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Mike awoke to the sound of his alarm going off, even though it was a Saturday.
As he sat up in bed and leaned over to hit the snooze, the alarm stopped just before he could reach it at the same time that the large overhead lights came on.
By the time he pulled his head back beneath the covers to shield his burning eyes the lights flickered off, but now his radio was coming in and out and blaring screeching static at top volume.
Mike quickly stood, threw his bed sheets aside, and waddled across the cold metallic floor to shut off his radio. It was silenced for a moment but came on again, and it took Mike unplugging the whole machine from the wall to cease its bleating.
He rubbed his sore eyes and looked back at his clock: it read 4:39 BMST ( Blue Marble Standard Time ), but considering how it just malfunctioned and set off the alarm all on its own, the time was unreliable. Hell, it could have very well been seven in the afternoon; all Mike knew was that whenever it was, it was too damn early to be dealing with this nonsense.
He wondered what it could be that was setting off all of his things. Maybe it was Tom and Crow, but he remembered that April Fools’ Day was three months ago and that the bots would never wake up this early on a weekend; so that idea was scrapped. Maybe they were just in a rough patch of space, but a quick glance out the tiny bedroom window showed that the atmosphere was as dark and smooth as always. Then, it had to be a breach in the electrical system of the ship, or something else of that nature…
One of the overhead bulbs flickered on, fizzled off, then blew, sending little shards of glass over the floor and leaving Mike in near darkness.
No matter what the problem was, now it was personal; and as the captain of the Satellite of Love, he needed to get it taken care of.
Mike searched around in the darkness and found a utility lamp amongst his emergency kit he kept stashed under his bed, then started it up and ventured into the hallway. The lights were on but were weak and flickered some as he walked through the corridors of the SOL. It was definitely eerie, and it scared him more than he would have liked to admit.
The hallway he was in was the one that held all their bedrooms. Mike considered sneaking right past the other rooms to begin his search for the disturbance, but he had to make sure the bots were alright before going too far, and he didn’t want them to be just as scared as he was and not be able to find him if they needed him.
The first door he came to was Crow’s. Mike knocked lightly, but didn’t get an answer. He knocked again, but still nothing. Calling Crow’s name didn’t earn him a response, either. He opened the door just a little and peered into the room, and saw Crow sound asleep in bed. The blaring alarms, flashing lights, screeching of his TV, and whirring of the blender didn’t seem to wake him up; and Mike wasn’t going to, either, just to worry him. He shut the door softly and left Crow to his slumber, the bot snoring away amidst the chaos.
The second door was Tom’s. Mike knocked just a few times, but was immediately answered with the door opening in front of him. He looked around and saw no one, then remembered he had to look down; Tom Servo stood at the door, glaring up at his human shipmate. He had a little white robe pulled around his mechanical torso, a black sleep mask that pulled over where his forehead would probably be, a little sleeping cap placed on top of his head, and a thin layer of white facial cream smeared on the front of his dome
“Mike! What do you want, at this ungodly hour?” Tom said, his arms shaking by his side as his body emoted anger.
“Well, Tom, I was just checking on you,” Mike said, peering around the door into Tom’s room. His lights were flashing just the same. “I got woken up by some awful noises, and I wanted to make sure you guys were alright before I went around trying to find out what was causing all the ruckus.”
“Oh yes, the noise. And the lights. It’s a good thing you showed up, buddy, because I’ve got a few choice words for you as to what I think about all this mess! First it woke me up from my beauty sleep, and then, oh you’ll never believe it, Mike. Last night I went to bed, after having carefully washed and organized and hanged my underwear collection on my chainsaw to dry, and let me tell you that I woke up to the sound of shredding fabric, and what do you know: my chainsaw was on! And all my underwear was gone…”
Tom shook his body, causing one if his non-functional arms to bounce off of his torso. It made a little clinking noise that implied a snap.
“...in a flash, just like that, Mike. So, what I’ve got to say to you is how do you expect a man to keep an underwear collection under these conditions, if they’re just gonna get ripped to bits in the night, huh? Hmmmm?”
“I’m sorry about your underwear, Tom, I’ll get you some new pairs, and sorry about your sleep. I just wanted to know you were alright.”
“Well, for your information, mister, I’m not just alright . I’m feeling peachy dang keen right now! And the only thing that could make this night even better is for my lamps to stop flickering, my chainsaw to stop revving, and my skin to be as silky sweet and smooth as a baby’s bottom!”
“Alright, Tom. I can tackle the first two, but I don’t want to get involved on the latter. I’ll go and, uh, try and work this whole thing out, with the lights and all.”
Tom only hummed, turned, and hovered as sassily as a robot could back into his room, before the door was slammed behind him. Mike didn’t slam the door, and Tom didn’t have any functional arms to even reach it. But then, how did Tom open the door in the first place?
Mike’s head already hurt, and now he was asking himself too many questions. He needed to just relax and get on with his hunt for the source of the disturbance.
The third and final room in the hallway was GPC’s, but Mike didn’t even make it to the door before he met the cold steel floor face first. He got up and brushed himself off before looking down to find long black tubes covering the floor; one segment led into GPC’s room, while another led down the rest of the hallway and through a door. Mike peered into GPC’s room for a moment, but all he could see through the flashing bedroom lights was a jumbled mess of tubes interspersed between messy pink blankets.
Then, Mike felt a tickle on his foot. He looked down to see that the tubes at his feet were moving, clattering in a tangle across the floor as they followed the path down the hall and out the door. What was GPC doing up at this hour?
Mike carefully stepped over GPC’s tubing and followed the black material down the hall, out the door, and through backways and hidden passages inside the SOL he didn’t even know existed. After what felt like an hour of squeezing through secret tunnels, calling out for GPC with no response, and climbing down no less than three dusky air vents, Mike found himself in what he assumed was the illusive “basement”. It was dark, dirty, and full of pure junk. With what little light he had to see, it looked like GPC’s tubes snaked atop a mound of dirty laundry and collected newspapers that had to be twice his height; he had half a mind to just ditch it all and try to go back to sleep, but he saw a flash of a familiar headlight from behind the pile and heard the clanking of metal parts. And then he heard… crying?
Oh, no. Not a man nor thing makes GPC cry. Mike Nelson was back on the case.
“GPC? You, uh, alright?” He called, and heard a further rustle of metallic-on-metallic noise.
“Mike? What are you doing down here? It’s dangerous, don’t’cha know?” GPC called back, sounding nervous.
Mike started to traverse the mound, finding footholds in fuzzy socks and the Great Gazette.
“Well, G-P, it’s just as dangerous up there! All the lights keep flashing on and off, and my alarm kept ringing, and my radio went wild, and I can’t sleep, and neither can the boys… actually, it’s just, uh, Crow who can sleep, Tom and I can’t…”
“Oh, Mike, I’m sorry! I thought if I came down here, then I… I wouldn’t disturb you all.”
“What are you talking about, GPC?”
As Mike mounted the peak of the pile, he finally saw GPC: she was curled up in a coiled, knotted mess of tubes and wires, and had a screwdriver hanging out of the corner of her mouth like a cowboy’s cigarette. Her flickering headlamp illuminated the area well enough to see so Mike sat his own lamp down and came to her side, kneeling next to her.
“What happened, G-P?” He asked, looking over the mess of tools and pamphlets and paperwork she had made around her. One book was titled ‘Robots for Dummies’, another was ‘Untangle Yourself: The Power of A Woman In Order’, and there were stacks of blueprints and mock-ups of GPC with drawings and notations in another man’s handwriting. To Mike and his robotically-incapable brain, it was barely decipherable into English from whatever technological language it had been scribed in. And he couldn’t even tell what half of the tools she had accumulated could have been for, because they didn’t resemble the standard wrench and hammer of the everyman’s tool box. What he could deduce of the situation was that she was trying to repair herself, but it wasn’t working out as she had planned.
“Well, at first I was asleep, and I was having this wonderful dream where I was dancing, and I was dancing on real, actual legs! At first it was a waltz, then it picked up into the tango, and then it was the polka! And then I was square dancing, and then I woke up, and…” GPC looked at her tangled body and sighed.
“Looks light you might have been tying square knots in your sleep, too, huh?” Mike joked, which earned a little laugh from the robot before him.
“Yeah, but that’s not it, Mike! I panicked! First it was one little knot, but when I tried to get out of it, I made a wrong left turn, and before I knew it there were two! But the more twists and ties I took, the tighter they got! Then, I think I pinched a nerve, because the lights started getting all weird, and then my back started killing me, and then I got this crazy tooth ache like you wouldn’t believe!”
“You probably cut off some wires and tubes inside of your body from all that rustling, and since you’re connected to the ship, that must be what’s affecting all the lights and the alarms,” Mike pulled out of thin air, but from the look on GPC’s face, he must have been onto something. “Why didn’t you come to me? I would’ve helped you out, y’know.” Mike started inspecting GPC’s body as he spoke. He picked up one length of tube and it shuddered in his hand, then slithered through his grasp like a snake.
“I know, I know, but I didn’t want to wake the boys, Mike. You know how grumpy they can get if they don’t get their beauty sleep -- especially Tom!” When she raised her voice, the screwdriver rattled to the floor.
“Oh, I know, girl. But still, you shouldn’t take matters into your own hands when you don’t have any. I would’ve done my best to help then, and that’s what I’m gonna do now, okay?”
“Okay...”
Slowly, Mike stood, as did GPC, and they started to attempt to uncurl her knotted tubing. They started with the loosest ones first, and each time a bundle was loosened GPC let out a sigh of relief and her headlamp flashed in time. Mike would hold GPC’s tubing and she would rush inside of a loop, then come out the other side and the bind would come undone, then both him and her would turn and swing past each other once again to retrace GPC’s steps to getting unstuck. Mike swore he did a pirouette at some point, and almost tripped on his own feet doing the box step around GPC’s long body.
At some points GPC said she felt better -- her back pain went away, her toothache disappeared, and she could stretch her mechanical muscles once again.
After what felt like another hour of just untying GPC, Mike stood, exhausted, with a length of the tubing thrown over his shoulders behind his neck, his hands holding one end at waist height and the other to his chest. GPC was swaying with him, humming still and moving her head in rhythm with her trills.
“How do you feel now, G-P?” Mike asked, doing his best to keep time.
“I think we got them all,” she said, sounding much happier now than she did earlier.
“And I don’t hear any more alarms going off, and your eye isn’t flickering anymore. How about we get ourselves back to bed, huh? You deserve another good dream after having to deal with all this.”
GPC silently agreed and turned herself toward the mound of laundry, then effortlessly slithered over the top of it. Mike tried to follow close behind, looping the excess of GPC’s tubes over his shoulder as he clamboured over the pile.
They both went through the vents, around the bends, and up the stairs until they were met with the sleeping quarters. Mike had accumulated six more loops of tubing around his neck, which he threw down as gently as he could onto GPC’s bed. As he did, GPC whacked Mike in the forehead with her large mouth and gave him a kiss. Of course it didn’t feel like one, it felt like getting hit in the face with a big piece of cold, repurposed plastic; but the sentiment that was carried with it made Mike smile through the bruising anyway.
“Oh, thank you, thank you again Mike!” GPC said, coiling herself into bed on top of her long body. “I promise I won’t get tangled up again tonight.”
“Alright, well, you get some sleep, now,” Mike said, pulling the blanket up so that it covered GPC’s body. “G’night, G.”
“Night, Mike!”
Mike shut off the now stable light in GPC’s room and returned to his own down the hall, and would have fallen straight in to bed if it weren’t for the broken glass still covering his floor. With a quick sweep of the room the glass was gone, and Mike flung himself into his bed, curling up with his teddy bears and beneath his own blankets.
He would replace the broken light bulb when he woke up later on that day. Right now, he just wanted to go back to sleep.
When he finally went under, Mike dreamt of dancing.