Transmit Failure (Part III)

Transmit Failure
Part 3

(Word count: 1177)

Joshua tried to communicate with anybody that had the ability to pick up his signals, at first his radio demeanor calm and professional and then evolving into frustrated yelling. Considering how deeply buried he thought he was, he feared not even God could hear him screaming into the thin microphone of the headset. He hollered until he was hoarse but he never received anything in return over the radio, not a beep, not a click. He sat in front of the main com screen, looking for a miraculous change in the com system’s status as it was telling him ‘offline’ in flashing red letters. He touched the ‘sensitivity’ slider on the screen and slid his finger to the right, setting it to maximum, but all he heard was static. After listening to it for a minute, it began to sound like rain, making him yearn for his family on Earth that much more.

He decided to rest his sore voice box and was on his way to the dining hall when he realized he was in front of the Robotics department. It was one of the places he’d yet to thoroughly explore. The lights turned on when he walked in, the place smelling of burned plastic and lubricant. Long work tables lined the room and were covered in wires, gears and circuit boards. He rummaged through every drawer, every cabinet and every steel storage locker but could find nothing useful.

A door in the middle of the back wall caught his eye. His right palm glowed red as he held it in front of the door’s scanner, not expecting to be granted access, but the door slid open, revealing a room already lit. Five steel tables were set up in a row in the center of it. Along the walls were more work tables but the surfaces were not as cluttered as the main Robotics area. Circular lights hung suspended over the tables.

Two androids lay in various states of disassembly and a third (he was hoping it was an android) was zipped up in a black body bag. Standing between the first two, he could see they were missing much of their bioskin. The edges of the artificial flesh, or what was left of it, were ragged as if torn from their bodies, leaving their bare, titanium bones to shine in the room’s light. The first android on the left had its metal cage of a torso exposed, internal organs of hoses, data cables and microchips stuffed haphazardly into its chest. The android in the middle was a gynoid, a female humanoid robot; its bioskin breasts were surprisingly still intact but its head was unscrewed from its neck and nowhere to be seen.

As for the third android, he thought it odd that someone would use a body bag for a robot. He approached it slowly, the overhead light flickering on the zipper. His fingers grasped the cold zipper and for an instant, he imagined the zipper as a grenade pin. He released it, recalling the old adage about the curious cat. Continuing to explore this room, he studied the various bio-mechanical parts strewn about on work benches; an arm here, a skinless leg there.

He found the gynoid’s head behind a partition that separated this private work station from the rest of the room. The head, upright and surrounded by small tools and other electronic parts, wore dark brown hair, its face exquisitely shaped. Her eyes were half open, revealing light blue lenses. Her lips were frozen mid-sentence or maybe she went offline a second before a passionate kiss. He didn’t want to get too close, half expecting that it would see him and start screaming.

He sat on a stool and just looked at her—admiring its face, pondering what it would be like to have someone to talk to while he lived out the rest of his life buried on Io. It would make this prison sentence somewhat tolerable but in the machines’ current state, coupled with his lack of robotics experience, the chances of getting one of these things to work again were nil.

He was about to leave the chamber but he stopped at the door, curiosity and loneliness making him pause and turn around to face the body bag. He told himself to quit being a coward, just unzip the damn bag and be done with it. So he rushed to it, reminding himself that it was just a machine, an inoperable robot. With the cold zipper in his fingers, he hesitated for a moment, then slowly pulled the zipper halfway along the center of the body bag, revealing a narrow section of face, neck, chest, stomach.

He gently spread the zippered edges to unveil short, blond hair, the face of a man in his late thirties, the torso of an athlete. The android’s open, blue eyes were cold and expressionless, reassuring him the robot was offline. In the center of his chest was a square hole a few inches wide. One of the things Joshua knew about androids was that its power supply was in its chest. Considering the poor state the other two robots were in, the lack of a battery couldn’t be the only thing that was keeping this particular android offline. There had to be something else wrong with this thing, something wrong with its processor or nervous system, making it unable to move, keeping it from its duties as a worker, compelling someone to deem it unfit to evacuate. He wondered what its job was around here because he couldn’t recall ever seeing this particular android around the base.

He found a box of batteries inside a red cabinet under one of the work benches. The batteries looked to be the same size as the hole in the robot’s chest. He grabbed one and inserted it into the android’s chest hole just enough to see if this was indeed the correct battery and it appeared to be. Now all he needed to do was slide the battery in all the way and wait to see what would happen.

A voice in his head told him to hold off, but what did he know? The voice never had to go through what he was going through. The voice didn’t know what it was like to be imprisoned, entombed. The voice was just a self-righteous little prick, apt to interject his opinion at inopportune times. The voice, never lonely, offered it’s unwanted advice from an ivory tower.

Screw it.

He slid the battery into the chest cavity until he heard it click into place but nothing happened. He waited for five minutes expecting the android to jump up and introduce itself but it remained perfectly still, not making a sound. Was it running through some kind of boot process or power-up procedure? He even poked at its chest but the only sound in the room was the faint humming of the overhead lights. Backhanding the android’s head, Joshua wandered away.

And that’s when the android sat up.

* * *