IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 703

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”

Suggested Title: Them, Robots
The fact is that robots are everywhere! From cleaning the bottom of the school swimming pool, to building the car you drive, robots are so much a part of our lives we couldn’t even LIVE without them…unless you could stand alongside a hospital bed and pump a respirator for a patient in a coma.

Event: The Arizona wildfire is likely going to go down in history as the Third Largest in that state. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43290922/ns/weather/ If it continues much longer, it may well go down as the second largest – maybe even the biggest one ever. They’ll bring in everything to stop it. Eventually, there will be robots – not humanoid ones like in I, Robot, but more like water, fire and chemical squirting tanks. Or possibly like the robots above. Of course, they’ll have to have a certain amount of autonomy. So what happens to them after the fire?

Santiago and Elijah are hiking in the mountains three half a century after after one of Arizona’s historic wildfires. They met the first day of their class on Introduction to Mobile AI Engineering. Way off the usual trails, they’re happily nattering back and forth and looking forward to lunch – Santiago’s dad packed a surprise, and Elijah’s older sister packed a different surprise. They’re going to swap meals and then serious critique them. After a while, they stumble onto a town that looks as if it had been burned mostly to the ground and entirely abandoned for the past fifty years, and they find some strange leavings. After poking around, they’re stunned to discover a nest of semi-intelligent robots who not only survived the fire, they’ve established a colony and they are making new copies of themselves. Surprising enough, but out of the basement of one of the ruined homes – and Arizonans don’t often have basements! – a humaniform robot steps up the stairs, looks at them and says in clear, Western-accented English…

Names: 2♂ Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese; Israel/Hebrew
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Valkyrie-robot-3.jpg