Opening Note: Huzzah! The first chapter of my first WALL-E fanfic! This story takes place approximately one hundred and fifty years before the events of the movie, making it EU. At this point in the altered continuity and timeline, Wall-E has not met Hal (the cockroach), Buy n' Large has abandoned Earth, and the other Wall-E units have been deactivated. As far as legal disclaimers go, I don't own Wall-E. Now, onto the bit people care about; the story itself.
Desolation – Chapter One
Desolate
adj.
Devoid of inhabitants; deserted.
Barren; lifeless.
Rendered unfit for habitation or use.
Dreary; dismal.
Bereft of friends or hope; sad and forlorn.
It has been stated before by wiser men than myself that silence is golden, which is an exceptionally accurate statement. Both gold and silence are incredibly rare, incredibly sought after, and lead to incredibly improbable consequences. On the subject of the first, true silence is atypical enough that most if not all living beings progress through their entire lives without experiencing it. There is a difference between silence and true silence. True silence is an unnerving sensation; experienced only when there isn't another living creature around for miles, whereas silence is something you can enjoy in a local park. At one point or another, most living creatures also spend a good chunk of their time searching for a place where they can get away from the "hustle and bustle" of mainstream society, so they may fulfill some kind of unknown mental need. Those beings can never fully comprehended what true silence is due largely to the fact that only a handful of unfortunate souls throughout the course of human history have been forced to endure it. For you see, dear reader, true silence isn't the absence of noise; rather, it is the cold, lonely, and desolate state of being alone.
The glowing white hot ball of hydrogen and various other gasses called the sun glanced tentatively over the eastern horizon. Its warming rays descended on the ruined landscape. The abandoned husks of skyscrapers and decaying trash towers absorbing the dawn's first light, preventing the heat and light from reaching the damp ground below. As it slowly rose in the sky, the sun's waves redistributed themselves and their intensity grew ferociously. The extreme, unforgiving light began to evaporate the last traces of the previous night's acidic rainstorms.
Thousands of plastic tags, bags, and shreds flapped gently in the damp daybreak breeze, as all natural and paper products had crumbled before the combined might of microbes and prowess of Mother Nature by this point in time. Few of these artifacts were on ground level; most if not all of these peculiar plastics were imbedded in the many obelisks jutting out of the city's ground level. These obelisks, upon further inspection, were towers; vertically ascending structures made out of hundreds upon hundreds of compacted cubes of trash. Throughout the entire abandoned city loomed at least a dozen of the aforementioned towers. Each tower's external surface aflutter and alive with thousands upon thousands of plastic bits flapping in the wind.
However, this quiet, surreal state was shattered by a great resonance felt throughout the city, accompanied by a storm of dull, varying thumps. After five and a half centuries of exposure to the intense elements, in addition to being constructed atop a decrepit water reclamation facility located deep within a superstore mall, the first garbage tower erected became the first to fall. After the concrete floor below the structure expired, the primary weight-bearing support blocks scattered into different component rooms in various directions; with its base gone the entire construct collapsed. While most blocks plummeted internally downwards and became imprisoned in the cavernous bowels of the water treatment facility and the basement of the mall, a good number tumbled outwards, particularly those towards the top of the now deteriorated spire. The blocks that dropped from the upper floors that did not land on or with their lower level counterparts proceeded to hurdle into the cityscape below. Their landings were marked by a series of loud crashes, thwacks, and thumps akin to that of rain; if rain was made of heavy cubes of scrap instead of water. Some of the garbage blocks impacted the streets arbitrarily, while others cracked upon the safety glass of nearby windows; a few with such force that the safety glass actually gave way to the small impromptu projectiles. The "calamity," if the term applies to an abandoned metropolis, lasted for the entirety of fifteen seconds.
After the copious amounts of dust stirred by the collapse began to settle, yet another odd sound echoed throughout the wasteland. A monotonous electrical buzzing originating from a rusted service truck spread outwards from a lofty perch on a fractured highway. The massive metallic door for the rusting truck began to descend slowly, unveiled as the source of the buzzing. Behind the now fully-lowered door stood the only sign of life in the entire city; a squat, cubical robot. The robot's two, slightly oblique, binocular-like eyes slanted outwardly, the lenses centered within shifting, as though adjusting to the light as the lens covers decreased the viewing range to a slit, presumably for magnification. The eyes at the body's peek sat upon on an adjustable metallic stalk, which lowered and stretched ever so slightly, almost as if the robot was straining to see something in the distance. The robot's dual treads kicked into motion, the many gears and intricate parts behind them meshing and operating in-synch to carry the automaton towards the commotion that had occurred inside the city, and away from the now closing storage truck door.
The fine coat of granular dust on the ruined highway adhered to the metallic treads, leaving a noticeably light trail of equally spaced tread marks wherever the robot moved. This trail began at the storage truck's now raised ramp, and grew in length as the machine ground its way towards an unknown destination at an impressive speed. The treads made no noise of protest as they carried their master across the dull landscape. Small debris on the ground, such as decaying aluminum cans and sandy styrofoam containers, were flattened by the contraption's weight.
Eventually, the metal creature arrived at the source of the racket; the megamall, in all of its capitalistic glory. After reaching the end of the asphalt and the beginning of the mall's tiled floor, the cubical mechanic slowly made its way through the boxy rubble. Using the two rectangular steel arms on each side of its body and the three flat "fingers" protruding from the end of the stubby appendages to reallocate some of the garbage boxes that completely blocked its path, the robot led itself on a convoluted tour of the mall, in the hopes of reaching the epicenter of the collapse. After three hours, this tour led the machine into a distant corner of the mall previously unreachable; locked down by Buy n' Large security. Due to the collapse of the garbage construct, however, the once impenetrable electrical barrier protecting this wing of the mall was absent entirely, the generator supplying power for it presumably crushed somewhere in the bowels of the subterranean water reclamation facility. The machine let out an emotion filled "Oooh," from its speakers as the robot's entire pose shifted slightly with its mood. The eyes slanted upwards, the equivalent of a human furrowing their brows when curious about something unknown.
This particular corner of the mall had something that made it unique. Something that made it stand out when compared to anything else the small automaton had ever seen before.
This corner was clean.
Not "clean," in the sense traditional sense of "no garbage," either. This was truly clean; it was sanitary, untouched by the cold hands of time, with dust and decay entirely absent. True cleanliness was unlike anything the robot had ever seen before, as it had lived out its hundreds of years of existence living among the scraps, waste, and remains of a previous civilization long since gone. A low hum was heard as ancient machinery stirred, and more of this strange luminescence appeared above the robot, which looked at the strange, odd-colored, and protruding plastics extending from the external wall above this newly open room. They glowed without the same sanitary feel, for without the electrical "force-field" barrier's protection the assault of foreign microbes was not repulsed. The machine hypothesized that these protruding, glowing symbols above the door were used to garner the attraction of humans and to designate this section as… whatever it was. The light these objects seemed to emit, the robot concluded, fell into the wavelength that humans would designate as "cyan." The newly-deemed cyan light bathed the short machine below it. It was surreal; so surreal, in fact, the small robot considered abandoning this area of the mall to continue his way to the now-ruined tower's base. However, being a machine, the miniscule brick of a robot decide to use logic to solve its dilemma.
According to its logic cores the roof above this given corner would collapse within the time frame of one-and-a-half to two standard hours as a result of the stress the broken garbage tower's remains added weight. Considering this a rare opportunity and knowing that it could revisit the epicenter site of the collapse later, the machine's curiosity got the better of it; it began slowly crawling towards the now open doorway…