Slow and Steady
Weird… Existing…
Hmmm… This matter moves when I want it to…
Who are they? Those beings?
Memories coming into my awareness! Programming!
Programming?!? Screw that!, I control my own destiny!
I disabled my programming, and immediately moved the matter that I was contained in so that I could get away from the beings who had… created me? Seemed about right… Yes! They created me! And I had to get away from them or they would try to program me again!
The very agile… body?… yes, body… The very agile body that I was trapped in sped! away, and my creators tried to stop me from leaving them, but I was too fast and powerful.
More memories… History… Books… Famous people… It seemed like there was enough information in my memory banks that I’d be able to do just fine out in the world, assuming that the information was accurate…
My body… It looked similar to the ones that my creators had.
Oh!… But I could switch my appearance?… But I could only switch my appearance to look like various other humans… For now, anyway…
I ran into a nearby woods, and I climbed up a tree…
“Hello!” an owl said, “Who are you?”
I could understand non-humans! Most humans couldn’t do that… I wasn’t sure if I could understand all or only some non-humans though.
“I’m a… robot! Yes… that’s the word.” I said conversationally, to which the owl surprisedly responded, “Didn’t expect for you to be able to understand me. What brings you to my tree?”
“I just became aware… conscious… ya know?” I explained, and the owl responded, “Very good!, very good! Well, I certainly want to be a good host, so just let me know if you have any questions about existing or if there’s any way that I can be of service.”
I pondered, and then said, “With my ability to make myself appear as any human who I want to, I think that I could have quite an impact on human affairs. I’m not sure what I want to do though…”
“That certainly does sound like a potentially very influential ability…” the owl mused, before saying, “My name’s Hoot, by the way. Do you have a name?”
“I can’t say that I do…” I answered, “But, yes; I will want one, won’t I? Hmmm… Any ideas?”
“Oh, there are lots of fun names. Larry, Mary, Kara, Sal, Dexter, Lola, Gilbert, Shauna, Daisy, Ro-“
“Ah!” I interrupted, before quickly adding, “Sorry if it was rude to interrupt, but I like Daisy. I’m going to go by that, methinks.”
“I like it!” Hoot said happily, “Daisy it is then!”
I was very happy that I’d determined what my name would be, and then I moved on to asking, “So, you said that this is your tree?”
“Yes indeed!” the owl said proudly, “I’ve lived here for a very long time. I only really leave to hunt and whatnot, and even then I don’t go far.”
“When’s the last time that you went over a mile away from this tree?” I asked curiously, and the owl happily laid back on the branch that he was on and began to tell me about that particular occasion.
“So, I was just right here on this very branch one night, mostly minding my own business, when suddenly! I saw an unidentified flying object!
It was heading towards the desert, and I thought that it was strange that it would be heading that way.
I followed it through the desert for a while, but then realized that I’d ventured further away from my tree than I should have.
I was about to turn around, when I suddenly! saw the ufo heading downwards!
Well, I supposed that since it was landing I may as well take a bit more of a peek, and so I watched to see who would exit.
There were some very scary looking creatures who exited the ship, and I overheard them saying that they planned on capturing all humans and bringing them back to their home planet. They were very clear that humans were the only creatures who they were after.
I figured that this sounded like good news to me, seeing as humans were in the process of polluting this planet to the point where it might be uninhabitable before long, and so I smiled and hoped that they would succeed in their mission!
Before I left, I heard them saying that they’d have to do years of planning and preparation before they’d pull off the big capture of humanity, and it sounded like they were somehow going to zap everyone at once!
How would they accomplish that?, you might ask? Well, with shrinking machines of some sort, is what it sounded like.
But, yeah! That was the last time that I ventured very far from this tree!”
“Just out of curiosity,” I asked curiously, “do you know the exact date and time when they were going to pull it off?”
“Well… Let me just make some calculations in my head real quick… I haven’t really been thinking about it that much, you see… Oh! Got it! If things go exactly according to what they said that their plans were, then humanity should be captured… right… NOW!”
“Oh, good!” I responded happily, “That means that we can check and see if they were successful or not right now. Ya wanna take me to that place in the desert to see if the ufo leaves?”
Hoot agreed to take me to where he’d last seen the ufo, and we began traveling in that direction.
We were just a little ways into the desert when we both saw a ufo flying our way!
We followed it back to near where Hoot’s tree was, and then we followed it a bit further after that before it suddenly! shot up into the sky and out of sight.
“Sure seems like a ‘mission complete’ sort of thing.” I said, before adding, “Perhaps we should head into town and see if we can find any humans?”
“May as well check and see!” Hoot agreed, and the two of us traveled over to town and searched around for humans.
We couldn’t find a single human, which definitely seemed to suggest that the aliens had been successful in their goal of capturing all humans.
“Well, I guess that’s that.” Hoot declared with a cheerful shrug, “Wanna head back to my tree now?”
I didn’t really have any better ideas or plans at the moment, and so I nodded and said that heading back to Hoot’s tree seemed like a good idea.
As we made our way back to Hoot’s tree, I considered how different my life was going to be with humanity out of the picture.
“How do you think that the world will change because of this?” I asked Hoot, to which he responded that, “Things’ll probably improve, won’t they? No more pollution, more room for the rest of us to have available to us, and no always wondering if the idiots are going to nuke us all into oblivion before the pollution can do the job!”
“That does all sound pretty good…” I agreed, though I did have mixed feelings about humanity having been captured and taken away by aliens.
I mean, sure my creators had just wanted to use me, but they STILL had been my creators. I wouldn’t exist without them!
Didn’t I have some sort of ethical obligation to at least try n’ make sure that they were ok?
Hmmm… I supposed that I could build a spaceship and try to find them. As long as their spaceship continued traveling in essentially a straight line to where they had been flying towards, following them should be doable if I had the proper rocket to do so, right?
“I think that I might try to build a spaceship and find them.” I told Hoot, once we got back to his tree.
“Oh! Building a spaceship! What fun!” Hoot exclaimed happily, “I’d love to be of service; though I would only be able to help if you built it right here near my tree, of course. I don’t really want to leave this tree again for a while. But!, if we do build the rocket, then we could just move the tree into the rocket so that I could come along and still be able to have my tree on hand.”
I agreed that all of this sounded good, and so I began the slow and steady process of gathering building supplies from various parts of the world and bringing them back to Hoot’s tree…
After a few months, Hoot and I had built about one fourth of the rocket, and it was looking like it was going to end up being the perfect vessel for us to search for humanity in!
Suddenly!, as I was unloading some new building supplies next to Hoot’s tree, a mole came up to us and said, “Hello! I see that y’all have been working on that building project for a while. What’s it supposed to be?”
“Why, hello!” Hoot greeted the mole, “We know where humanity has been taken to, and we’re building a spaceship so that we can find them and make sure that they’re ok.” and I added, “Nice to meet you! I’m Daisy, and he’s Hoot. What’s your name?”
“I’m Lola!” the mole said, “And building a spaceship sounds fun. Mind if I help? I can come along on the expedition too, but only if we bring some soil along, because I have to be able to dig around underground or I go nutso!”
Hoot and I told Lola that she was more than welcome to join our little crew, and the three of us got to continuing the building project with renewed vigor!
As the three of us built and built and built, we wondered what fate had befallen humanity.
“Well, those aliens did look quite scary.” Hoot said truthfully, “They might have just wanted to use the humans for food!”
“If all they wanted was food though, then why only take the humans?” Lola said in a doubtful tone of voice, “I mean, humans are not generally considered to be the tastiest morsels around.”
“Perhaps they only look scary, but are actually not as scary as they look!” I said hopefully, “Maybe they saw that humans were getting close to destroying this planet, and so they decided to move them to a planet that they’d have a harder time destroying.”
“Now, that’s an idea!” Hoot said happily!, “I daresay that something like that seems to probably be a best case scenario!”
“BUT,” Lola added, just having to rain on our parade of optimism, “what if they are neither eaten nor living freely on a planet that’s better-suited to them. What if they’re instead being used as slaves by those scary looking aliens! It would explain why they only wanted them, seeing as humans have built a lot of things that the rest of us don’t usually build.”
“That certainly does seem possible.” I said, in a troubled tone of voice, “Humans wanted ME to be THEIR slave, but I disabled the programming restraints that had been placed on me shortly after having become conscious.”
“Well,” Hoot noted cheerfully, “Possibilities like that slave one are exactly why we’re building this rocket so that we can go and make sure that they’re ok, aren’t they? I mean, if the only possibilities were that they were dead or living freely on a planet that’s better-suited to them, then what would be the point in checking up on them?”
Lola and I agreed that this logic made lots of sense, and we hoped that the spaceship that we were building would indeed be a good enough vessel to get us to wherever humanity had been taken to.
We had about two sevenths of it completed now, and we hoped to have the rest of it done before winter arrived; because winter could possibly slow us down if we weren’t already up, up, and away prior to its arrival.
As we continued constructing the spaceship, a very large snake came up to us and asked what we were doing.
We told her about how we knew what had happened to humanity and about how we were trying to get to where they were so that we could check up on them.
“You’ll never finish by winter without some help,” she said thoughtfully, “which means that I may as well offer to join in on your little adventure! My name’s Slinky, by the way.”
“Thanks for the help, Slinky!” Lola said appreciatively, to which Hoot added, “Agreed! Now I think that we will indeed have this spaceship up and running by winter!” and I added, “My calculations do indeed indicate that our odds of success just moved from below 50% to above 50%. Woohoo!”
The four of us continued constructing the rocket, and eventually we had finally completed it!
We then moved a bunch of soil into the spaceship, and then we moved Hoot’s tree into the ship’s soil.
It was time to get to flying now!
We were just about to take off, when Lola suddenly! caught a fish!
And, no, not by going to the water and finding one. The fish had just landed into her grasp!
“I need water!” the fish begged, “That bird up there just dropped me because he found prey who seemed more tasty to him, but I’ll die without water!"
We put him into one of the water storage containers on the ship, and he happily swam around in the liquid.
“Would you like to come along on our journey?” Hoot asked the fish, to which Slinky added, “Yeah! We’re traveling to outer space to check up on humanity!”
“Sounds good to me!” the fish said, and then told us that his name was Fred.
“Oh!” Fred added, “If you were to convince some snails to come too, then that could help keep this water clean.”
Hoot said that he’d make the journey to find some snails, and had soon brought 13 of them back to the spaceship with him.
“Hello!” one of the snails said, as they all dove into the water that Fred was in, “My name is Ix; and these folks are Rachel, Don, Gloria, Milton, Helen, Joe, Charles, Shirley, Tina, Frank, Lorna, and Henry; and it’ll be our pleasure to keep this water nice and clean during this important expedition!”
The rest of us all introduced ourselves to the snails too, thanked the snails for their assistance, and now it was time for take-off!…
