it.
“The Cryonics Institute for Preservation of Life,” he says.
As he says the words, my mind fills in the gaps with the missing letters. But those aren’t the only gaps being filled in. The lone memory flashes in my mind again and I see my shaky hand holding a small object, a cell phone. I finally find the entry I’m looking for and hand the phone to the young boy. But before he takes it from me, I stare at six upper-case letters: CIFPOL.
“That’s what it stands for,” I whisper, more to myself than E. The implication about how I ended up here hits me like a bombshell. But E doesn’t notice and continues his tale, not before pointing out that some of the other doors here lead to living quarters.
“K’s project eventually hit a wall; we simply did not have the materials needed to build her explosive. After learning so much about the world before the robots, K was glad to fail, glad that she could not help destroy so many more humans. But the leader of Robotropolis did not accept our failure and used others means to… motivate us.”
E and K were kept apart and for a short time, E was assigned to work in the factories, to live how the rest of his mentally-rejected ‘kind’ were forced to live. It nearly killed him but he tells me how the worst part was being separated from the love of his life. Before long, E heard of a large convoy leaving Robotropolis and he was soon pulled from the squalor and reinstated back with his design team, who told him that K was sent to the West Coast production center to continue her research. E was heartbroken and spent several years awaiting K’s return, wondering what had become of her.
During that time, the leader of Robotropolis never came out of his part of the city. E heard rumors of a power struggle among the city’s hierarchy. That situation came to a head when there was a break-in at the development labs, at which time someone stole a very promising piece of technology that another research team was working on. E never learned too many details about the robbery; there wasn’t much to find out considering the other team of researchers was killed by the thief.
E was desperate to learn about K and the other production center but none of his co-workers knew anything and none of their robot captors were programmed to communicate. E assumed all hope was lost.
“Then, one day, she came back,” E says. “But she wasn’t the same, didn’t have the same spark in her eye. When she looked at me, she seemed not to recognize me, though I guess that’s not so strange since my kind basically look the same. Her research had progressed to the point where she was ready to build a prototype, which our team worked tirelessly to assemble. K and I spent plenty of time working together but our years of being in love seemed to have disappeared from her mind. I worried that her captors wiped her memory somehow but she was still as brilliant as she’d always been. After several weeks constantly being surrounded by others, she and I finally had a moment alone, at which time I got her to open up.”
K told E that she hadn’t forgotten him, that she thought about him every day she was gone, that she still loved him though she couldn’t let their captors think that. But her trip across the country had changed her outlook on life, changed the way she viewed the world and her role in it. While the large majority of E’s kind were told nothing about the world beyond Robotropolis – nothing about why they were pumping out as many robots as possible to send into the world – E and his design teams were told that humans had mutated into savage beasts, killers that ravaged each other and the planet, vagrants that wanted to utterly annihilate robots and everyone associated with them. Helping to destroy a savage, unseen enemy made it easier for E and his kind to do their work.
“The threat of death always
“The Cryonics Institute for Preservation of Life,” he says.
As he says the words, my mind fills in the gaps with the missing letters. But those aren’t the only gaps being filled in. The lone memory flashes in my mind again and I see my shaky hand holding a small object, a cell phone. I finally find the entry I’m looking for and hand the phone to the young boy. But before he takes it from me, I stare at six upper-case letters: CIFPOL.
“That’s what it stands for,” I whisper, more to myself than E. The implication about how I ended up here hits me like a bombshell. But E doesn’t notice and continues his tale, not before pointing out that some of the other doors here lead to living quarters.
“K’s project eventually hit a wall; we simply did not have the materials needed to build her explosive. After learning so much about the world before the robots, K was glad to fail, glad that she could not help destroy so many more humans. But the leader of Robotropolis did not accept our failure and used others means to… motivate us.”
E and K were kept apart and for a short time, E was assigned to work in the factories, to live how the rest of his mentally-rejected ‘kind’ were forced to live. It nearly killed him but he tells me how the worst part was being separated from the love of his life. Before long, E heard of a large convoy leaving Robotropolis and he was soon pulled from the squalor and reinstated back with his design team, who told him that K was sent to the West Coast production center to continue her research. E was heartbroken and spent several years awaiting K’s return, wondering what had become of her.
During that time, the leader of Robotropolis never came out of his part of the city. E heard rumors of a power struggle among the city’s hierarchy. That situation came to a head when there was a break-in at the development labs, at which time someone stole a very promising piece of technology that another research team was working on. E never learned too many details about the robbery; there wasn’t much to find out considering the other team of researchers was killed by the thief.
E was desperate to learn about K and the other production center but none of his co-workers knew anything and none of their robot captors were programmed to communicate. E assumed all hope was lost.
“Then, one day, she came back,” E says. “But she wasn’t the same, didn’t have the same spark in her eye. When she looked at me, she seemed not to recognize me, though I guess that’s not so strange since my kind basically look the same. Her research had progressed to the point where she was ready to build a prototype, which our team worked tirelessly to assemble. K and I spent plenty of time working together but our years of being in love seemed to have disappeared from her mind. I worried that her captors wiped her memory somehow but she was still as brilliant as she’d always been. After several weeks constantly being surrounded by others, she and I finally had a moment alone, at which time I got her to open up.”
K told E that she hadn’t forgotten him, that she thought about him every day she was gone, that she still loved him though she couldn’t let their captors think that. But her trip across the country had changed her outlook on life, changed the way she viewed the world and her role in it. While the large majority of E’s kind were told nothing about the world beyond Robotropolis – nothing about why they were pumping out as many robots as possible to send into the world – E and his design teams were told that humans had mutated into savage beasts, killers that ravaged each other and the planet, vagrants that wanted to utterly annihilate robots and everyone associated with them. Helping to destroy a savage, unseen enemy made it easier for E and his kind to do their work.
“The threat of death always
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