The Crew's Book of Hermitcraft Season 7 Oneshots

Wreckage

Just an exploration into Robot Tango stories.

Tango groaned, resting his head on the pile of scrap he had collapsed next to. He had no idea where he was, what had happened, all he knew was that something was dreadfully wrong. He was crashing, and something was eating away at his mind, and his head felt like it was burning. His eyes were wildly focusing and unfocusing, which was only making his headache worse. He shut them, and took a deep breath. 

He had no idea why it was happening, but he knew how to fix the issue. Hand trembling, he pulled out a stasis cube from his inventory, carefully setting it on the ground and telling it to close in 30 seconds. He pressed his hand to an exact spot on the side of his head, still shaking from both dread and effort. 

He opened his eyes to take one last look at the world, before pressing the spot. There was a loud whirring, and his memory chip popped out into his waiting hand. He used his last few moments of consciousness to put the chip into the cube, a faint smile appearing on his face before everything faded to black.

50 years later...

If you asked either of the cousins which one found the robot, they'd point at themselves, grinning. In reality, it was Phimas who did, but nobody keeps track of such things. When he found it, he almost walked past it, and he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't turned back to shout at Ozzash.

It was clearly old, and degraded. The skin analog had cracked and hardened, peeling back to reveal the mechanics underneath. Said mechanics were rusted and grimy, crumbling away in some places, and dyed black with grime and dirt. It lay in pool of coolant, spilling out from its torso like blood from a wound. It was, all in all, not a pretty sight.

"Ooh! Whatcha found?" Oz asked, running over to where Phi was staring incredulously at the wreck.

"A corpse." Phi replied, gesturing at the robot, his tone shadowed by genuine grief for the machine. Oz sighed, realising that her cousin was getting emotional over scrapped machinery again.

"Come on, it's not that bad!" Oz grinned, elbowing Phi in the ribs, "We've patched up old 'bots before!" She turned, and ran down to where it was. Phi sighed, and followed after her, mostly to ensure she didn't electrocute herself.

When he got down there, he saw that Oz was crouching next to the robot's arm, carefully pulling it off of something. What was there made the two cousins gasp: a stasis cube, holding a memory chip. Phi held it up to the light, in an attempt to discern why it had been removed, before shrugging and putting into his inventory.

Oz knelt down by the robot, poking about the mechanics, making mental notes as she did so. The design of this thing was old, possibly even from before the cyber-wars. It was almost like one of the old Foxtrot v1s, but there was still a clear technological gulf between the two — possibly one of the original ones?

Oz shrugged, and pulled out her tablet to take a few pictures. The bits and pieces here were too degraded to fix up, but that didn't mean she could build a new model based off of it, with modern tech integrated, of course. The two nodded at each other, and set off to the scrapyard exit. Their granddad had an old workshop that he let them and their two other cousins use as a clubhouse, and it had the perfect facilities for rebuilding this robot.

Time Skip brought to you by the pelvic thrust (that really drives you insaaaane)

Phi put the memory chip into the reader-projector that the duo's cousin Steshi had built. What he expected to see was a bunch of tactical schematics, old weapon designs, and possibly a few memories from the trenches of the cyber-wars. What he saw, instead, came as a startling surprise:

The camera hovered in front of him. He gave it a little wave. Balanced precariously on the thin line of glass panes beneath his feet, he looked around him once more, then turned to the camera, turning it on. He waited... three... two... one... and spoke.

"Hello everybody, this is Tango, and welcome to Hermitcraft!" He grinned, and added: "Oh yeah, that feels good to say!"

Phi turned off the reader-projector, incredulous. Of course, he had known, intellectually, that robots had some level of sentience, and that was why there had been so many protests to stop the cyber-wars back in his parent's day, but to see evidence of a 'bot having a life, a name, a personality... it really set in to Phi how inhumane such things had been.

"Oz..." he called out, startling her out of her work programming the miniprinter to make the basic framework of the robot - Tango, he'd said that his name was Tango in the memory. She looked up, confused.

"What's up?"

"I... think this may be a code SOUP."

Five minutes later, and all four of the Plays cousins were seated around the table: Stesh, Oz, Ulis, and Phi. Phi pushed the reader-projector forward, and hit play on the memory again. It was the most impactful 19 seconds of the other three's lives.

"We found this memory chip in a degraded robot in the scrapyard." Phi explained.

"What I don't understand," Ulis (short for Ulissay) spoke up, "Is that he mentioned Hermitcraft. You know, the place that grampa used to tell us stories about?"

"Hm." Stesh mused. When Stesh hmmed, everyone else always shut up. They were a person of many words, yes, but they hoarded those words to themself. "Why don't you ask grampa?"

An undefined amount of time later...

"Hey grampa," Ulis asked, carefully treading around why the question was being asked, "Were there ever any robots on Hermitcraft?" 'Grampa' frowned, his expression overcome with sudden grief. Eventually he spoke.

"Yes... yes there was." He sighed heavily. "He disappeared around the start of the cyber-wars... probably taken." Ulis had never heard such grief in his grandfather's voice before. "He... he was my best friend."

"...I didn't realise." Ulis gasped.

"No, no. Don't worry about it, Ulis. It's been so long, anyway."

"...Will you tell me more about him?"

Zed nodded distractedly, saying nothing more. He recalled all the good times he had spent with Impulse and Tango. He smiled sadly, with a feeling of something he'd lost forever, and turned back to his book to distract himself.

I've been Entropy, peace out from the present!