Blue Sand 02 – Bot
Tink’s cheek was still pressed against something cool and smooth, and she still thought for a split second that it felt wonderfully comfortable, but it definitely was not sand.
One greeny-bluey-gray eye reluctantly peeped from beneath thick pale lashes. Then it popped wide open and was quickly joined in its wide-open-ness by its twin on the other side of her narrow-bridged nose.
She stared along the smooth coolness upon which her cheek rested. It was blue, the same glacier blue of the sand, but this was a single highly-polished expanse of…she didn’t know. Her mind just stuck, ground its gears.
She gazed out across the surface upon which she rested, and bumped into what was stalling out her neurons. Then her brain suddenly fired. The landscape beyond the blue slab slid silently past her eyes.
She and what she lay upon were moving.
Tink sat bolt upright and looked around. She was on a long rectangular slab, facing the back of a large crawler bot, which methodically tracked toward a slowly-opening entrance at the base of a sheer cliff.
She could hear the blue sand skishing beneath the bot’s treads, but she felt no translated vibrations.
The bot was a totally different thing than JR Red. Instead of the fairly small hovering…and now missing…mechanical companion, this bot was nothing more than a silvery satin-finished mechanical cube. It was featureless, or at least the parts of it Tink could see were featureless.
It pulled the shiny blue platform via an extension which seemed to sprout from just above its lower edge, and the end connected to the slab seemed to have melted and blended into the smooth blueness.
“Ummmm . . . Hello?” she called out, just in case, like JR Red, it could interpret her vocal soundwaves and respond. “Where are you taking me?”
Nothing.
That feeling of dread under which she had cowered before dropping into exhausted sleep, roared back into her mind. What if she was being taken away for processing as some kind of beach flotsam…or for fodder in some Deathstar trash compactor or something?
In a sort of mindless semi-panic, she scrambled off the sled and ran.
About a hundred yards away she stopped, turned and looked back. Nothing was changed. The bot’s slow pulling of the rectangular blue slab toward the tunnel mouth had not altered.
She was glad that it had not apparently noticed that she had jumped from the sled, because the opening at the base of the cliff was now nearly half way open. The bot had just kept on moving in a straight line toward the gaping darkness.
I might not be trash, Tink irrationally decided, there might be something usfeul inside the cliff. So she ran to catch up with the sled jumped back onto the slab, noting that when she landed, she felt no impact.
Was she even awake?
The bot continued without detectable change toward the cliff.
She jumped back off.
The bot kept on as it had been keeping on.
It was rapidly approaching the huge opening in the rock wall now. Tink walked alongside for a short distance, but then suddenly jogged forward, to come abreast of the bot.
The bot stopped, frozen in place.
The massive door began to slide shut again.
“Uh-oh. That’s connected with me?” she wondered, aloud, as she usually did. “But which part? The bot stopping, or the cliff door freaking out?”
One nearly invisible brow raised quizzically, and she backed away from the bot. The big silvery cube remained frozen. However, the big door began to slide open again.
She was close enough now that she could hear an incongruously soft sighing sound, presumably made by whatever powered the massive stone’s movement. It seemed to come from deep within a huge tunnel, behind the cliff walls. She could feel its power thrumming through the soles of her shoes.
She walked back toward the bot…and the door stopped. She stopped.
The silver cube-shaped bot suddenly extruded an appendage from its lower edge, which immediately began snaking toward her.
“Uh-oh!” she squealed, decidedly uneasy about the mysterious ‘tools’ now sprouting from the end of the appendage.
Once again driven by the overwhelming dread, she raced inland from the the beach…away from the peculiar bot…away from that odd sheeting wash of pale liquid slipping across blue sand to finally edge the surf with pale patterns of moving colored light.
As she sprinted, she fully expected to be tripped up by the extension from the bot. She almost made it to a jumble of steel blue boulders at the edge of the blue sand.
Almost.
Tinkian Motion 