Introduction: Sloan is a slum dweller residing in Old City, which is designated to be the waste disposal facility of the New City. The New City is controlled by the all-powerful and all-pervasive corporation, Eternal Yggdrasil Enterprise.
Into a pile of rusting machinery parts fell Sloan. Hard.
“Scurry off, midget, or we’ll beat ya to a pulp!”
Still reeling from heavy punches, Sloan bit his tongue to stop the tears from flowing. “Give me some time.”
The Avenue 33 gang shook their robotic arm fists at him menacingly. “Yeah, because you’re so useless you can’t even run,” sneered the group of five older youths as they sauntered away.
He just lay there in the darkness. Whilst snatching breaths through bruised ribs, Sloan thought that as from the dung heap he came, so to the dung heap he returned.
The dung heap was where he was born and lived his life; it was all that he had ever known.
Sloan gingerly pushed himself up with his palms when suddenly, his right palm dug into something sharp.
“Ow!” He yelped in pain and withdrew his arm, only to see an AI chip. His curious streak impelled him to pick it up.
Abandoned AI chips from the New City was very commonly found but this chip was shiny, glistening with strange symbols. It pulsated a life of its own.
It might fetch a good price, Sloan thought to himself as he pocketed the AI chip. In the past there were days where he spent every waking hour rummaging through trash and yet finding nothing. Today, he got lucky.
The excitement was quickly eclipsed when a pang of self-pity hit Sloan. The crowning glory of his life was that he found a good piece of trash.
Shoulders slightly slumped, Sloan plodded over to Avenue 22 to continue his scavenger hunt. Junk is still just junk.
Out of all the dumping sites of Old City, Sloan liked that place best. It was only at Avenue 22 that an ethereal stream of light from New City shone down.
The light never failed to strike him blind for a minute or two – Old City was perpetually draped in a gun-metal grey darkness – but he didn’t mind.
Bathed in that white light, Sloan could dream.
A soft buzzing whir, all too familiar to Sloan, disrupted his dreams. He stiffened up, back upright and eyes peeled open.
The Eternal Yggdrasil Enterprise (E.Y.E.) surveillance bot was approaching Avenue 22.
The whir evolved into a deafening siren. Sloan had to cover his ears with his hands, for the sound pierced through his eardrums and into his soul. It was shrill, like that of twice-ancient pterodactyls.
Hurriedly, Sloan ran away from the E.Y.E. surveillance bot and its red laser scanners.
More than ever he tasted fear on his tongue; it seemed that the bot was not merely here to conduct its cursory mid-day round.
Was E.Y.E. looking for something?
Something, or someone? Sloan brushed away his irrational fears whilst panting heavily from the run.
He should be invisible in the eyes of the Eternal Yggdrasil Enterprise (E.Y.E.) surveillance bot: Old City slum dwellers were not ID code-tagged as alive.
Sloan gasped, suddenly realising that he had put the AI chip into his pocket earlier.
Better to be safe than sorry. Sloan braked and took cover under the scratched and bent hoods of Toyotas.
Then there was a decrescendo and the siren became a whir and the whirring got softer and softer. The bot was returning to the E.Y.E. headquarters.
Sloan stared at its ascent, transfixed by the dreadful red halo.
Will he discard the AI chip or keep it?
Inspiration struck Sloan. He ran excitedly to his makeshift bookshelf in that hovel of a home on Avenue 20. Maybe he could learn how to construct an AI bot from scratch.
(Books, or germ-pages according to official E.Y.E. dogma, were strictly prohibited. However, like Old City slum dwellers, their existence was disregarded.)
Sloan pulled out a thick hardcover “How to Build a Robot from Junkyard Materials” and thumbed through the first chapter.
It was not long before he went back to dumpster diving for the bot’s head. Eventually he found a slightly bulky monitor screen. Sloan nodded to himself approvingly.
“Large and brainy.”
“Materials you will need:” This phrase was printed at the start of every chapter in elegant cursive script.
For the entire week afterwards, Sloan eagerly devoured the robot-building instruction manual from cover to cover.
When he was not reading, Sloan was out combing through the digital trash (which New City conveniently disposed in Old City) for spare parts.
Sloan started hoarding the parts instead of selling them off like he normally did to a burly man nicknamed “Brutus”.
By the following Monday, Sloan had gathered an impressive array of tools – hammers, screws, wires, soldering irons. He had no time to waste. Not when E.Y.E. might be watching.
“Slimy Sloan, stupid Sloan~” The Old City dwellers from the neighbouring dumping grounds did not understand.
They teased Sloan mercilessly for reading germ-pages and even tried to steal some away in a mischievous prank. But Sloan was too absorbed in his newfound mission to dwell on their taunts.
He had already given the bot’s head, as well as the newly assembled chest, arms and hands, a fresh coat of paint.
Whilst affixing the upper body of the bot to the ceiling with sturdy springs and steely wires, Sloan was reminded of Pinocchio the puppet. Sloan chuckled to himself and whispered to the dangling bot.
“This shall be our inside joke.”
As Sloan was soldering on the last few wires onto the bot’s heel, he smacked his forehand with his palm.
He ran out of metallic ball joints for the bot’s hips and knees. Time to find Brutus.
“Can I have some ball joints, please?”
Brutus glared at Sloan. His glare read, what use did you have for it? But he said gruffly, “Yeah, for a dollar, kid.”
Sloan grimaced when he handed Brutus a dog-eared note, equivalent to one month’s worth of scavenging.
But he flew on the wings of euphoria all the way home, hugging the cold metal spheres close to his chest. Trash had transmuted into treasure.
Day and night blended into one, dawn was dusk and dusk was dawn.
Sloan toiled on, forgetting to eat and drink. Every so often his stomach would rumble loudly.
His bowels felt like they were going to explode; he did not even pause to relieve himself (though he could not help nodding off).
Finally, in the wee hours of one morning, Sloan stopped to take a good look at the fully assembled bot.
He counted himself lucky to light upon a motherboard, now attached to the back of the bot’s head, which had a compatible socket for the AI chip.
Tears welling up, Sloan could not stop admiring his creation. “Perfect, just perfect!”
With shaky hands, Sloan inserted the AI chip into the back of the bot’s head. He had come too far to fail, right here, right now.
The AI chip slid in place with a soft click. Sloan held his breath, the air buzzing with an electrifying anticipation.
Nothing.
“Argh!” Despite his disappointment, Sloan continued reworking the connectivity of the wires. Suddenly in the wee hours of the night, the monitor screen lit up with a huge “:)”.
Sloan erupted in joyous laughter, for he had read in germ-pages how emojis were all the buzz in the generations leading up to the E.Y.E.’s takeover. Ah, those were the days.
“Hello—"
“Hello…” Sloan’s voice trailed off. He had not thought of its name.
The bot just glanced back at him inquisitively, with the huge smiley plastered on its face.
As Sloan was still deep in thought, the deafening siren of the E.Y.E. surveillance bot sounded above his hovel. Sloan instinctively ducked down; the bot followed suit.
The pterodactyl-like siren rang in his ears for five minutes before fading away. Slightly shaken, Sloan stood up, brushing dust off his pants.
“Hello, Arty.” The bot gave a puzzled face. Whatever little Latin Sloan learned from germ-pages, he put to good use. “It’s short for arte et marte – by skill and valour.”
For they needed valour, more than ever.
“HIYA!”
With voices united in a shout, Sloan and Arty drilled side kicks in sets of ten.
When they finally flopped down on the floor after an hour’s training, Arty turned to Sloan and asked, “does my voice sound weird?”
Sloan, who had some difficulty interpreting the emojis that flashed on Arty’s face, decided to install an additional text-to-speech voice chip in the motherboard’s spare socket.
“Not really,” Sloan panted, still out of breath from the past hour’s martial arts training. “Think it fits.” He had specially selected the voice of a young adult male for Arty.
A thinking face emoji flashed across Arty’s face. “But it’s strange hearing my own voice. I sound so…human.”
“Look out!” Arty gave Sloan a shove as a crushed tin can sailed through the air and missed Sloan’s cheek by an inch.
Sloan and Arty had been throwing some punches on the outskirts of Avenue 22, where the ethereal stream of light shone down from New City, before…
“I see you’ve gotten yourself a friend, eh?” Reclaiming his balance quickly, Sloan spun to his right to face the sneering Avenue 33 gang.
“Arty’s a much better friend than you all.” Sloan spat. Arty flashed an angry emoji while striking a defensive guard stance.
“This midget has more guts now that he has a bot to protect him. Well, we’ll see if your bot is as useless than you.”
They were outnumbered, seven to two, and Sloan had no robotic arm.
“What should we do now?” Sloan whispered through clenched teeth as the Avenue 33 gang advanced.
The gang closed in on Sloan and Arty like a pack of hungry vultures, the harbinger of death.
“I’ll try to fend them off—you just find some way to escape.” Whilst maintaining his guard stance, Arty glanced left and right cautiously.
The Avenue 33 gang leader was the first to draw near. He delivered a straight punch at Arty’s head, which Arty dodged. With lightning quick reflexes, Arty countered with a powerful uppercut and sent the leader reeling.
Then, a bloodcurdling scream: “Arty, help!”
Arty immediately turned when he heard the bloodcurdling scream for help.
Sloan was pinned down onto the dirt ground by two gang members, with the burlier one of the two sitting on Sloan’s back.
Arty’s face displayed a furious emoji, eyes ablaze with fire. “Get off him!”
But his exclamation was suddenly eclipsed by a pterodactyl-like siren.
Before Arty even lunged forward to attack, all the gang members fled. Even the leader who was still holding his broken jaw with bloodied palms vanished.
The E.Y.E. surveillance bot focussed a beam of red laser light onto Sloan, who was still lying face down, and onto Arty. The siren went off at once, replaced by clunky metallic footsteps.
The police bots had found them.
These are all 16 parts in Series 1 of Sloan & Arty - The Boy and his Companion Bot. The ditigal artworks and story are all original, borne from a collaborative effort by Matthew (my graphic designer boyfriend) and myself.
Hope you all have enjoyed this Series!
Get the Eternal Yggdrasil Enterprise surveillance bot merchandise HERE!
E.Y.E. am watching you!
