Lasantier Plateau sits five hundred metres higher that its environs, atop near vertical cliffs. Ten square miles of flat topped mount proves safety for its few thousand inhabitants from the miasma that envelopes the lowlands.Nothing can grow down there and the air is so fouled you can barely breathe. The stories passed down tell of a time of cities and farms and civilisations of millions that fell in a war hundreds of years ago. The remnants on Lasantier Plateau have a good living here with sunlight and clear air, but they wonder if there’s anyone else out there, for in living memory only one outsider has every visited..
That outsider is now the most unusual member of the community – the Old War Bot. Centuries old, it maintains itself as best it can with jury-rigged fixes and upcycled scrap. Whilst its power cell needs only water and sunlight to keep working, the bot doesn’t have the metal to repair its chassis or the electronics to replace its vocal units. It makes do with hand signals and beeps and boops. What does still work are its reinforced blade and the arm mounted plasma rifle, though it has never found a need to put either to use on the plateau. It climbed up the side of the cliffs forty years ago and was met with deep fear and suspicion by the Plateauns. Over the next year it won their trust as it set about helping the community and not murdering them all. They still don’t know what to make of this mechanical person who shares none of their culture or habits.
OWB lives in an old shack on the northern edge of the plateau. The land here was contaminated and abandoned by the Plateauns and clearing it was one of the robot’s first tasks. The shack is part workshop, part library and is filled with tools and books. The roof is made of solar panels which power the only electronic light on the plateau. From the seven fields that surround the shack, OWB produces an ever rotating harvest of crops chosen to ensure the population maintains a balanced diet. It also grows an oil crop each year which it processes in ethanol for fuel and lubricants. OWB gives away its crops and its labour, always refusing the Plateauns attempts to pay it. It will however always find time to play with the children.
At night it can be found in its shack reading, plugged into the little power network in its shack. It has probably read all of its books many time nover but it never seems to tire of them. If there is an important festival or event, it will make a show of itself at the town square, but it never joins in. At irregular intervals throughout the day, OWB will stop what it’s doing and patrol the plateau. Its demeanor changes from its usual lackadaisical pose to a precision military posture, as if an entirely different personality is now driving it. There patrols have never intercepted much danger beyond the occasional toxic bird, but OWB insists on them and they do make the Plateauns feel safer.
Which is perhaps why so many are nervous when OWB climbs down the cliffs. Gone for weeks at a time when the fields are fallow, OWB searches the lowlands for salvage. Lasantier Plateau has no metals, so it is completely reliant on what can be brough up from below. Before OWB, small teams would make short raids that found less and less in the limited area they could search in the choking miasma. OWB, immune to the pollution, can search far further. When they return, they bring a couple of tons of cargo that takes it dozens of trips to bring up the cliffs by rope and crane. Mostly this is metal to be reworked, but there are also toys, cloths, and books. Once it brought up a working freezer that now sits are the centre piece of the community root cellar. This and other salvage is slowly bringing technology back to a community that had almost regressed to the stone age.
Image Credit: Zombie Robot 02 By bramLeech CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0