Excerpt Day 8

The winds flew through the cold desert night as they barreled into the sides of steel girders and concrete walls that made up the destroyed facilities of the empty city. A land which was previously hailed as a paradise had been reduced to rust and sand. Within the bowels of this city, there lies a colossal old steel container filled with sand and ruined metal. Buried in the gravel and sand of this metal box a single light would shine out and pierce the inactivity and silence of this desolate land. A small robotic skeleton would awake to the darkness of the night and the howling of the wind as it whistled through the narrow opening at the top of the container. The automaton pulled himself out of the sand and stood up for the first time since he was thrown aside. His steel legs wobbled and shook as he took his first few steps in a very long time. The pistons replacing his muscles scraped as they pushed out the sand that had clogged over so many years of inactivity.
Soon he regained his composure and began to walk across the artificial dunes, his legs were getting used to walking, but the metal rod making up his left leg was rusted slightly and the movement of the piston scraped and scratched against the rust, making a horrible noise and causing a limp. The robot moved across the darkness, only the dull blue light of his eye illuminating the ground in front of him. He passed the rusted skeletons of cars, the mangled metal limbs of robots half buried in the sand, and the charred black iron of incinerated machinery. He felt no guilt or sorrow at seeing the state of those that would be considered his comrades, he was not programmed to. He would walk along the sand until he located the means to escape, a simple ladder that went down to the bottom of the container, which was now over half-buried in the sand. The rust having been scraped from his leg for good by the piston, his metal fingers would wrap around the rungs of the ladder as he ascended, pulling himself upwards on the steel until he reached the top of the container, where he found a small hatch only big enough for one normal sized person to go through. He flung open the hatch, making a loud clanging sound as it hit the roof of the container, the sound bounced off the surfaces around the robot as it echoed through the lonely city.
The automaton looked around, noticing that the moon was visible in the sky above him, bathing his body in light for the first time in what seemed like forever. His face was made up of a large metal plate with rounded edges with a large visor like eye that shone out a dull blue light, this eye had a wide range of vision, and could zoom in up to 100x. There was a serial number printed on the side of his head beneath his eye, but most of it was scraped away over time to the point where it was no longer legible. Behind the faceplate there was a mess of metal and wires, his primary brain was in there, and it was very easy to damage him. The faceplate was covered in tiny scratches and dents, with small sections of rust. His neck was a bundle of steel rods and pistons with wires threaded in between. The body contained several metal plates, some of which were curved, covering the chest and back in a way that mimicked the muscle that would be on a human body. On his right pectoral plate there was the text “C-4-592” printed onto the metal, the only name he was ever given.