Mister Fifty-Two

The town was a wasteland. Huge dunes of brick and rubble scattered over the buried streets and tarmac. A stinking brown lake had formed where fallen buildings had blocked the canal. We were the first to walk through these gone streets in a century.

            I was taking samples from this filthy lake when Carena tapped me on my shoulder. I stood and looked to where she was pointing: a warehouse on the edge of town, the only intact thing in a bleak and hazy skyline. Carefully replacing my sampling equipment back in my pack, I kept one hand on my weapon as we made our way towards it.

            Entrance was easy enough since, although the structure was sound, the bay doors had been blown in. I relaxed, knowing that nobody could have survived the radiation levels that the interior of the warehouse had been exposed to. It was vast and empty apart from the rows and rows of high metallic racking, orange in colour and draped with ragged grey curtains of polythene that waved in the breeze like the ghosts of industry. The floors were a concrete grey as were the walls. An abandoned fork-lift truck and a pile of rotten wooden pallets at the far end were the only other visible things.

            We walked through one of the aisles wondering what it was that had been stored here. At the opposite end, concrete steps concertinaed up to a mezzanine floor.

            This area appeared like a smaller version of the main floor, only instead of the high orange racking stood rows of empty grey shelving units at chest height and was redolent with the dry smell of ancient dust. Each shelf within each unit carried a code of two letters followed by a two-digit number and a bar code, printed on card and stuck to the shelf. Walking past the near end of the rows, watching them vanish towards the far end, I realized that this warehouse would have stored millions and millions of items of whatever it was that people desired before the war had all but eradicated them. Thousands of people would’ve been employed here at its peak. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder where all the bodies were; where all the stored goods were.

            ‘It must have closed down,’ Carena said, reading my mind. ‘Before the war even began.’

            I nodded, and kept walking. I stopped, Carena, not expecting it, bumped into me. I pointed down the aisle where a cylindrical object, about the size of a child of six, stood motionless. A limb of some kind was extended into the shelving unit. Carena and I looked at each other, mutually deciding. Whatever it was, it hadn’t moved for a long time.

            It was covered in dust as we approached: a robot. The limb that extended into the shelf was made of chrome, slim, and jointed with a ball and socket at the elbow. A channel ran vertically up and down its body where the limb was attached. The limb itself ended in a flat claw-like pincer; gripped within this pincer was a dusty box. Supposedly the last person inside the warehouse had been unable to remove it from the robot’s grip. Two lenses on top of its domed ‘head’ seemed to stare, confused, directly at the box. This robot, at least, had still had some work to perform when the bombs fell. I wiped the dust from these two lenses with my sleeve, my face reflected in the black convex orbs. Carena was dusting off the body as best she could when muted metallic noises came from within it. A whirring like the sound of air through a filter, then little clicks and beeps. We stepped back as the robot shuddered, dust falling off it as it hummed. The ‘head’ swivelled this way and that a few times until it rested with its two black lenses once again focussed upon the box in its claw. It remained still for a moment, as though remembering what it was there to do. Then a thin beam of red light appeared on the box, moving up and down the side of it. The robot gave another little beep as the red light moved over the bar code. The limb was retracted from the shelf, moved upwards along the runner in the robot’s body, then levered itself so that the box was dangling above Carena and I. We took another step backwards as it dropped the box at our feet. Dust plumed off it as it fell.

            The same thin red light appeared again, only this time it scanned the bar code upon the same shelf from which the box had been taken. The robot beeped once and reached its thin claw back into the shelf, its pincers opening and closing and grasping nothing; moving a few inches either side, and trying again. The laser scanned the shelf again. Again the robot beeped, and again it tried to clasp something from the empty shelf. During a third attempt, the laser remained shining for a minute upon the bar code, illuminating the shelf number: MR52, but no beeping sound followed. Instead, the whirring and clicking from inside the robot ceased as it shut down.

            Carena and I looked at each other again. She stooped to lift the box, rubbed the excess dust with her glove, and opened it. Inside were some small plastic cups and saucers, purple in colour and decorated with tiny pink and green flowers, a small purple teapot, and a few brown plastic discs. She closed the box and placed it gently in her pack.