Love and Robots

The first time I saw her she was standing in the general vicinity of where the bus would pick us up, she had a slight scowl and looked uncomfortable in her new school uniform.

They required us British kids to wear a uniform at St. Georges School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

I said hello and told her the bus would probably come in 5 or 10 minutes. Then my sister started talking to her and I got back into human-resistance mode, after all, the situation was critical, the damn Meganoids had over-ran the colonies on Alpha-3 AND the Ajaxian Empire, sentient robots, continued to fight in the Uranium-rich asteroids of Quadrant X. I had enough to think about. My parents had just got divorced.

I saw her again in class, coincidence, she was the same age as me, but she was a civilian and it wouldn’t do to get too friendly as I could be called to coordinate a resistance operation at any time and the odds were pretty slim that I would get back to Earth anytime soon, heck, even with the new advances in time and space warping, I’d be lucky to come back in the same century.

After school, I saw her get off the bus, scowl still attached and some hair-device askew, but I was on an important mission to get to Wod (Edward) and Richards HQ for some serious drawing. I said hello to Carmalita who was making Filipino rice candy sticks, they were ok I ’spose, changed, grabbed my biro and blaster (fully charged in case of cobras and Meganoids), set the force field in my bedroom to beam-repell and ran out the door.

The elevator was too slow so I ran down the 9 floors and made my way through the twisted hulks of Federation machinery and de-activated robot killing machines and saw her again, sitting on a railing.

Since I was an officer in the Federation I had to be polite and noticed her scowl had dissipated somewhat, in fact she had a nice smile and her light brown hair was glittering in some trick of the light and I totally forgot about my mission for a few seconds.

Dammit, I could have been picked off by a sniper-drone and the Hong Kong HQ would have one less commander…

She said she was bored and didn’t have any friends and had only been in HK for a week and had a lot of questions she wondered if she could ask.

Since we were Brit’s in Asia we had a common bond so I felt bound to be friendly and asked her to walk down to the beach with me.

Our bock of flats was on the hill overlooking the bay that still had a certain vestigial colonial flavor so it was easy to imagine the HMS Repulse sitting in the bay, sails puffed by the breeze, cannons being shined and decks being swabbed.

As we walked down the road to the beach she told me she had been living in Scotland and her dad was a sargeant major in some (Earth) brigade and she actually laughed a couple of times.

It was a good sound and by the time we were walking on the sand I realized she would be a decent candidate for officer training, I mean, I doubted she could draw robots with the required ferocity our comics deserved, and after the fiasco of letting my sister color in some of the stories (Wild Wolf doesn’t have a navy blue costume, what was she thinking???) we were warey of girls being artists, but I liked her already.

By the time we got to the McDonalds I realized I was thirsty and asked her if she’d like a coke, she said she had no money, but I had pocket money, lots in fact, so I bought her one, and we sat on the white-washed concrete and looked at the fat tourists and groups of Cantonese grilling endless chicken pieces.

She said she had never seen the sea before and wanted to live here forever as it was so pretty.

Looking back, it was idyllic, the bay was a natural crescent of yellow sand and green hills that rose sharply to make the ‘dragons’ back’ and the Repulse Bay hotel was a glittering white festooned with red flowers…We talked for a long time and finally returned to our flats, Wod and Richard would understand.

I saw her the next morning at the bus stop and she seemed happy, but my sister was monopolizing the conversation so I got busy in the temporarily neglected ‘Curse of the Androids’ comic book, copyright SDME+RCC (Sonja, Darren, Mark, Edward and Richards Comic Company).

On the bus I happened to look up and she was looking at me right before we entered the tunnel that separated our island from the mainland, then it was dark and stuffy and I remembered that Emperor Ajax was planning an offensive in the Neutral Decant…

The next day my new American step-dad woke me up, it was Saturday, what was so important? He handed me a pair of binoculars and pointed to the block of flats across from us, a lady was laying smooshed on the ground and people were gathering around.

The next day I found out it was that girl’s mother, she had set her self on fire and lept out of the window, 18 stories up, later I saw these huge black cockroaches in the spot where she had landed. I looked for that girl around the area and again at school but was told she had flown home to live with her grand parents and I never saw her again.