Senior System Failure

Until that (almost) unforgettable morning in the daycare pod, the youngling’s pedagogue had operated impeccably and was therefore unremarkable. The humanoid automabot that they all knew as ‘Ralph’ was an old-time pre-apocalypse brand of servopure government technology, a classic model— forever famous for its manufacturer’s warranty, which was good for a cool two million years. The impressionables under the robozoid’s tutelage had just witnessed Ralph spend ten minutes crossing barely seven feet of space. Their preceptor was using a vacubroom to lean on, giving his shuffle-feet-hobble a third leg to awkwardly accomplish three jittering steps forward and two shaky steps back.

All the students sat obediently attached to their desks, wide-eyed with horror.

It was little Kaleesha Kaye who broke the stunned silence. “Where are you going?” she asked the old-timer.

“What!?” Ralph barked back.

Kaleesha asked again, “Where are you go-ing?”

“To the bathroom,” said Ralph, totally freaking out the children.

Even seven-year-olds had been around long enough to know that faculty droids didn’t use bathrooms.

Ralph doddered on toward the boy’s restroom, instead of properly retreating to one of the service stations at the back of their pod.

“Why are you walking so slow?” asked little Janus James.

Ralph stopped and yelled, “What!?”

When Janus felt silent, Kaleesha whined, “Why are you walk-ing like that?”

“Oh, Rover!” Ralph shook his head and spoke in a high-pitched voice. “I’m not walking slow! I’m fine!”

“Who is Rover?” asked a bewildered little girl.

“I think that’s a dog,” offered a confident little boy, confusing the matter more.

“What!?” shouted Ralph.

“You should go to the magnidock,” said a worried little Kaylor Joe.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” said Ralph. “You’re not the boss of me! I’m going to the bathroom!”

Several seven-year-olds squealed when the robozoid wet himself, spraying oil down the front of his vanilla chrome legs. Sludge oozed down Ralph's metallic inner thigh.

The children were young but not stupid. Said one to another, loud enough for them all to overhear, “Something is wrong with him! Servos aren’t supposed to go to the bathroom!”

The word ‘bathroom’ caused another squirt of oil from Ralph’s crotch gears. A child squealed, “Eeewwwww!” All the automabot’s snow-white lower plating was now dripping black.

“It’s broken,” wailed a gobsmacked little girl.

“Servos can’t break!” gushed a flushed little boy.

“Then why does it want to go to the bathroom?”

“And why is it walking funny?”

“And why is it yelling at us?”

“What!?” yelled Ralph. “Are you kids talking about me?”

“No, Ralph,” lied Lucea Lou, who was glaring at their synthetic teacher with dark contempt.

“What time does Bonanza come on?” asked Ralph, again moving forward at the amazing speed of eighteen-yards-an-hour.

“What’s Bonanza?” asked Lando Dan.

“It’s on Channel 11066,” said Ralph, quite confidently. Then he chuckled his good-natured chortle, his You’re-So-Precious chuckle.

“What’s ‘Channel 11066'?” asked an orange boy.

“I think he’s talking about audio-visuals,” said a purple girl.

“What’s that?” asked the baffled boy.

“Antiques,” explained the smart girl.

A gender-fluid child nodded knowingly. They said, “My grandmam collects ‘em too!”

Ralph-the-robozoid suddenly stopped with an abrupt jerk, his fingers flying apart. He dropped the vacubroom, his makeshift cane. He then bent over very, very, veeery slowly. For one particularly scary moment, it appeared as if he was going to go off-kilter and fall flat on his perfect face.

Horrified, Kimtroya Sue shrieked, “What the madcap hell is wrong with him?!”

A mortified blue-green he-they yelped, “He almost fell down!”

The entire class let out a collective gasp. Multiple younglings began to whimper.

A little girl suddenly shouted, “I feel sorry for him!” That caused all the children around her to burst into tears.

Detaching herself from her desk, Kaleesha Kaye jumped up, startling everyone. Running to the vacubroom, she grabbed it up and then gently handed it to Ralph.

“I can do it!” insisted their indignant educator. “I’m not an invalid, you know!” He yelled so loudly at Kaleesha, even her iron resolve broke down, and she began to cry.

Wailing begat more wailing, spreading like some prehistoric disease.

In a series of jerky spurts, Ralph stood up erect again. He wobbled, went rigid, and then remained perfectly still for a solid two minutes. The children's sobbing tapered off to sniffles. Kaleesha returned to her desk, in order to stop its awful beeping. The impressionables were morbidly fascinated by the way their lifelong mentor uncharacteristically became a statue.

Ralph was usually so animated!

The teacher looked around suddenly as if he’d just been teleported to some unfamiliar place. He acted startled, and then Ralph laughed and said, “I forgot where I was going!”

At least thirteen children screamed at the top of their perfect little lungs. Every kid in the daycare pod began bawling hysterically. Even a baby knew that ‘forgot’ was a dirty word! Knowledge was as permanent as perfect health. The only time a person forgot something that they had learned—eeewww!—was when their minds were purposely cognoscaped by awareness architects.

The combined yowlings of one-hundred-twenty-seven younglings was strident enough to eventually bring surly human supervisors, who were shocked to discover the old automabot was malfunctioning.

They gunned Ralph down just outside the boy’s bathroom, slagging him.

His final word was, “What?!”

⚡⚡___________________⚡⚡

An entire class of older model automabots were once infected by what the Behavior Deviancy Agency dubbed ‘synthetic Alzheimer’s syndrome’. The bureaucrats coined such an odd name for the dysfunction because the mecha-affliction was supposedly similar to a pre-apocalyptic disorder called ‘Mad Cow’s Disease,’ a terrible tribulation that destroyed both the memory and the motor functions of poor, unprocessed, unaugmented people.

When the Child Welfare Rehabilitators assessed the damage done to the younglings who had witnessed Ralph’s breakdown, they were appalled. They issued an emergency medical mandate to have awareness architects instigate total mind-wipes of all the students, causing them to forget that entire, awful day in their care-pod. One-hundred-twenty-seven children had their memories erased by caring government representatives, but none of the one-hundred-twenty-seven ever fully trusted old servos ever again.

And every single one of those traumatized children have grown up to become politicians and/or activists, notoriously led by Kaleesha Kaye 1276011533. Kaleesha now heads the multigenerational grassroots organization that advocates the complete annihilation of all "outdated" (old) government servopure technology (even though there have been no further malfunctions in more than fifty years)....

This is the origin story of the rapidly growing #SayWhat movement.

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