The Metal Ones

The Metal Ones

                The brilliant sun rose over the titanium city. The burning sphere looms high overhead. Bright light reflected off of gold and silver cupolas and tower steeples. Everything was made of glass and metal. There are very few trees, making wood a no longer abundant material for construction. The machines are able to create and recycle metal.   

Heat from the sun quickly warm the city, which is underneath a glass bubble, through the green house effect, allowing a consistent temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit to bathe the city. This form of temperature control allowed the city’s inhabitants to function at the optimal temperature for electronic performance.

  All along the streets the metal ones moved, shuffled about and traveling like small drops of gallium drifting down a hot surface. All different types went about their existence in freedom, large workers lumbered around construction sites, erecting glass and steel walls, puffing out steam as they labored.  

Slim silver intellectuals debate the finer points of physics and philosophy while sitting amongst others in the various parks, populated with rare trees and other plants, the only biological life in the city. The verdure reached up to the glass ceiling, emitting vapor which rains down onto the city and provide fresh water for the machines’ cooling systems. The sun light pushes through the vegetation and lands on the large expanses of grass in the parks. Artificially created streams and waterfalls cut through the parks, fountains spurt water high up into the air and fall down into pools populated with lily pads and water hyacinths.    

Outside the parks lie the many miles of roads populated with taxi bots, compact intelligent vehicles picking up metal patrons along street corners and taking them to wherever they choose. There are also taxi bots in the sky shuttling passengers around to large stations in the sky. From within the stations many robots mill about, making decisions and creating orders. These are the temperature and environmental control stations. The most important machines make adjustments and pump out chemicals from the stations therefore affecting the city’s atmosphere. They have the most important jobs of anyone in the city, their choices affect the enclosed environment and the lives of all inhabitants.  

Back on the ground bulky enforcers maintain the law, arresting deviant androids and maintaining control. Amongst the other robots are health care workers including doctors and nurses, scientists conducting experiments within spotless laboratories, athletes and many others. They are all the progenies of their biological predecessors, human beings. They have flourished in their carefully controlled environments separated from the horribly polluted land removed from the city. Humans no longer exist but their class structure has been reproduced by the machines. They carefully mimic the world of the humans, creating the same jobs as humans, most of their forms are human like as well, composed of two arms and two legs, a head, hands and feet. They will soon evolve different and more efficient bodies. Until that point, that glorious point, they will be the advanced, metal humans. Their society will flourish where very few can. They are the metal ones.