And so another installment of Memories is completed! Thank you all for reading and reviewing!
NOTE: WENDI, as you all very well know, is not mine. She belongs to gothicorca1895.
Part I: Echoes of the Past
Chapter I: Seven Years Later
For the former passengers of the BnL executive starliner, they day had started normally enough.
The dawn came, pink as always, over the twisted metal tops of the ruined city beyond the landing site, bathing ring after ring of sprouting vegetation in beams of gold and fuchsia light as the sun struggled to ascend the still-clouded skies of the wounded planet. The wind from the nightly sandstorms had quieted, and the first-awakened humans could pull the emergency pins keeping their doors shut and walk out for the first time into their fresh, dew-covered ground, bathing their bare feet in the damp, chilly earth. For a people who had never seen the surface of the land they hailed from, this was a beautiful sight...but not one they could enjoy for long.
Within a few hours of the daybreak the work began. Every human had some part of the "green rings" to tend to, as was expected of them by the Captain and starliner officials, in order to keep the recolonization of Earth constantly going forward. These tiny sprouts were the only hope the planet had, the only way the humans could continue to live here and never have to set foot in space again. Throughout the day they would take shifts pruning, watering, planting, inspecting, replanting, sampling, and irrigating the vast acres of foliage; when they were not farming they were making trips to the city ruins, salvaging what they could use to keep the colony itself from collapsing. Surprisingly, the Ultra Stores that had been built over 700 years ago still held up the old Buy N Large tag-line to this very day: they did indeed have all the humans needed, and so much more.
Things inside the Axiom itself had not settled either, despite the ship's obsolescence. True, the humans did not need the resources provided by the automated crew; they did not need most of the robots who had served them for centuries anymore. However, the ship remained in operation, and it still stood regally in the center of the human colony, on it's home port. Today, it serves as a museum and resort, providing exhibits about the past and history of the ship, the history of Buy N Large, and (to most) as a lasting reminder that what had happened 700 years in the past must never be repeated.
On most days, the Axiom was packed with visitors. Children ran amok through the crowds as their parents chased clumsily after them, still wobbly on their weakened, flabby legs. Eager treble voices drilled deeper, mature ones about the many exhibits on display, followed by the sighs of both: the children glad their own life isn't nearly as sedentary, and from the adults, who only wished they hadn't been so pitiful. On the outer fringes of the crowd, tall, white SECUR-Ts kept the activity levels down to a safe level and made sure the traffic kept moving in order to lessen the damage caused by so many people in such a limited area.
"Mama, Papa! Over here!"
A young, seven-year-old child darts from a mass of idle adults, making a beeline for a particular exhibit roped off in the middle of the floor. It doesn't seem like much more than a glass case, standing freely next to the diving board of one of the Lido Deck's main pools, but upon closer inspection the boy managed to make out a mess of shattered glass and metal, strewn in random places all over the floor of the case. Screwing his freckled face up, he leaned a little over the ropes just as his parents, a large man with short, blonde hair and a woman with a red ponytail sticking up from the back of her head approached from behind, panting with the effort of chasing after their hyperactive child.
"Don't lean so far over the bastions, Jeremy," the woman chided gently, grabbing the back of his jumpsuit to put some distance between the display and the boy's eager face. "You're only going to excite those stiff old Stewards milling about here."
"What's this a display of, Mama?" Jeremy's brow furrowed a bit as he looked to his parents. "It kinda looks...broken."
"It's the ship's first mate," the man answered, laying a hand across the boy's backside. "They called him GO-4. He was the right-hand guy...or bot, I guess...for the Captain himself, and was usually the first to hear about anything that went on in the decks below."
"But then...why is he broken?"
The blonde man sighed, rubbing his fleshy chin. "When the autopilot rebelled...GO-4 tried to help him. He was knocked out of the bridge window when Captain McCrea tried to silence him." He cast his blue eyes down at the twisted heap. "Good riddance, too..."
"John, don't say that!"
The woman leaned to scold her husband, when suddenly, the crowd parted and grew silent, and the family turned to see what all the commotion was about.
"It's them!"
"Why, they've never come so early...I wonder what the matter is..."
"Clear the way, you idiot! Can't you see they're trying to get through?"
As the last few people moved to the side, John, Jeremy, and Mary finally caught sight of "them". Moving slowly through the mid-morning crowd in the Axiom's Lido Deck were none other than Wall-E and EVE themselves, the praised saviors of the human race and the ones who had helped the Captain found a successful human colony amidst all of the destruction. Wedged between them was a smaller, green-eyed robot who hovered like EVE, yet was gold in color and almost blocky enough to qualify as a sort of refined Wall-E unit; staring worriedly up at EVE as the white probe continued on her way and Wall-E trundled faithfully beside her.
Despite the cheerful atmosphere of the humans pressing in on her from all sides, EVE kept her gaze downward and stern, refusing to look even Wall-E or her daughter in the face as she continued across the floor of the Axiom's main area. As much as she would have normally wanted to take part in the merriment (as she usually did when she came to the ship...as a human had nodded earlier that she and Wall-E were not strangers here), this time the white probe had a purpose in mind...a directive, dare she call it; though a temporary one.
She had to get to the bridge.
Things had not gone well in the night for EVE; in fact, the things that she had experienced last night at the height of the moon still troubled her even as she reviewed them in her database now. During her dormant mode, a sudden, strong memory had chosen to rise up from her repression and startle her awake, and ever since that had happened she had been turning the concept over and over again in her mind, trying to make sense of why something like this would happen...and why at such an odd hour. The harsh look she had set her luminous blue eyes into was merely a front to keep her real fear from showing through; she was at her most vulnerable at the moment and the last thing the probe wanted was human pity. She came for answers, not sentiment, and as the crowd finally thinned and halted right at the entrance to the bridge, EVE finally stopped and turned to her faithful companions.
"Wall-E."
The squat trash compactor cocked his goggles up towards EVE's LED screen, the bars above his lenses springing up at the sound of her voice. He whistled in response, though her look remained unchanged and she pointed at his chest, then at the bot clinging to his arm.
"WENDI."
Wall-E nodded in comprehension, laying a dirt-caked shovel across his daughter's backside as EVE finally pointed to the ground before turning to the glass double-doors of the bridge. The gold bot, WENDI, whimpered and called out, but EVE simply turned and pointed to the ground again, keeping her stern gaze. Wall-E gurgled his concern, and tightened his grip on the girl, watching as the doors slid shut behind EVE and the humans began to press in on him.
"What's wrong, Wall-E?"
"She's not letting you go in?"
"Well, of course not. She's Axiom-class, he's not. Simple hierarchy."
"They're robots, not wolves. She just doesn't want him to come along. Don't you think she has the concept of privacy?"
"Don't worry, WENDI...your mama will be back."
Wall-E nodded, pulling WENDI close to him as the crowd grew tighter around him. He moaned in protest...ever since his accident with the ship's holodetector, Wall-E had never been comfortable with tight spaces. The humans should realize that, he mused, but all he could do at the moment was hunker down and hope that eventually...
"Enough."
Suddenly, the crowd gasped and quieted, the area around Wall-E suddenly being bathed in a dim, eerie red light as a slight, pneumonic hiss emanated from behind. WENDI's emerald eyes grew wide as the red light grew brighter, this hissing closer, and the humans finally spreading outward from their claustrophobic formation.
For hovering only a few feet above the trash-compactor's head, a large, black-and-white robot had descended from a track in the ceiling, his inner workings twitching slightly behind a visage that looked strikingly similar to that of a ship's wheel.
AUTO had arrived.