Rethinking Life

Barry Bot

Barry Bot was way ahead of his time.  As a boy he gathered this and that and spent hours drawing plans for a mechanical man.  He was quite successful, starting with small crawly things and moving up to bigger hopping things.

He had few friends, however, since everyone thought he was a bit ‘off.’  So Barry learned to stop talking about the things he made out of gears and other metal pieces.  Once he did that, people still left him alone but at least they stopped teasing him about his ‘hobby.’  His parents doted on Barry, thought he was a clever boy, and lavished him with praise.  It didn’t make up for the fact that no one else liked him but it was better than nothing.

When Barry was in his middle teens Carl Rowan moved into his neighborhood.  It turned out that Carl and Barry were the born on the same day, two hours apart.  They became best friends.  Eventually, Barry told Carl about his dream of filling the world with mechanical men.  He expected Carl to leave and never return but Carl thought Barry’s idea was fantastic and asked what he could do to help.

From then on the boys spent all of their free time hammering, welding, nailing and joining parts of other things together.  Carl built shelves from the floor to the ceiling just to hold all of their tiny creations.  He set the larger mechanical pieces in rows on the floor.

After a while, Carl told Barry that they needed a name for the things they were making.  He suggested calling them Bots, after their creator.  Barry blushed and said, “Thank you.  That sounds great.”  While they were working Barry would ask Carl to bring him a bot from the shelf or one from the row on the floor.  When they were busy, he shortened the requests to shelfbot or rowbot.  Carl, being good with words, thought that rowbot sounded  absolutely brilliant. “That’s exactly what we should call them,” said Carl.  “ROBOTS!”   So the boys dropped the ‘row’ and took the first two letters of Carl’s last name and added it to Barry’s full last name and ‘Robots’ were born, giving both boys equal credit.

You might have head a lot of  stories about where robots came from but this is the real one, the one from the very beginning.  This is where robots got their roots.

Carl and Barry became quite wealthy.  Unfortunately, Barry grew an embarrassingly large mustache, which made people ignore him even more.  One day, while out walking, a gale came up unexpectedly.  Even more unfortunately, the wind, caught under Barry’s ungainly facial hair, picked him up and threw him into the fast moving river below.  He was never seen or heard from again.  Officials said that even if he survived the fall, the weight of his wet mustache would have dragged him to the bottom of the river.   Men in the area began shaving the same day.  They also changed the name of the town from Landcaster to Closeshave, to commemorate Barry’s  sad and untimely death from mustache drowning.  Carl, devastated by the loss of his working partner, closed the company they had built together and sold the plans and the rights to the “Robot” name, to the highest bidder.

While Carl became ‘filthy rich’, after the sale, he never forgot those exciting first days, when robots came to life.  He kept several prototypes with him until his final breath. The bots were sad when Carl died and fled to the forest, to avoid capture.  The townspeople believe that Carl’s bots are still living in the forest today and that they are the ones responsible for all of the oil cans, that have gone missing from shops around town.  Every now and then a group of folks will gather a search party and head into the forest.  But no one has ever seen hi m