bathroom?”

“And why is it walking funny?”

“And why is it yelling at us?”

“What!?” yelled Ralph. “Are you rugrats talking about me?”

"What's a 'rugrat'?"

"That's scary! Are there rats in the rugs?!?"

“What time does Bonanza come on?” asked Ralph, again moving forward at the amazing speed of fifteen-inches-an-hour.

“What’s Bonanza?” asked Lando Lailemonake.

“It’s on Channel j1588,” said Ralph, quite confidently. Then he chuckled his good-natured chortle, his You’re-So-Precious chuckle.

“What’s ‘Channel j1588'?” asked an orange boy.

“I think he’s talking about audio-visuals,” said a purple girl.

“What’s that?” asked the baffled boy.

“Antiques,” explained the smart girl.

A gender-fluid child nodded knowingly. They said, “My grandmam collects ‘em too!”

Ralph-the-robozoid suddenly stopped with an abrupt jerk, his fingers flying apart. He dropped the vacubroom, his makeshift cane. He then bent over very, very, veeery slowly. For one particularly disconcerting moment, it appeared as if he was going to go off-kilter and fall flat on his perfectly round face.

Horrified, Pimtroya Puejompal shrieked, “What the madcap hell is wrong with him?!?”

A mortified blue-green he-they yelped, “He almost fell down!”

The entire class let out a collective gasp. Multiple younglings began to whimper.

A little girl suddenly shouted, “I feel sorry for him!” That caused all the children around her to burst into tears.

Detaching herself from her desk, Kaleesha Kayeleenkil jumped up, startling everyone. Running to the vacubroom, she grabbed it up and then gently handed it to Ralph.

“I can do it!” insisted their indignant educator. “I’m not an invalid, you know!” He yelled so loudly at Kaleesha, even her iron resolve broke down, and she began to cry.

Wailing begat more wailing, spreading like some prehistoric plague.

In a series of jerky spurts, Ralph stood up erect again. He wobbled, went rigid, and then remained perfectly still for a solid 99 seconds. The children's sobbing tapered off to sniffles. Kaleesha returned to her desk, in order to stop its awful beeping. The impressionables were morbidly fascinated by the way their lifelong mentor uncharacteristically became a statue.

Ralph was usually so animated!

Their teacher looked around suddenly as if he’d just been teleported to some unfamiliar place. Ralph seemed startled, and then he laughed and said, “I forgot where I was going!”

Eighty-eight children screamed at the top of their augmented little lungs. Fifteen fainted. All the impressionables began bawling hysterically. Even a baby knew that ‘forgot’ was a dirty word! Knowledge was as permanent as perfect health. The only time a person forgot something that they had learned—eeewww!—was when their minds were purposely cognoscaped by awareness architects.

Kaleesha Kayeleenkil felt the weight of so many disapproving eyes. She screeched, "Did I fuck him up?!?!"

The combined yowlings of one-hundred-twenty-seven younglings were strident enough to eventually bring surly human supervisors, who were shocked to discover the old automabot was malfunctioning.

They gunned Ralph down just outside the boy’s bathroom, slagging him.

His final word was, “What?!”

⚡⚡___________________⚡⚡

All at once, like a __bolt from the blue, an entire listing of older musky automabots were infected by what the Behavior Deviancy Agency dubbed ‘synthetic Alzheimer’s syndrome’. The bureaucrats coined such an odd name for the dysfunction because the mecha-affliction was supposedly similar to a pre-apocalyptic disorder. ‘Mad Cow’s Disease’ was once a terrible tribulation that destroyed both the memory and the motor functions of poor, unprocessed, unaugmented people.

When the Child Welfare Rehabilitators assessed the damage done to the younglings who had witnessed Ralph’s breakdown, they were appalled!!!

Neuro-nannies issued an emergency medical mandate to have awareness architects instigate total mind-wipes of all the students, causing them to forget that entire, awful day of winter disconnect. One-hundred-twenty-seven children had their memories erased by caring government representatives, but none of them ever fully trusted old servos ever again.

Every single one of those traumatized children have since grown up to become politicians and/or activists, notoriously led by Kaleesha Kayeleenkillbots. Kaleesha now heads the multigenerational grassroots organization that advocates the complete annihilation of all "outdated" (old) government servo-pure technology (even though there have been no further malfunctions in thirty-seven years)....

This is the origin story of the rapidly growing #SayWhat movement.

Do you want to know more?

⚡__________________ ⚡

*by

_____________Bolt⚡

Yet another tale of mine About Tasty Things To Come: my Honorable Mention in the Tomorrow's Utopia Challenge... 👇😎⚡🌮🔔⚡