One Word Prompts 2020

Radio - All Things Shall Perish

A song echoed over the wastelands. It drifted over the remains of fallen buildings long overgrown in winding ivy. Over mounds of rusted scrap decaying to dirt and sprouting with clover and blackberry, it wafted. Carried by gentle winds over the graveyard of humanity, a human voice rang clear and bright.

But no human feet tread over the cracking concrete roads. No human eyes watched the rising dawn and no human eyes closed again with its setting.

Yet a human song played on anyway.

"All things shall perish from under the sky," sang the voice of a woman long dead.

Through the lonely world, a single humanoid figure wandered, metallic hands rummaging through scrap pile after scrap pile, bronze legs carrying her tirelessly onward.

She was the last robot.

Why she'd been built she didn't know. She didn't know what purpose a robot with a radio for a head might have served. But, in truth, it did not matter to her. Her creators were gone. Whatever role they had envisioned for her hardly mattered now.

She pressed aside a patch of poison oak with one hand, careful to avoid snapping any of the branches. With the other she brushed aside the dirt beneath it, to reveal a small pile of trash. She scanned through it as the next line of the song played from her speakers, "Music alone shall live, music alone shall live."

She didn't see any cassette tapes in this pile, which was too bad. But there was no end to the piles of forgotten relics and she was in no hurry. There was no inherent meaning to her quest after all. There was no pressing reason to collect cassettes containing the voices of ghosts. Sure, she could not speak without them, but there was also no other human to converse with.

And it wasn't as if the world was silent without the millions of human voices. The birds sang as ever. The squirrels chittered from their burrows. Wolves howled. The wind whistled. Rivers babbled. Storms roared.

Life continued on with or without them, just as beautiful. Just as strong.

But there was a beauty in human voices too. A beauty she was loath to let die if she could do something to help it.

So, she straightened and continued on. Continued to the next pile, eagerly awaiting the treasures she'll uncover next. Eagerly looking to the next beautiful ruin, the next reclaimed jewel.

She continued on, the last lines of her song playing with hope and resolve from her tireless speakers, "Music alone shall live, never to die."