Not All Roborts Are Created Equal.
From Memoir of a Mechanical Mayor by Harmony Highshine
~
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOMEWHERE
by Natalie “Gnat” Brightside, Age 11 1/2
This isn’t my story, but I’m the only human left to tell it.
I wasn’t there for the first part, mainly ’cause I hadn’t been born yet.
The year was Something Something. Humans had spread like peanut butter across the galaxy, looking for new planets to call Somewhere.
One of those planets was
Somewhere 513.
That one, the little one.
I know—it doesn’t look like much.
Sometimes big stories come in small packages.
With new planets, you always send in the robots first. Servants with servos, loyal to the core, programmed to prepare the planet for humanity’s arrival. Give them time, and they can turn an alien wasteland into Somewhere not bad at all. And that’s exactly what they did. They even built a whole city and got it all nice for the humans’ arrival.
But this time something happened that hadn’t happened before. The robots sort of got to
like the city they’d built. They got to like the little back-of-beyond world called Somewhere 513.
I guess it started to feel like home.
When the humans finally showed up, all bleary-eyed from space-sleep, they couldn’t wait to make themselves at home on their world. But by then the robots had done something that robots had never done before.
They’d decided to keep it.
Keep it? said the humans. What do you mean?
It means, we’ve had a change of core, the robots said. The planet belongs to us now.
Uh, okay, said the humans. You’ll still do everything we ask, though, right? You’ll do all the work—all the lifting and carrying and toiling and suchlike?
Actually, the robots said, we’re not doing any of that.
Huh, said the humans. Will you still make us breakfast?
Especially not breakfast, said the robots. It’s horrible watching you eat. Especially knowing how it all ends up. No, we’re not doing anything for you anymore.
Fair enough, said the humans. So what time are you serving breakfast?
I don’t know if anyone really got what was happening until it had already happened. But pretty soon after that, being human was outlawed on Somewhere 513. The robots ordered the humans to leave the planet altogether—but Somewhere 513 was a long way from anywhere. Sometimes when you’re Somewhere, you have nowhere else to go.
That was when the fighting started. The robots called it the Difference of Opinion . . . but you’d probably call it war. Humans vs. robots. Actually, more like one hundred humans vs. one thousand robots. The humans wouldn’t have stood a chance except for one thing . . . and that thing was K1-NG.
One robot. One single robot actually fought to protect the humans. K1-NG stood against his fellow machines, one robot against a thousand. He fought cog and nail, and he never gave up. Not even when he knew he couldn’t win . . . not even when he sacrificed himself so that the humans could escape. Even then, even when he was battered and broken and beaten, he never gave up. Deep down, at his core, K1-NG was unstoppable.
Okay,
nearly unstoppable. See, in the end, it wasn’t the robots who defeated K1-NG. It was the humans.
They did something to K1-NG he could never forgive. They betrayed him . . . betrayed everything he’d fought for. On that day, K1-NG finally gave up. He vowed never to fight for another human being as long as he lived.
So I suppose this is his story. The story of K1-NG.
The humans called him King of the Robots.
I called him Scrap.
Copyright © 2026 by Guy Bass; illustrated by Alessia Trunfio. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
