Assistant: "Hello? Hello? Can you understand me? ... Dr., it isn't responding."
Dr. Smith: "Hold on. I'm almost done figuring out what, exactly, gravity comes from. When I'm through playing around with this I'll help you. It's still my break, you know."
A few minutes pass and the Dr. gets off his break. The assistant shakes his head, wondering why the Dr. does those kinds of things for fun. The Dr. takes one look at the object the assistant talked about earlier, a robot, and bursts out, "You idiot! It's because you haven't enabled the responsive speech hardware we created! He can hear you, but without the program running, you can't get a response from him. Just let me flip this switch, right here." (probes the machine's "torso" for the switch). "AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!" 'SHOCK!' *BUZZ!* 'BANG!' ...then the commotion ends and all is quiet.
The good doctor's funeral was held later that week, and the confirmed cause of death was electrocution. Nobody came to the funeral, for he had no living relatives, and no friends because his work consumed him completely. The lab was shut down and the robot that the doctor lost his life building was forgotten. Dust accumulated, time passed, and life went on. It was eight years until someone bought the property, and three more years until someone set foot in the building. Stage center: a dirty blonde boy standing at the height of 5' 9", about 17 years old, wearing a polo shirt and khakis. Sam. Sam escaped into the building running away from some gangsters that he had borrowed money from, and they were anxious for their money back. He is breathing heavily. Too heavily. They might hear him! The gangsters burst open the door, intent on catching Sam. Sam sees them and runs further into the abandoned lab, knocking over tools and machines as he goes. The gangsters hear him and give chase.
The leader of the pack of thugs steps closer to where Sam is hiding.
"Where are you, little brat? You know we are going to find you! Come out now and we won't hurt you... as bad". He flips a switch, thinking it is for the lights. A flash, buzz, bang, and a few sparks scatter from under a junk pile underneath a blue tarp.
"What the hell?"
The blue tarp jolts up off of the table and lights shine through it, startling the thugs. The leader cautiously pulls the tarp off of the thing, now standing there, before everyone. A face lurches toward him. A twisted metal face. As you may know, things that jump at you in the dark are usually more frightening than in the light, and this such happening scared the thugs so much that they turned and ran, faster than if the cops were chasing them.
Sam approaches the machine slowly, careful to not make any noise. The machine is still, standing right where it leaped to, back turned toward Sam. As Sam got closer and closer, he could hear his heart beating, harder and harder. He reaches toward the thing, and when his hand is within inches of reaching the robot, it's head turns around slowly until it is face to face with Sam.
"What-in-the-name-of-Darwin are you doing in my lab!? Can't you see I'm working here?! You are interrupting my work on this robot, and more importantly my hobby of working out the universes secrets, like gravity Where did my assistant go!? What the hell is going on here?!?!" Screeches the robot in it's eight-bit voice.
Sam replies, "What do you mean your lab? This building hasn't been in use for years. Also, I seriously doubt that robots can own property in the U.S. of A., and what robot you are working on? The only one I see is you!"
The robot eked out a startled yip, and rolled away from Sam and out of the building as fast as it's tank-like tracks could carry it. Sam hastily gave chase, worried that he could get in trouble for losing a robot that he didn't even own.
When he finally got within shouting range of the bot, a black windowless van screeched out around the corner, and barreled toward the robot. Men in black suits got out and hoisted the bot into the van, then sped off. Sam was left there, dumbfounded at such a spectacle. He brushed the thought of giving chase to the men out of his mind, deciding that he was already in over his head with local thugs, so why make things worse? He started walking home, and the weather took a turn for the worst and started dumping bucket-fulls of rain unto him. He Finally got home and stripped out of his soaking clothes and flopped down on his bed to sleep, and sleep he did. It was the deepest sleep he had ever had.
When Sam woke up the next morning, he found a letter slipped underneath the front door of his apartment. No labels, no postage, nothing other than his name. He reluctantly opens the envelope, and pulls out a check for 1.5 million dollars and a note: "you didn't see anything".
Over the following couple of years, there were reports of nuclear bomb testing run by the government, new inventions popping up with no proclaimed creator, and other rumors about government doings. There was even a rumor that there was a top-secret robot built for the government that went missing. Sam constantly heard such rumors and couldn't help but smile, for somehow he knew that it was the very same robot that had saved him from the troop of thugs that day. He smiled and thought to himself, "That's a nice talent, escaping from high security government bases. I wonder how many people could do that.", but said nothing. And life goes on for Sam, sitting on his 85 foot yacht sipping virgin margaritas, sailing into the sunset. As for the robot, nobody knows exactly what happened to it. It just disappeared one day, and with it disappeared the rumors. And that is the story of Bob, the junk hap robot.
