ASCIIBotics Labs

Toron arrived in a crate as long thin sheets of metal and spools of wire. His blueprints were white, and this lead to an fight between the workmen as to what the word irony actually meant. It took them five weeks to assemble Toron and a month to properly program him. When he was active, the workmen added a small rectangle of bronze to the hexagon that was his center plate. On the bronze was his name, Toron, as well as the names of all fifty five colonists that had come to settle the small, distant planet. Toron was the only robot and if asked, the colonists would have said he was chosen for his useful ability to grab and pinch, but the reality was that Toron was simply the best robot they could afford. In the first year of the colony it was a planet of adults. Toron would go with the able-bodied men and the women who prefered hard labor and help them by grabbing the pieces of stone or pinching apart the trees or grabbing the net of fish from the river or pinching the long trenches into the farmland. At night everyone would go back into town and Toron would help the women and the men who prefered the softer arts by pinching the iron pots as they hung over a fire or grabbing the long boards to make a stage for the band. Toron did not enjoy his night work as much as his day work, but it was still grabbing and pinching so he was happy to serve. The colonists were very comfortable with each other and spent many evenings drinking and then wandering off into the darkness, under the clear starry sky. By the start of the second year, the little colony began to grow. Toron was reprogrammed to step carefully as the toddlers moved freely among the town. Toron found it took twice as long for him to get anywhere but he was programmed not to find this upsetting so this was a simple bit of trivia to him. The colonists began to keep to their own homes and the drinking was casual and often over before the sun had gone down. By the time the first children were ten years old, Toron was being called upon to be a playground. He would let the children climb his sides and slide down the slippery metal he held against his bronze plaque. There was a great debate as to the matter of the plaque. Some very influentual people wanted the names of the children added to the list. This was voted on three times before it was decided that the plaque would remain as it was written, with only the names of the original founders of the colony. The day after the final vote one of the children scratched his name into the plaque with a rock. His parents said they would punish him but were secretly proud. Soon the plaque was filled with illegible scratches and dents and finally it was removed and the children were forbidden to play on Toron. Toron's programming was modified to make sure he would be aware that he was no one's toy. By the time the children began to have children of their own, the colony began to have enough money to buy a second robot. Toron was kept with the workers now, and since the worksite was now almost a half a day's walk from the colony, he almost never came to town. There were enough workers to rotate shifts, and so groups of men and the women who prefered hard labor would walk to the worksite and stay for a week and then return to them. Toron was modified and programmed to work non-stop. It was all pinching and grabbing so he was happy. This continued until the year that the children's children came of age. One of the original colonists, grown very rich and very old, planned to marry one of the children's children. Her father refused but the old colonist insisted and attempted to have the father arrested and removed from the colony. Instead, the father's son came to Toron and programmed him to grab and pinch the old man. The son was found with Toron and the two halves of the old man. At the trial the father openly wept and begged for the life of his boy. Toron's memory logs were entered into evidence but they were not needed since the son admitted what he had done. The son was found guilty and imprisoned for the remainder of his life. Toron was restored and was sent back to work, but many of those in the colony felt uncomfortable around him now. The original colonists had begun to die out, and though the elder statesmen had all grown from the children who had played on Toron's metal arms, and had all kept their fond memories of Toron's compassion, the voters of the colony were of the generation who had seen Toron as just the machine in the woods, and had invented foolish campfire stories about why he was forbidden to enter the town. It was decided that it would be best if the money was spent to buy a new robot and Toron was dismantled. It was not explained to Toron, he was simply asked to kneel and did so, and then he was shut off and his power source removed. The shell was sold to a local robotics artist who reshaped the metal into a robot called Origami, who he would introduce to people as his friend.