Remember That Even Beautiful Days Will Turn to Ash

I felt compelled to roll the windows down as we crested the pass. The desert beneath us glowed with the freshness of a still-wet painting, animated by the distant outlines of semi trucks crossing the valley floor. It was perfectly dry, of course, but the hot and heavy air blew by too quickly to impart any real discomfort. There weren’t many vehicles either, so we didn’t choke on diesel fumes. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Mark signing something at me. I didn’t turn, but I got the gist of it. Looks nice. “Yeah Mark, it sure does.”

Yet our moment of ecstasy was brief. The highway turned and began to wind down the side of the mountain, on the lee side of the afternoon sun. Then, as if on cue, we saw the sign. “Welcome to Collins - The Friendliest Town in Nevada” and, graffitied beneath it, “Robots keep driving”. It looked sufficiently compelling - the warning spray-painted in scarlet, the original paint scoured by untold years of sandstorms, the shadows gathered about it like an ancient mob. All it needed was a withered tree, perhaps one with a fruit of twisted metal. We both took a good long look at it as we sped by, then sat in silence for a few moments. It was Mark who spoke first:

Let’s keep driving.

I checked the fuel gauge and reported with mild concern, “We need gas, we’ll have to stop down there.”

Mark turned to gaze out the window. Being a new driver, I normally kept my eyes on the road at all times, but I chanced a look at him then. His big round head rested heavily on one arm, perched in the window. At the end of his arm, which was shrouded in wires, sat a metallic claw with three fingers and a thumb. He wore as his crown a little tuft of plastic hair, static in the breeze. On one side of the head was a gleeful grin, printed with industrial perfection, and a pair of cartoonish eyes. Despite manufacturer intent, he looked anything but cheery. Maybe because it wasn’t his head; I pulled it off a Kid Kosmo animatronic a couple of years ago.

As we got into the valley we began to debate where to pull over, and it became evident that the sign had really gotten into Mark’s head. Eventually, on the far side of town, we came across an exit with an old Mobil right off the interstate. It was isolated and mostly empty, plus there was a Burger King adjacent to it, so he consented. I got out and pumped, then asked him to park while I walked over to the restaurant. He shuffled into the driver’s seat without a word, and when I thanked him, he mimed at me with an air of surliness:

Be quick, I hate this place.

Well, okay Mark. I turned towards the Burger King and crossed the street, jogging a little. The iconic logo, a stylized hamburger with the company name as its patty, sat on top of a 50-foot pole. The searing sun had turned the red meat to a nice medium rare, and I wondered how much longer it would be until the sign was fully cooked. Maybe then Mark would get to eat a burger too.

Fifteen minutes later and I stepped back into a wall of fire, cheese and grease in hand. It was not the heat, though, that got me so much as the scent; the perfectly curated aroma emanating from the bag sapped my patience. Every step was an eternity. Looking about for traffic as I crossed the road, I spotted some vultures riding a distant updraft. You could only tell they were vultures because they were flying in circles; no well-adjusted bird would do that. The road shimmered like a pond disturbed by a stone, and part of me wondered if the vultures had succumbed to the heat. I squinted up at the sign again. Did the desert do that to all things that dared linger in it?

It might explain Mark’s attitude, I thought, and with that I completed my trek. Grateful for the air conditioning and entranced by the smell of cheap food, it took me perhaps half a minute to realize that he was gone. I stopped chewing and looked around. “Mark?” I asked, as if he would hear. Both annoyed and worried, I swallowed, grabbed the shotgun in the back seat, and exited the car again. I scanned my surroundings once, twice, three times before I noticed his tiny shape standing under the highway overpass. As I approached I noticed yelling:

“What, you don’t like what we have to say about your daddy?” The voice was young and laced with stupid malice. A teenager’s.

“Wait ’till he finds out what we did to it!” said another. I heard jeers of laughter and quickened my jog.

“Mark!” I called out. He turned and looked at me with the same hollow smile. His fists were clenched, though, and I thought how lucky it was that I showed up when I did.

“Hey, you know that thing?”

I turned my attention to the speaker. Sure enough, he was a teenager, about as old as me but big for his age. His face was freckled, but he had a frightening gleam in his eyes. He wore a sneer, which was mirrored on the two smaller boys that flanked him. Before I could say anything, Mark explained:

These miscreants were abusing the corpse over there and started shit-talking me when I tried to stop them.

Then I finally noticed the elephant in the room. Sitting in the shadows, slumped over and leaning against the wall, was a robot. A big robot, perhaps 20 feet tall in the slouching position, damaged beyond repair. Its head hung limp so that it was staring at the ground with its mouth agape. Wires sprang from the back of its skull and became tangled like vines as they flowed downwards. Smashed and stripped computers dangled from its eye sockets, dripping shards of glass and silicon like stalactites. Recent damage, I thought. Ragged bits of cloth hinted at what could have been a cloak once. Sand had accumulated in a few crevices here and there, and rust was beginning to spread from the joints. It was a sad and haunting sight.

I looked back down at Mark, irate and resolute. He had looked much like that corpse when I met him on a snowy night last January. I was heading home, pulling my sled behind me, when I noticed a faint whirring and a soft rustling from the trees. In horror I watched as a bare robotic torso hauled itself out of the woods with one arm, its mangled legs dragging behind it. I wanted to run or scream or kick it and end its misery, but I didn’t. The weak buzzing it made with every move, the thin trail of oil it left in the snow, the minuscule arcs of electricity as wires grazed metal. This was a creature that needed help. Gingerly I loaded it onto my sled, took it home, and plugged it into a computer.

"Where am I? What happened?", and a thousand questions later, we were inseparable. It called itself C45o-Mark4, "because that's the only name they ever gave me". So I suggested a nickname.

My flashback was cut short by a peal of laughter from the boys. “What the hell was that?!” they howled, flailing their arms in mockery.

“Mark doesn’t have a voice box,” I retorted, “It was ripped out by scrappers while he was still powered on.”

The ringleader wasted no time or effort on his counterargument. “You think I care? It’s a robot, so what if somebody stole a computer?”

“Imagine having your vocal cords ripped out while you’re still alive,” I said, in as strong and stern a voice as I could. Mark massaged a spot on his abdomen.

One of the boys shuffled uncomfortably at this, but the chief was unaffected. “That’s completely different. Humans are real, we feel true pain. Robots, they’re just zeros and ones, no emotion, no feelings, no souls, just pure digital logic. Pain to them is just an error, like a faulty sensor or a bad diagnostic report. And they can be repaired. You could probably find your pet a suitable part somewhere over there.” He finished by motioning at the corpse.

That was enough for me. With a sigh of disgust I turned to Mark. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.” I reached out to him and he took my hand, but the boys had one more vile card to play.

“If you don’t want to hear that then that’s your business,” the leader advised, “but you should know something else too. Robots only care about themselves.”

Mark stopped. The bully continued. “They don’t have sympathy in quite the same way as us, but what they do have, they use on each other. Think about what happened in Albuquerque, and make no mistake; your friend ‘Mark’ was programmed to hate humans.” He smirked at this last emphasis, knowing he had landed a real killer.

A sinister silence fell on us all, broken only by the roar of the interstate above us. I looked down at Mark, who was hurting my hand with his grip. He was shaking with rage and staring straight ahead. I could practically see him thinking with his metallic heart. The welcome sign, the decayed robot, the teenagers destroying it; he filtered it all through multiplexers, latches, and logic gates innumerable, then he crossed it with the nightly news, the TikTok feed, the billboards we saw in all 13 states we drove through. For a moment, I wondered if what the boy said was true. In an instant, I saw that it was.

With stunning violence and speed Mark swiped at my shotgun and tore it from my hand. The teens barely had time to shout some curse words before he whirled around and let a shot off. The awe-inspiring crack of a desert thunderstorm echoed across the sands, and the main offender fell before a cloud of buckshot. The others, sobbing and stumbling a little bit, fled in terror.

I shrieked. “Mark, no!” He turned and glared at me, his smile stretching from sea to shining sea. “This isn’t you, just put the gun–” but he cut me off. With programmed precision and murderous force he struck my shins, knocking me from my feet. I hit the asphalt hard and lost myself. It felt like a planet had exploded in my skull. Was that what had just happened? Through dazed mind and blurred vision I watched as Mark stood over me, raised the butt of his rifle over my head, and brought it–.

Down came the rifle. Up it came, bloody now, and Mark thought about bringing it down again. There wasn’t any need though; Amelia wouldn’t be getting up any time soon. Anything more just proved what the fleas had said about his kind. He glanced over at the boy lying dead on the ground and considered pursuing his companions for a moment. No, he thought, let them run. Their day will come. The road above called to him, so he took Amelia’s wallet and keys and stormed over to the car. It was time he found some other robots.

Some time later, first responders arrived at the scene and airlifted Amelia to Reno, where she was given the latest in medical care and the greatest in prime time coverage. The whole nation (if you could still call it a single “nation”) wanted to know if she would survive. Once she stabilized, they pivoted to what she thought about not just robots, but computers and printers and fax machines. She refused the cameras, though, so the networks ran with a rumor popular among the nurses: That in the days before her coma lifted, she could be heard calling out for someone named Mark.