“Just Twelve, and No More” by Danielle Ste. Just

Illustration: “Joes vs. The Cat” by Romeo Esparrago (c) 2005

There were twelve of us. Just twelve, and no more. We lived in the box, only let out once every 365 days. The fresh air revived us, barely enough to sustain our life throughout the long year.

One year, we were put away on a damp spot on the cellar floor. Toward May, Number 5 said, “The cardboard is weak around me from the moisture.”

Being Number 1, everyone looked to me for direction. “Let us act on this,” I commanded.

We dug and scraped, wiggled and writhed, until Number 9 gasped, “I feel a slight draft!” This inspired us to new lengths, and before long a fresh breeze blew through the box.

“Onward, eleven soldiers!” I cried, and we broke free.

The cellar was huge and cavernous. A bright square at one corner revealed a window high in the wall. “We’ll make for that,” I said, pointing with my gun.

“U, Robot, and The Totally Unremarkable Paper” by NoMan (A.L. Schuhart)

U, Robot sat in a room.

(As will be learned later, it is here that U stopped reading)

It was a big room, not that size was important, which it wasn’t. After all, the size of the room had nothing to do with the size of the robot, nor with how important the robot was, which it was. The robot, I mean.

So, the robot sat in the room. Well not sat, really, at least not the way people sit. I mean, its body, well what a robot means when it says “body”, had adopted the position of sitting, although, really, it wasn’t sitting on anything. Really, its feet were on the floor, its knees bent, back straight, and all that. Just like sitting, except there was no chair. Not even a bench. It was sitting, though, on the power tube because, well, it had to. After all, it got its power from the power tube. And the power tube was just a tube filled with power that stuck up out of the floor upon which, well, the robot sat.

In the room were an astounding number of power tubes, but amazingly only one robot. The tubes stood up as straight as straight is, exactly thirty-two inches tall and thick as a fist. There were exactly eight-hundred and fifty power tubes, arranged in ten rows of eighty-five. The robot called them editing stations. Occasionally the robot would slowly raise itself from one, stand, take three medium steps down the line, and sit on the next one. When it stood, the vacuum seal would go shtuk when it released and then hiss slightly as the pent-up gasses escaped. The robot referred to this as unshtukking, and would laugh about it with the other robots at the robot bar. “Har Har” they would laugh, “Har Har.” The robot bar also had power tubes upon which not to sit. But in the totally unremarkable room where it worked, when it came to the end of the row, it crossed to the next one. When it came to the last editing station in the room, it went home, or to the bar. And that was that.