Little Priya's Room

Rajesh couldn't move. This was one of those unpleasant dreams.  He was stuck somewhere between consciousness and sleep, his body frozen, his mind aware and yet susceptible to hallucinations. He had long suffered from chronic sleep paralysis. Long enough to know that resistance was futile. And yet he tried to struggle his way free for quite a while before he finally calmed down.

He found himself staring at the alphabet, painted years ago on his daughter’s wall. The letters looked old and faded now. The letters A, D and E had almost vanished. This was only in his dream. The real letters, he remembered, still glistened as if they’d just been painted. He was glad his dream had at least picked his daughter’s room as its setting. This was a nice place to be, even in a bad dream.

He realized he was sitting on the chair next to his daughter’s bed. The five year old slept blissfully just beyond his sight. He felt a sudden longing to see her face, but still couldn't move, no matter how hard he tried. Eventually he gave up trying and closed his eyes thinking that maybe if he could calm down enough he could go back to sleep.

There was a sound nearby.  A rustle of the bed sheets.

Rajesh opened his eyes. It seemed his daughter had woken up. Listening closely, he heard her pour herself a glass of water from the jar he kept on her bed-stand.

He noticed something odd. He was so used to how his daughter moved around that he could practically see her moving through the sounds she made. Even without looking. But right now, he couldn't see her. What he was hearing were slow and calculated movements of someone definitely more than five years old.

This was not his daughter. He could tell.

Rajesh panicked, forgetting in an instant that he was in a dream. Desperately, he tried to move his head towards the bed, grunting in his mind, straining against the grip of immobility, till finally, the shackles broke. As his head turned, his prying eyes found the person on the bed. It was a girl, no more than fourteen years of age. She was staring back at him, looking extremely rattled. He noticed her hands were trembling. He tried to say something but his tongue wouldn't budge. He shook his head in exasperation. The girl shrieked.

She ran out of the room screaming for her grandmother. Once again unable to move, Rajesh waited, helplessly staring at the bed. An eternity later he heard voices outside the door.

“Okay, calm down now,” said a familiar voice, “here…”

Click. The lights came on.

“The doll moved Grandma! It was staring right at me,” the girl said between sobs.

Rajesh heard footsteps approaching him. “The head’s come loose I guess.” He knew this voice. So when the woman took his head in her hands, and turned it to face her, he already knew he was going to come face to face with his mother.

“It’s such a ghastly doll. Wait…”

With some effort his mother turned the chair around, away from the bed.

“I’ll sleep here tonight, okay? Tomorrow we’ll move the doll to the attic.”

On the wall, at which he was now staring, Rajesh saw his portrait, decorated with a garland. Both the portrait and the plastic garland wore the dust of years gone by. The dust of nine long years. 

The awakening

XWE 2 woke up with a start, staring into the darkness without any thought or memory. Then something whirred into life at the back of his head and his memories came back, some of them like nightmares in the way they shook his digital soul. The 14 years of darkness... the war that never really went away. The dying gasps of the planet seemed to ring in his ears again. The planet had survived apparently. But so had the darkness. 

A series of panicky beeps emanated from his chest. His powercore was about to drain out completely. This meant that he’d been asleep for centuries. He looked around. Absolute darkness. He switched on his Third Eye. The power drained faster now. He quickly took a look around before shutting it off. There was a dead XWE lying not far from him, chest caved in, face torn from head. Because the XWE had died, his powercore would not have drained much. If XWE 2 acted fast, there was a way he could save his own life.

XWE 2 made his way to the metal carcass. A few seconds later, the dead robot’s powercore was in his hand. He hesitated. After he’d removed his own powercore he’d have a precious few moments before he was immobilised forever. He’d have to be precise with his movements down to the last millimetre, and really quick.

Click.

Darkness grew around his eyes... before...

CLICK.

With a hearty whir XWE 2 was up again. He switched on all his light sources and soon figured out he was inside a cave. He had to get out and see what had become of his planet. He wondered if he’d find it just as it had been before, dark and abundant, drenched in life forming metal. He remembered the sulphur rains he loved to watch from inside the safety of his pod. He hoped his pod was still intact somewhere out there.

Soon, XWE 2 had blasted an opening through a weak part of the cave wall. He collapsed onto the ground as blinding light fried his visual sensors. He switched to auxillary, taking a moment to adjust to the assault of light. Cautiously, he made his way out and found himself at the bottom of a canyon. He stood up to peer over the top of the escarpment. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. There, in front of this eyes were scenes from the fabled Age of Humanity. Blue skies, brown soil, trees... They were real. The first of the creators were the humans. This he knew.

Right in front of him was a cave, bleeding blue light into the golden of the sun. He stared at it in fear and anticipation, until he saw what he was so fervently hoping to see.

A small boy walked out with a dog. As the dog started barking, the boy and the Robot stared at each other. And there was no way to tell whose eyes held more wonder.