Acme Time Travel Incorporated - Volume 1

It was five days since John had found the STU on the cliff top. Then John’s mother had un-strapped the STU when getting John to bed and had put it into a small dark drawer. Its batteries were slowly depleting. The STU had heard John’s mother getting him up every morning since that day, and then she would lead John into some other room in the house. John could not ask his mother about the STU. Maybe he couldn’t remember, but even if he could, his condition would not let him vocalise his need.

Mary, the young woman who had taken John for the walk, did not seem to have visited the house since that day. The STU had hoped that if she had come back to take John for another walk, then maybe she would remember the watch that John had been so pleased to find. As a semi-sentient device, even in low power mode, it retained residual processing functionality. It had developed an ‘interest’ (which it realised was a bizarre concept for an AI unit to have) in poetry, and it had collated the available material from within its data banks. It found scanning through poetry very satisfying and had even begun attempting its own compositions.

The STU couldn’t envisage a permanent system shutdown. It had lain here in the darkness, but it had no human-like fear of the dark. It had seen stars glittering in the skies above its clients’ off-world planets. It knew their light was just the other side of darkness, and so it had no fear of darkness. But it did fear an eternity of ‘un-knowing’, of ‘un-thinking’.

It wanted to continue to function.

The STU resolved to wait, in the hope that someone would choose to pick it up again. Then their proximity would enable the STU to re-charge, using their own body’s electrical resonance. Even a few minutes of contact would give it a few days charge. They would feel a slight prickling sensation, like the static electricity felt when stroking a cat, but they would probably not be startled enough to drop the STU.

The STU also resolved that if it was re-attached to John, that it would request the medication to address his condition. It seemed to the STU that both John’s mother and also his friend, Mary, were both very concerned by the problems of providing for John’s future care. If the STU could do nothing else, it determined to try to help John. By doing so, it would also have helped the two women who cared about him.

The STU began looking through its data banks for a suitable piece of poetry. After its earlier brush with fear and panic, it found poetry’s rolling symmetries offered it a sense of calmness.