Futurism logo

One Man's Trash...

By Shanelle DeJournettPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
Like
(I do not own this image. It was taken from CNET.com)

Amid the bustle of the market, the flurry of skirts and legs and tails, was trash. It littered the streets, and like cholesterol in a humanoid's artery, sometimes it blocked off entire alleyways, dumpsters hidden so far beneath the detritus that not even the arachnarats could nest there. That didn't mean, however, that they wouldn't glut themselves on the bountiful feast and nesting fodder that the passersby carelessly tossed. It was somewhere amid that mess of debris that an odd sort of life blinked in to existence, one moment there and in the next...

It was two days prior that the building to the right just above the pile of refuse shuddered with an explosion and a discordant symphony of wracking coughs and slamming windows echoed through the narrow space as heads poked out in search of air.

"What in Vlargr's name was that?" hissed a slit-eyed Reptiloid, blinking his nictitating membrane and flaring his red neck ruff. A human one floor above and slightly to the left of him wiped her streaming eyes and frowned, opened her mouth to speak, and went straight in to a coughing fit.

"I reckon it's the mad man," said a cool, slurping voice. Below them, a being with the head of an octopus pointed a tentacle up past their heads to a man who was silently succumbing to hysterics, face gray from whatever had exploded in his face and window streaming vibrant lavender smoke. He disappeared from the window for a moment only to return and throw something at the building across the way. The small metal mechanism bounced with a bright ting and dropped to the pile below.

After some shouted complaints at the mad man, people ducked back in to their apartments and closed their windows once more.

It came as no surprise to the people in the adjacent building when early that next morning, there was a corresponding bang in their own complex. A four-eyed Scorpius adjusted her glasses that were knocked askew by the swaying of the building and came to her window to glare up at the one making the racket. Other heads popped out, and she found the scene reminiscent of the ground vultures in the Garthak galaxy that liked to nip at your heels when you walked past their burrows. The cyborg responsible very coldly regarded them and then looked across the alley at the mad man who was smiling in a gloating manner. Their rivalry made no sense to their onlookers, but they had been trying to one-up each other for a couple of years. No one ever knew what it was they were trying to make or why it seemed to almost exclusively involve small, medium, or large explosions, but they just grumbled and carried on about their day because the rent was cheap and it was an unspoken understanding that at least the inventors provided entertainment.

The cyborg civilly dropped something out of its window and with a nod to its neighbors, closed it's window and went back in to its laboratory.

It was these two occurrences, the dropping of two failed experiments and then the shuffling of arachnarats and other scavenging creatures that pushed those metal parts closer and closer together until that day when they clicked together amid the press of garbage and blinked to life. Looking around itself, the small being was unimpressed with the mess and its companions who craned their little furred necks to peek at it. With a sigh, the little robot rocked itself until it could roll down from the pile and off on to the sidewalk where it sat and watched the people walk by.

It was a little girl that saw the robot and picked it up. The robot blinked, making the little girl smile. Her mother raised an eyebrow, but said not a word, thinking that this would keep the girl quiet for a time. The little girl pressed her face very close to the robot's and asked in a sweet, soft voice what the robot's name was. The robot could only blink confusedly, not having yet grasped what "name" meant. And so the little girl smiled and held it close and whispered, "I will name you and you will be Kuri." And so it was.

Kuri and the little girl spent a lot of their time together, the girl teaching Kuri all about her old home world, though she had never visited, and how her grandmother had been sucked up in to a one-way vortex on a planet called Earth somewhere over a place called Bermuda. She explained all of these things to Kuri and Kuri listened and patiently took notes in its database.

When the little girl grew up, she began to tinker with machinery and it was a happy day when she made Kuri a companion. And then she made another one, a bigger one. And another slightly bigger one. Until she was producing Kuris and giving them away. Kuri became a new thing, an assistant for the busy people. Kuri helped tell stories to children after they were tucked in at night. It helped keep track of pets and children when parents weren't always able to keep an eye on them. It answered questions about the weather and a whole assortment of other little things that made life a little easier for everyone.

The little girl, now a young woman, came to realize that she could make a connection, however small, with her home planet by lending them a helping hand. She calculated and hypothesized and narrowed until finally she thought she'd figured out which space quadrant her grandmother had come from and she packed away the schematics for Kuri in a tight space-proof container. With a kiss to the tube and a smile to her Kuri who watched on with delight, the young woman fired off the small projectile containing the plans right in to space. She watched the tube fly away, like a beautiful shooting star until it was just a pinprick of light against the dark sky and then finally gone.

The tube traveled for years and years, ping-ponging through asteroid fields and being swallowed by black holes, but as though fate were a guiding hand, the tube hit the Earth's atmosphere somewhere in the early 2000s of their timeline. It fell and landed right smack where it needed to be, in to the hands of a curious inventor who smiled and rolled up their sleeves. It was a task to decipher and get the proper materials, but when they finally succeeded, Kuri sat before them, smiling with delight. And so it was that Kuri came to be on Earth, always ready to assist with a twinkle in the eye.

#KuriStory #HeyKuri

science fiction
Like

About the Creator

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.