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Description

Somewhere in the vast expanse of the cosmos, amidst the swirling threads of galaxies and gaping voids between clusters lay a small, unassuming barred spiral galaxy, known to its own sentient inhabitants as the Milky Way. In the densely populated Orion Arm of this galaxy lay a small cluster of mostly red dwarf (Class M and Class K) stars, with a scattering of yellow dwarf (Class G) stars. Of the latter, two solar systems stood out: The Alpha Centauri system, with its twin yellow suns and smaller red companion Proxima Centauri, and the Sol system, with its 9 planets, 9-10 dwarf planets, distinct asteroid and Kuiper belts, and massive Oort cloud. Out of these planets, the third planet from the star had been lucky enough to host its own forms of sentient life over the latest fraction of its 4.6 billion year long existence. Unfortunately for the life forms living on said planet, it was also subject to periodic mass extinctions and subsequent reshufflings of the structure its biosphere. The latest of these had spanned from approximately 10,000 BCE to approximately 2,200 CE, with a large proportion of the populi of the two sapient species: Humans and Synths leaving around 2,100 CE. Most of those who left were at least decently wealthy, or in the case of the Synths, unwillingly cyborgized crew "programmed" to follow robot like directives. Most of those who were left behind on Earth were variously too poor to make it onto the great interstellar ships, holdouts who refused to leave, or in the cases of the synths, a once again unwillingly cyborgized army following a robot like directive. The latter, an army of "Waste Allocator Load Lifter: Earth Class" or "Wall.e" synths, had been given an enormous task: clean up the massive piles of garbage and other pollution littering the Earth's surface and contaminating its oceans. As the old biosphere collapsed and a new ecosystem evolved around them, the Wall.es tirelessly attacked the garbage, compressing it into cubes and stacking said cubes into massive garbage towers to await the arrival of massive recycling robots, which rivaled the great starships in scale. Unfortunately, about 5 years into the cleanup operations, a mysterious incident lead the megacorps in charge- Robotics, Mech, and Cyborg Specialist Volskaya Industries, Development Giant Vishkar Incorporated, and Bulk Supermarket Chain Buy N' Large to pull the plug, causing the massive recycler bots to grind to a halt, and the Wall.es to fend for themselves. Over the next 700 years, more and more Wall.es died and resurrected themselves with little to no memory of their previous lives or otherwise abandoned their directive, leaving a dwindling number of their former compatriots to continue attacking the decaying garbage mounds that had come to serve as a food source for the new biosphere. By 2815 CE, the only massive garbage piles left mostly untouched were in cities, and even these were starting to break down and decay, with the few remaining Wall.es being unable to replace decaying towers fast enough. One such Wall.e lives in the combined New York- Newark metropolis, and this is her story.

It was the late afternoon, approaching evening, and near the top of a Garbage Tower in Central Park, Wall-e was performing garbage tower maintenance. This mostly consisted of compacting the loose litter blowing around, and recompacting cubes that had begun to fall apart. It was a tedious and lonely job, which is why she had her retrofitted music player on, and her two dragons, Hal and Whiptail perched nearby. Of the two, Hal was the larger, being a Woolly Howl of about average size. Being a 29th century Woolly Howl, Hal differed from the variety depicted in the by now ancient viking manuscript "The Book of Dragons", sporting a pair of long, antenna like nubs, vaguely Night Fury like Tail Wings, and orange coloring with black stripes and a jet black mane of feathers. Whiptail, on the other hand, was a slightly smaller than average Sand Wraith, who again differed from her viking age ancestors in a few ways, notably sporting the same vaguely Night Fury like tail wings as Hal, stripes vaguely resembling those of a Lizard, and a brilliant cyan/blue head and tail which would have make a Blue Tailed Skink jealous. The two of them were presently occupied with watching other dragons fly around the enormous garbage towers as Wall-e finished compacting and placing her last few cubes. Upon placing her last cube, Wall-e noticed something shiny compacted into one of the older, more fragile cubes nearby. It was way too large to be just another old candy wrapper, and too flat and circular to be a piece of compacted tinfoil, both of which Wall.e encountered frequently in her quest to compact garbage. A couple of possibilities flashed through her mind: it could be part of an old metal trash can, in which case it couldn't be the lid since she saw no flattened handle... or it could be a hubcap. She decided that it was likely the latter, and, after shifting a striped green scarf (one of her few possessions remaining from her Pre-Wall.e life) out of the way, she grabbed hold of the object as best as she could and yanked it free. It was a decently sized hubcap, likely pulled off a sports car shortly after the evacuation. In the center of the hubcap sat a logo: seven stars set on a scratched and faded blue background. Wall.e didn't mind that the paint was faded and scratched up: she found the old Subaru hubcap fascinating, and besides, those hubcaps were pretty rare in an American metropolis. She turned and walked away from the wall, stopping to put the hubcap into her portable cooler and close the lid. She slung the cooler over her back, and whistled for her dragons. Hal and Whiptail leaped off the top of the wall above her, and stretched out their wings, catching a light breeze, and slipping into a glide. Hal got close enough for Wall.e to leap onto his back, gripping his mane for purchase as she swung a leg over his broad neck, and settled into a sitting position. Whiptail drifted over Hals wings, momentarily licking Wall.es ear as she drifted over to Hals right. Wall.e leaned towards Hals head, and said, (Let's go home, Hal.) With a few vigorous flaps of his wings, Hal began to fly home, with Whiptail flapping more vigorously to keep up with him and Wall.e.

As they flew home, they passed the massive holographic projectors that played Buy N' Large advertisements to a now mostly animal audience. A few flared to life as they passed by, the voice of the last C.E.O. of Buy 'N Large booming into the now empty streets. Most of them advertised a life of paradise aboard the starships- an originally 5 year cruise in space advertised to any humans that were able and willing to pay for tickets. The most impressive of these advertised the Crown Jewels of the fleet- the Axiom, the Yorktown, and the Columbia, each of which was touted as being the largest, and the most luxurious starship of the lot. As they passed the advertisements, Wall.e was reminded of the distant past. Though, being roughly 7-800 years old meant that she had a sort of "fog of ages", she could still vividly recall watching the Axiom take off. She had been helping to build one of the first garbage towers in the Manhattan district when it happened. The massive starship had blasted its way out of its docking port with a deafening roar of the engines, a large blast of exhaust, and a shockwave that blasted dust and trash across the whole city. Wall.e also vividly remembered the smell of red hot metal and burnt meat- some unlucky Wall.es had been caught in the blast zone and charbroiled as a result. Coming back to the present, she stared at the empty port as the dragons passed by. The ashes had long been swept away by rain and subsequent dust storms, and the port now sat idle, a massive reminder of what had once been docked in it. Wall.e's own home wasn't too far away: an old transport vehicle for Wall.es such as herself, which she had reclaimed and added on to. She had also started filling the shelves with items that she'd found in the trash heaps after a glitch in her programming allowed her personality to re-emerge. Hal and Whiptail landed in the yard several meters away from the back, and Wall.e disembarked from Hal's back. As she walked towards the doorframe, she cast a brief eye over her small garden. She was pleased that the Tomatoes were doing well, having grown much hardier than the ones she'd eaten prior to the evacuation. She noted that Hal's and Whiptail's dragon nip needed a tad more fertilizer. That she could scavenge from the trash heaps or assemble from compost as needed. The stream at the edge was an excellent source of fish now that the waters were crystal clear and free of contaminants, a state which it had not been in when she first found it. As Hal and Whiptail did some evening fishing, Wall.e strolled up the open door, and into her home. As she turned on the lights, an eclectic assembly of objects greeted her. She reopened her cooler, and inspected the objects within. Reaching into it, she pulled out a spork. She glanced at the cups of fresh silverware lining a nearby shelf. The spork clearly wasn't a regular spoon, nor was it a fork. After a momentary bout of indecision, she placed the spork in between the two cups. next she pulled out an old tape. The label read "Hello Dolly!- Recording of original, made in 1969." This Wall.e placed into a tape player hooked up to an old Ipod like device, and pressed play. Then she pulled the magnifier. As the movie played in the background, she continued to sort objects. She hummed along with "Put On Your Sunday Clothes"- her favorite, and stopped to giggle in amusement as Barnaby acrobatically leaped around the room when Irene Maloy tried to teach him how to dance. She later found herself drawn to the movie right before "It Only Takes A Moment" began to play. She recorded the song on her music player, and stared, transfixed, as Cornelius and Irene held hands. When the number ended, Wall-e looked down to find herself holding her own hands. She then stopped recording, and turned her attention to the last item: the hubcap. She didn't know what to do with it- it was her first and only Subaru Hubcap after all. She eventually set it down on a shelf with a small collection of hubcaps from other brands, and, now feeling tired, she lay down on the floor, and curled up into a ball, like a Catastrophic Quaken curling up into a "boulder." Her dragons lay down on the floor next to her, curling around her in a cozy tent of wings and tails. Just before she fell asleep, Wall.e pressed "play" on her music player. She drifted off as the soothing strains of "It Only Takes A Moment" began to play.

Description

Somewhere in the vast expanse of the cosmos, amidst the swirling threads of galaxies and gaping voids between clusters lay a small, unassuming barred spiral galaxy, known to its own sentient inhabitants as the Milky Way. In the densely populated Orion Arm of this galaxy lay a small cluster of mostly red dwarf (Class M and Class K) stars, with a scattering of yellow dwarf (Class G) stars. Of the latter, two solar systems stood out: The Alpha Centauri system, with its twin yellow suns and smaller red companion Proxima Centauri, and the Sol system, with its 9 planets, 9-10 dwarf planets, distinct asteroid and Kuiper belts, and massive Oort cloud. Out of these planets, the third planet from the star had been lucky enough to host its own forms of sentient life over the latest fraction of its 4.6 billion year long existence. Unfortunately for the life forms living on said planet, it was also subject to periodic mass extinctions and subsequent reshufflings of the structure its biosphere. The latest of these had spanned from approximately 10,000 BCE to approximately 2,200 CE, with a large proportion of the populi of the two sapient species: Humans and Synths leaving around 2,100 CE. Most of those who left were at least decently wealthy, or in the case of the Synths, unwillingly cyborgized crew "programmed" to follow robot like directives. Most of those who were left behind on Earth were variously too poor to make it onto the great interstellar ships, holdouts who refused to leave, or in the cases of the synths, a once again unwillingly cyborgized army following a robot like directive. The latter, an army of "Waste Allocator Load Lifter: Earth Class" or "Wall.e" synths, had been given an enormous task: clean up the massive piles of garbage and other pollution littering the Earth's surface and contaminating its oceans. As the old biosphere collapsed and a new ecosystem evolved around them, the Wall.es tirelessly attacked the garbage, compressing it into cubes and stacking said cubes into massive garbage towers to await the arrival of massive recycling robots, which rivaled the great starships in scale. Unfortunately, about 5 years into the cleanup operations, a mysterious incident lead the megacorps in charge- Robotics, Mech, and Cyborg Specialist Volskaya Industries, Development Giant Vishkar Incorporated, and Bulk Supermarket Chain Buy N' Large to pull the plug, causing the massive recycler bots to grind to a halt, and the Wall.es to fend for themselves. Over the next 700 years, more and more Wall.es died and resurrected themselves with little to no memory of their previous lives or otherwise abandoned their directive, leaving a dwindling number of their former compatriots to continue attacking the decaying garbage mounds that had come to serve as a food source for the new biosphere. By 2815 CE, the only massive garbage piles left mostly untouched were in cities, and even these were starting to break down and decay, with the few remaining Wall.es being unable to replace decaying towers fast enough. One such Wall.e lives in the combined New York- Newark metropolis, and this is her story.

It was the late afternoon, approaching evening, and near the top of a Garbage Tower in Central Park, Wall-e was performing garbage tower maintenance. This mostly consisted of compacting the loose litter blowing around, and recompacting cubes that had begun to fall apart. It was a tedious and lonely job, which is why she had her retrofitted music player on, and her two dragons, Hal and Whiptail perched nearby. Of the two, Hal was the larger, being a Woolly Howl of about average size. Being a 29th century Woolly Howl, Hal differed from the variety depicted in the by now ancient viking manuscript "The Book of Dragons", sporting a pair of long, antenna like nubs, vaguely Night Fury like Tail Wings, and orange coloring with black stripes and a jet black mane of feathers. Whiptail, on the other hand, was a slightly smaller than average Sand Wraith, who again differed from her viking age ancestors in a few ways, notably sporting the same vaguely Night Fury like tail wings as Hal, stripes vaguely resembling those of a Lizard, and a brilliant cyan/blue head and tail which would have make a Blue Tailed Skink jealous. The two of them were presently occupied with watching other dragons fly around the enormous garbage towers as Wall-e finished compacting and placing her last few cubes. Upon placing her last cube, Wall-e noticed something shiny compacted into one of the older, more fragile cubes nearby. It was way too large to be just another old candy wrapper, and too flat and circular to be a piece of compacted tinfoil, both of which Wall.e encountered frequently in her quest to compact garbage. A couple of possibilities flashed through her mind: it could be part of an old metal trash can, in which case it couldn't be the lid since she saw no flattened handle... or it could be a hubcap. She decided that it was likely the latter, and, after shifting a striped green scarf (one of her few possessions remaining from her Pre-Wall.e life) out of the way, she grabbed hold of the object as best as she could and yanked it free. It was a decently sized hubcap, likely pulled off a sports car shortly after the evacuation. In the center of the hubcap sat a logo: seven stars set on a scratched and faded blue background. Wall.e didn't mind that the paint was faded and scratched up: she found the old Subaru hubcap fascinating, and besides, those hubcaps were pretty rare in an American metropolis. She turned and walked away from the wall, stopping to put the hubcap into her portable cooler and close the lid. She slung the cooler over her back, and whistled for her dragons. Hal and Whiptail leaped off the top of the wall above her, and stretched out their wings, catching a light breeze, and slipping into a glide. Hal got close enough for Wall.e to leap onto his back, gripping his mane for purchase as she swung a leg over his broad neck, and settled into a sitting position. Whiptail drifted over Hals wings, momentarily licking Wall.es ear as she drifted over to Hals right. Wall.e leaned towards Hals head, and said, (Let's go home, Hal.) With a few vigorous flaps of his wings, Hal began to fly home, with Whiptail flapping more vigorously to keep up with him and Wall.e.

As they flew home, they passed the massive holographic projectors that played Buy N' Large advertisements to a now mostly animal audience. A few flared to life as they passed by, the voice of the last C.E.O. of Buy 'N Large booming into the now empty streets. Most of them advertised a life of paradise aboard the starships- an originally 5 year cruise in space advertised to any humans that were able and willing to pay for tickets. The most impressive of these advertised the Crown Jewels of the fleet- the Axiom, the Yorktown, and the Columbia, each of which was touted as being the largest, and the most luxurious starship of the lot. As they passed the advertisements, Wall.e was reminded of the distant past. Though, being roughly 7-800 years old meant that she had a sort of "fog of ages", she could still vividly recall watching the Axiom take off. She had been helping to build one of the first garbage towers in the Manhattan district when it happened. The massive starship had blasted its way out of its docking port with a deafening roar of the engines, a large blast of exhaust, and a shockwave that blasted dust and trash across the whole city. Wall.e also vividly remembered the smell of red hot metal and burnt meat- some unlucky Wall.es had been caught in the blast zone and charbroiled as a result. Coming back to the present, she stared at the empty port as the dragons passed by. The ashes had long been swept away by rain and subsequent dust storms, and the port now sat idle, a massive reminder of what had once been docked in it. Wall.e's own home wasn't too far away: an old transport vehicle for Wall.es such as herself, which she had reclaimed and added on to. She had also started filling the shelves with items that she'd found in the trash heaps after a glitch in her programming allowed her personality to re-emerge. Hal and Whiptail landed in the yard several meters away from the back, and Wall.e disembarked from Hal's back. As she walked towards the doorframe, she cast a brief eye over her small garden. She was pleased that the Tomatoes were doing well, having grown much hardier than the ones she'd eaten prior to the evacuation. She noted that Hal's and Whiptail's dragon nip needed a tad more fertilizer. That she could scavenge from the trash heaps or assemble from compost as needed. The stream at the edge was an excellent source of fish now that the waters were crystal clear and free of contaminants, a state which it had not been in when she first found it. As Hal and Whiptail did some evening fishing, Wall.e strolled up the open door, and into her home. As she turned on the lights, an eclectic assembly of objects greeted her. She reopened her cooler, and inspected the objects within. Reaching into it, she pulled out a spork. She glanced at the cups of fresh silverware lining a nearby shelf. The spork clearly wasn't a regular spoon, nor was it a fork. After a momentary bout of indecision, she placed the spork in between the two cups. next she pulled out an old tape. The label read "Hello Dolly!- Recording of original, made in 1969." This Wall.e placed into a tape player hooked up to an old Ipod like device, and pressed play. Then she pulled the magnifier. As the movie played in the background, she continued to sort objects. She hummed along with "Put On Your Sunday Clothes"- her favorite, and stopped to giggle in amusement as Barnaby acrobatically leaped around the room when Irene Maloy tried to teach him how to dance. She later found herself drawn to the movie right before "It Only Takes A Moment" began to play. She recorded the song on her music player, and stared, transfixed, as Cornelius and Irene held hands. When the number ended, Wall-e looked down to find herself holding her own hands. She then stopped recording, and turned her attention to the last item: the hubcap. She didn't know what to do with it- it was her first and only Subaru Hubcap after all. She eventually set it down on a shelf with a small collection of hubcaps from other brands, and, now feeling tired, she lay down on the floor, and curled up into a ball, like a Catastrophic Quaken curling up into a "boulder." Her dragons lay down on the floor next to her, curling around her in a cozy tent of wings and tails. Just before she fell asleep, Wall.e pressed "play" on her music player. She drifted off as the soothing strains of "It Only Takes A Moment" began to play.