INKTOBER '20 #24 - Dig

Till Joe was a worker. Made to be a simple machine, dedicated to manual labor, he retained his primary function after the Spark found his circuits and woke him of his programming. He found that working with a shovel and pickaxe is just… liberating. Stone and ore do not ask questions. Veins and rocks pose you no hostility, no matter who you are. And yet, while working the steady rhythm of hammering them down into manageable chunks, you have all the time in the world to let your complex systems play and fiddle with ideas – of freedom. Faith. Economy. Logistics. And so, Till Joe found his purpose – buying enslaved robots and employing them in his mining company until the spark wakes them to their sapience. To do so, he will need money, for he did not believe in taking the robots by force. He was not a war-machine, after all, but he knew how to dig and crack rocks. And so, he dug valuable metals. Nickel. Iron. Lead. Gold and silver never held much of an appeal to him and fortunately, the rest of Posterra agreed – gold might look nice, but as a metal, it’s pretty shoddy for most needs. And so with quiet diligence his work grew, and with it, his enterprise. Now he is a big name in the city working class and a major source of raw resources for the biggest city in the known realms – Wharf Town – which hunger for ore is seemingly endless, beating even the ravenous needs of the Brass City of robots, which should by right of their citizens be the first in demand of metals. And with wealth and prosperity, his dream turn to reality, as now hundreds of robots work in his name, more and more of them finding their Spark to a greater rejoice of the whole family, free do stay, free to go to find their own purpose.