Callisto

Callisto vividly remembers the moment the kid touched her on the shoulder with their purple mechanical arm and whispered four words in her ear.

A storm was blowing into shore. Callisto was huddled in a tumble of boulders, shielding her metal body from the rising gales and stinging sand. She’d been scavenging for a new battery that might fit her frame (her old battery had taken in damp after too many nights camping in the open), but the scrap piles had yielded no prize.

“Follow the trees east,” the kid murmured cryptically, and scampered off.

Stubbornly, Callisto had held out for a few days before following the kid’s directions. When she’d run away from the garbage-sorting facility, she’d known surviving wouldn’t be easy. She dragged herself three times a day to the charging stations at the market, but they were always hogged by robots with owners. She grew sick of arguing with those pretentious clods for a few measly hours of juice. Even she could only take being called a trash-muncher so many times.

At first Callisto got lost in the forest, but after a while she figured out how to see the way: subtle markings on the trees, a pattern that would be invisible to humans. The markings guided her through the thick underbrush to a hidden clearing, a rambling garden, a brown bungalow with a cluttered workshop.

Now that she’s made a home in KiMo’s hideout, Callisto still ventures down to the coastal village once or twice a month. She likes to sift through the market stalls and scrap piles, filling her wagon with odds and ends. Sometimes, she even likes to hang by the charging stations and talk back to those snobby clods (“You’re just a collection of parts to be repurposed!”).Once, she splurged on a second-hand guitar at a trash-and-treasure shop. The shopkeeper didn’t care that she was a robot; he even gifted her a spare set of strings.

During those tiresome days sorting garbage on a conveyer belt, Callisto had dreamed of such freedom. She’d dreamed of not having her supervisor’s voice barking incessantly in her head; of tramping through the wilderness with the wind caressing her face; of being allowed to rest.

More than anything, she imagined using her hands to make art.

Nowadays, Callisto sits in a patch of morning sunshine and practises chords on her guitar, listening to the Rii3 chattering in the kitchen. She isn’t very good at the guitar yet, but that’s not stopping her. She’s already working on an alt-rock album about her coming-of-age adventures.

In the afternoons, Callisto heads out to the patch of lawn between KiMo’s workshop and DAWEI’s garden. She sorts through her piles of scavenged treasures: sea-smoothed planks of wood, discarded plastic toys, rubber tyres, the metal carapaces of broken machines. With saw and screws and glue, drilling and welding and joining, Callisto fashions the waste into new creations. Her robot sculptures are larger-than-life and brimming with soul. Callisto doesn’t know it, but they are astonishing.

In the evenings, Callisto sits on a cushion,sometimes chatting lazily with the others, sometimes daydreaming. She’s heard stories of other robots making music, making art. One day, she muses, she’ll hold an exhibition of her sculptures. She’ll record her songs and release her debut album (“Trash-Muncher” might be a good title, after all). She might even have a concert!

But first, she wants to go back to the shore, find another runaway robot, and whisper in their ear, “Follow the trees east.”