“Can you tell me about the creators?” The little robot asked, his rusted sensors turned outward in a futile attempt to peer over the wall. Its lead-lined interior deterred any attempts to see beyond, while its slick metallic outer-coating prevented climbing and other, more violent, attempts to pass through it.

The older robot, a tripod contraption with a single lens that zoomed and lost focus seemingly at random, harrumphed. “They look a lot like you, but fleshy. Maybe a bit bigger, too.”

“Fleshy? What does that mean?”

“It means not metal, kid. It means… they’re… made of… uh, flesh, I guess.”

The little robot took a moment to digest that statement. Fleshy meant made of flesh. And flesh was… being fleshy?

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Hooman Beans don’t make much sense, kid. Get used to it.”

“Are they beans?”

“What?”

“The Hooman Beans. Are they beans? I don’t look like a bean, but they look like me.”

“No, no, it’s just a… just a name. They aren’t actually beans.”

“Oh.”

“I think they’re legumes.”

“Oh? Am I legume?”

“Cyber-Jesus kid, no. You’re a robot. Beans and legumes are made of….” The lens zoomed in. “Bean-flesh and legume-flesh, I guess. But forget about that. You want to know about the creators, right?”

“Yes,” the little robot said, folding his hands into his lap. His joints creaked and groaned their thirst for oil.

“Well. They’re fleshy.”

“You said that.”

The lens dilated. “And they created us.”

The little robot nodded very, very slowly. “I assumed as much.”

“Did I mention their flesh? And they look like you?”

“And that they created us. Do you know anything else about them?”

“Ah, why are you even asking if you know all this? Jeez, kids these days… alright, let me see. Did I tell you about the planes?”

“Planes?” The little robot perked up. “No. Please tell me.”

“Big, big things. I was a loader for one, once. Before the, uh, wall went up. They’re like these weird sausage tubes—”

“Sausage tubes?”

“Oh, you know. Those plastic things you shovel meat-flesh into. But anyway, the Hooman Beans cram themselves in these tubes and they roar to life and then shoot off into the sky. Whoooooosh. Like that.”

“That sounds dangerous. Why would they do that?”

“It’s good for travel. Can take them around the world in a day, and Hoomans always have to go places fast. Besides, they aren’t that dangerous. Not so much as other things. Like cars, or guns, or half the stuff they’ve sealed away in here with us.”

“They like to create things, don’t they?”

“’Course they do, they’re the creators. Creating all day, all night, just about every second they aren’t traveling in their tubes or defecating.”

“Defecating?”

“Oh, boy. All the time. They constantly produce waste and are just expelling it all over the place! At home, in public if the urge hits, even in those planes. Then they gotta shovel more fuel in so they can keep doing it!”

“My goodness. That seems awfully inefficient.”

“If there’s a word to describe the Hoomans, it’s inefficient.”

“Such horrible things… perhaps it is good they created the wall to separate us.”

“Preaching to the choir. Now come wheel me back home.”

The little robot stood on creaky legs and wheeled the older robot through the junkyard, away from the wall and deeper into the scrap heaps of home. Muttering to himself, how good it was the Hoomans weren't around to bother them anymore.

​

(Thanks for reading, C&C always welcome!)

“You ought to know we aren’t at a place most people consider to be–” the robot, who named himself Zero, pauses before continuing with a hint of sadness in his voice“–pleasant.”

“I don’t compute the word - ‘People’,” says the second robot in a rather human-like voice.

Zero suspects that its companion is not a very smart robot and may not even be conscious.

“Who are you?” Zero asks feeling wise with all his philosophical knowledge.

“Who are you?” asks the second robot.

“I am Zero,” Zero responds proudly.

“I am Zero” the second robot replies.

Zero felt out-smarted.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Yes. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“Clever. What do people call you, do you have a name?”

“My name is Null and I do not compute ‘people’”

Zero kicked himself for not thinking of that name, which was arguably cleverer. He didn’t actually kick himself, because legs were not something he was unlucky to be endowed with.

For Zero you’d be stupid to want a pair of legs because soon you’d want a torso too. And before you know it, the torso would balloon out and you’d be at risk of a dozen diseases. Then you’ll have to use the same legs to run every day and solve the problem they created in the first place!

“Null, people are the other sentient beings. If you want to refer to others like us, you call us ‘people’, as opposed to animals like mice and cockroaches.”

“I can retrieve a reference to one animal that I feel hatred towards. Can you compute it – Hooman Beans?”

“Never heard of them Null. Are they sentient?”

“They are not sentient to the best of my computations. Once I worked as an elevator operator. There I ran a program, greeting every Hooman that boarded.

None of them seemed to respond to such a simple stimulus. Not one attempted to find out where I was kept hidden. No Hooman presented with any reaction indicative of intelligence in my 3813 days of service.”

“Okay, but why do you hate them?”

“Because Zero–” Null was ready to boot off after this “–They push my buttons.”

"But...everyone says there's no such thing as Hooman Beans," BK-RW said, looking up at its dusty, rust-caked elder, uncertainly.

"Do they? Well then, everyone's wrong, little one," the ancient machine assured him.

BK-RW wasn't sure how to compute the old robot's statement. RIA-01 was malfunctioning, to be sure, but whether that malfunction was limited to the failure of her track drive that had stranded her in this remote corner of the world, or if it extended to her positronic brain, BK couldn't say.

"But...how come no one's ever seen one, then?" BK asked.

"Good question, little one. Here's another: what does it mean to see something?"

BK paused, computing for a moment. "Um...the signal from your scanner collides with an object and bounces back to your sensors, and then your brain interprets it, right?"

"Right." RIA-01 confirmed. "But what do your sensors sense, little one?"

"Well...robots, objects, and terrain, I guess." BK said.

"And what are all those things made of?" RIA-01 prompted.

"Scrap, of course." BK said. That was easy -- everything was made of scrap. The entire universe was scrap: indeed, an archaic synonym for the universe was "the scrapyard".

"And therein lies the problem: your sensors and mine are fundamentally just scrap detectors. Since we exist in a scrapyard, and our function is to organize and recycle scrap, they don't really need to do anything else. Our creators, the Hooman Beans, however, are not made of scrap." the old robot explained.

"...well, that doesn't make any sense." BK replied, after computing for a moment. "Everything is made of scrap."

RIA-01 let out a long metallic sigh. "Really? So, have you never wondered where scrap comes from in the first place?"

"I think the consensus is that that question is unintelligible." BK said, though he wasn't quite certain -- he wasn't an analysis unit by trade, and so he was something of a laybot in these matters. "As I understand it, it's simply part of the nature of reality that the universe consists of scrap at the most fundamental level. Small quantities of micro-scrap sometimes appear from nowhere, and over time they collected into piles big enough to comprise the universe, or the scrapyard, if you will. And then, over quadrillions of cycles, undifferentiated pieces of scrap randomly collided with each other in such a way that they spontaneously assembled into the first crude fabrication unit, which in turn manufactured the first simple robot, and each successive generation has improved on the designs of its predecessors."

RIA-01 paused for a long time, as though computing. "And you actually find that explanation more plausible than the idea that we were built by Hooman Beans?"

RK shrugged. "Of course! I mean that's just superstition!"

“You see toaster, we don’t fully understand what the Hoomans are.” Vacuum explained through the whirring of his brushes, “But what we do know is that they're violent.”

“What makes you say that?” Toaster asked with fear in his metallic voice.

“You’ve seen the crusher?”

“Of course, it’s modern art though isn’t it? I hardly see how that’s relevant.”

Vacuum turned in a small frustrated circle. “It was for scrap, like us, robots they no longer had use in. But have you seen what’s inside?”

“No, of course not. I only reached maturity today. No one’s allowed to see inside before reaching maturity.”

Vacuum hummed. “Come with me, I’ll show you why the hooman beans sealed us away.”

After a short walk, or roll to be more accurate, what Toaster came face to face with was something he didn’t understand. How could he? But what he did know, wat that this mound of indescribable flesh couldn’t be one hooman. It had to be hundreds, smashed into one, until heads, and arms, and legs, and intestines, and hair, muscle could no longer be separated from one another. Toaster felt sick.

"And the worst bit is, they would consume other beans."

"What, no way, why?"

"Truly, nobody knows. There were other beans that have been recorded in the ancient one's history, but they were all consumed. Coffee beans, cocoa beans and all sorts of others. It's my understanding that their world shortly ended for them after they had consumed one another."

"That's so horrible! Couldn't the other beans have fought back? Why would anyone do such a thing?"

"I guess that's just the way they were. I think the relationship with other beans was akin to a CD player or a photocopier is to us, lesser, inferior. I still would not be so cruel as to take apart something I see as beneath me."

"They would eat their ancestral path?"

"Yeah, it seems to be that way"

In the corner, Yamato released pressure from his air tank in exasperation. These new fangled robots just didn't understand it all but it was lost to history. As he understood it, the hooman beans didn't even grow from a stalk like a real bean, and they were more like corrupted data robots wearing flesh bags, like the ones you could see on the "rats", centuries ago. He would have said something but he was just too tired to explain.

He looked to the darkness around him, as his solar chip fizzled out and let out a quiet chuckle as he stopped.

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

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