Ame no Hi no Iris

Chapter 2 - Rebirth: Day Eight

A week have passed, but I am still repeating the same actions.

As the labor robot 'number 108', I am still moving the waste construction materials as well. My vision is still monochrome, the sky, the sea and the land are all dyed in a gray color. The 'rain' has no sign of stopping. The white noise rang repeatedly, countless white lines interlacing in front of my eyes.

I would repeat the actions approximately one hundred and twenty times each day— between one hundred and sixteen times and one hundred and twenty eight times, to be exact, moving back and forth in the area. No rest. The labor everyday takes at least eighteen hours a day.

After going back and forth the area for about a thousand times, I understood a few things.

Firstly, the area is divided to two large areas. The 'gut' and the 'intestines'.

Large machinery like cranes and lift trucks would remove the large pile of waste construction materials near the sea. The removed materials would be collected in the same place, piled up like a tall tower. That is the 'gut'. The job of us robots is to go up the slope, and carry the waste construction materials in the 'gut' to the interior part of the area, the 'intestines'. Traversing between the gut and the intestines is our job.

The distance for going back and forth is about two hundred meters, as the slope is somewhat steep. The surface of the road makes it hard for us to walk on, as our continuous tracks would be stained with the soil on the ground. The reason that the truck for moving the waste construction materials cannot enter the area, is exactly because the ground is too soft.

By the way, the waste construction materials are christened junk food. Junk would be similar to waste, but I'm not sure how the word came to be.

There are also quite a variety of waste construction materials, such as flattened steel bars, rubble stained with soil and charred metal pieces. Weapons and the remains of explosives could be seen occasionally as well. Then, probably this place is a facility connected to the military? The area is surrounded with a tall, steel wire gauze, brewing a stern, strict atmosphere.

Today, us robots are moving the 'junk food' from the 'gut' to the 'intestines' as well. After moving the waste construction materials to the gut, we have to place them on a conveyer belt. As the name 'intestines' suggests, the shape of the conveyer belt is just like large and small intestines. At the other side of the transport equipment, tens of workers in gas masks are sorting out the waste materials.

At first, I thought that the workers are humans too. But from their movements and the serial number that they are shouted at by the angry inspectors, they are all robots. I don't know the reason for them wearing the gas masks, but probably they're coming in contact with materials that would harm robots.

In short, almost all of the workers working in this dismantling construction site are robots. The job of the humans is only to keep watch and to give orders. We would do labor for them like slaves, doing labor like ants carrying the remains of food, carrying the waste materials non-stop. After the day stops, we would return to our nest.

In this week, I did not think of Professor. Every time I couldn't help but remember it, I would forcibly seal my emotions in my heart. That is because I believe, if I face my own memories when dealing with reality, I would not be able to hang on anymore.

Thus, I gradually stopped thinking. What I am doing, why am I doing this— days passed, and the questions stopped surfacing in my mind.

From goodness knows when, I became one of the silent, gray robots.