RoboBug
A three-part comic book story of tragic fantasy
by Clark Humphrey
(Based upon an idea by Kathleen Skeels)
3/21/91
CHAPTER ONE
PAGES 1-2 (2-page splash): A detailed image of the mature giant robot with its body bio-engineered from chritin (the substance that makes up a real insect’s exoskeleton), its six retractable hydraulic legs, its computer brain, its satellite dish tail, its flying mechanism, the turbine power generator in its torso that can use any combustible material as fuel, its giant eyes, the sensors in its snout. Perhaps these details can be noted as in a technical drawing. The entire robot has a complicated but elegant look (imagine how elegant the Lunar Module looked). Most of its components are either black or steel-grey (it will be all black on the b&w pages).
Narration: “Please sit down and allow ourselves to become better acquainted. Please do not be alarmed by my appearance; I visit you with the most humble of purposes. I am the world’s first fully sentient robotic device. I am also the most intelligent being of any type in the history of the world, and the only machine capable of growing and adding to itself. I am also the most tragic creature ever doomed to exist, for I have inadvertantly caused the end of all civilization on Earth — TWICE. My name: I have several. My initial project name was “Experimental Research Robot.” My device name was “ERR 7-Y.” But the name by which I am best known is the nickname given by one of my human monitors — ROBOBUG.”
PAGES 3-5: Multi-panel pages with the origin of RoboBug. A team of university laboratory scientists in Edmonton, Alberta invents the first “living” mechanism. Unlike the cheesy movies where bioengineered life takes full human form from the start, these scientists are satisfied with having created a mechanical insect — or, more precisely, a self-portable, self-modifying research unit with a built-in computer unit and microbiology lab. Its microchip “brain” knows how to make its chritin body fly and maneuver around, without any human-operated remote controls. Pressured to provide a practical purpose for the creature in order to maintain funding, the scientists equip Robo with an amazing array of sensors and the ability to send the information it gathers and analyzes back to home basis via a two-way satellite relay. In one other innovation, they bio-engineer into Robo the ability to learn from his data and observations, as well as to maintain its energy support by ingesting leaves and other readily available raw materials.
PAGES 6-7: With a rousing send-off, Robo is sent flying off to a very remote area of the Canadian wilderness at the northern limit of naturally-growing vegetation. His missions: to explore how plant and insect life in the wilderness is affected by far-away industry and pollution; to study how all life in an ecosystem is inter-related; to unlock the secrets of growth and life among these creatures; and to help the scientists on the other end of the satellite link determine whether there really is such a thing as a collective intelligence among “lower” life forms.
PAGES 8-10: After having been there a while, Robo learns the growth patterns of biological life. Jealous of their ability to become more than what they were born as, Robo taps in long-distance to the university’s entire computer network and programs his own way to grow, to become stronger, larger and more intelligent. He wills the mineral materials in his body into a state of mitosis. He also learns more and more about the ways of the biological world and becomes more enamored of the collective ways of nature than of the competitve ways of man, whose bulldozing and pollution are, he discerns, already threatening his adopted bioregion’s fragile way of life.
PAGES 11-12: Robo meets a dying swarm of bees, starved for lack of pollen and menaced by ticks. He gladly learns to communicate with their collective intelligence (mistaken by man for “instinct”) and offers to rearrange their genetic code so they could become stronger, larger, capable of flying farther and surviving harsher conditions.
PAGE 13: Since bees are biological, not mechanical, creatures, Robo could only cause them to produce mutated offspring who in turn would have even more powerful grandchildren, and so on. He lovingly takes the beautiful but sickly queen bee in his mechanical arms and makes the proper alterations in the chromosomes that will result in her eggs.
PAGE 14: Thus, every annual mating season brought a more powerful strain of bees in the wilderness. While remembering that queen bee ever since, Robo heads off in a different direction, becoming ever larger and stronger and more aware of the world around him; and becoming more peculiar in the reports he sends back to the lab.
PAGES 15-18: Within six short years, Robo senses that the closest source of air pollution has ceased. The mutations cause a change in the frequency of the bees’ communications, so Robo is not on a communications “wavelength” with this or subsequent generations. News reports tell of mysterious human deaths around the edges of the wilderness, where developers had been clearing the land for future industry. The scientists ask Robo to investigate; he gives flowery reports of the comeback of plant and animal life and concludes that no threat to or from humans exists at this time.
PAGE 19: Unknown to Robobug, the bees have mutated to the size of footballs and are mercilessly attacking the land developers and their crews. The Phylum War has begun.
CHAPTER TWO
PAGES 1-2: Robobug in his beloved wilderness home. Narration: revised version of the first issue’s opening, incorporating a brief summary of his origin.
PAGE 3: Brief summary of the first issue.
PAGES 4-6: Robo knows something is wrong back home when he can no longer properly send his data back to the home-base computer system. It fails to properly receive his messages, as if routine maintenance had been ignored. What messages he does receive from the university lab where he was created are patchy and incomplete, but they do reveal a sense of panic that Robo cannot explain away as the scientists’ constant fear of losing funding. Weeks later, the relay link goes dead. Robo is alone in the world.
PAGES 7-8: By this time, he has become fully capable of reasoning without the need of the university computers, so he continues his quest for the secrets of life. While smoke and pollutants had been gone from his wilderness for a few years, they now returned with what he could sense were far more distant origins. Then he senses large fires, intense destruction, coming from the general direction of his original home town.
PAGES 9-11: He flies out of the wilderness to see abandoned construction sites, then abandoned highway projects, then abandoned towns and cities in ruins. His sensors fail to pick up any air traffic control radar signals and only a few automated radio broadcasts, chiefly pre-recorded distress signals and automated beautiful-music stations (which offend his increasingly sophisticated aural sensibilities).
PAGES 12-13: Finally back at the remains of Edmonton, he sees the university lab destroyed, the town deserted. No living human is in sight and only a few dead ones.
PAGES 14-15: Not yet knowing what is happening to himself in response, he seeks to understand the feelings he is feeling but cannot identify. He seeks solace in the university libraries, where he absorbs all recorded human knowledge available to him and learns the good side of the destructive creature that had created him. He absorbs all the human cultural achievements which have now been abandoned — poetry, music, art. He becomes a depressed-romantic poet and searches for love in a world where love has been removed.
PAGES 16-17: Emerging from his historical research as a changed robot, a more philosophical and less coldly analytical machine, he soon learns the full scope of the tragedy surrounding him. In the news reports he uncovers (including the last recorded words of mankind), he learns that bees have become mammoth creatures who have set up a society of their own and enslaved those humans they have not killed. The bees have learned to communicate by human means, thanks to computer-translation devices. The human construction squads are pressed into building an ordered, choiceless, completely structured society for the bees.
PAGES 18-19: Paralyzed by remorse, Robo wanders around in total depression (expressed most romantically) until he flies into the outskirts of a newly-constructed bee city and sees enslaved humans finishing a giant artistic likeness of the current queen bee, the ten-foot-long descendent of that tragic queen he rescued so few decades ago. At the sight of her stately image, he realizes the full culmination of his work at gaining the emotions and drives of a true biological creature. He immediately and totally falls in love.
CHAPTER THREE
PAGES 1-2: Robo amidst the landscape of a bee city, one of thousands of immense projects being built by enslaved worker humans to service the now-dominant species, the giant bees. Everything is hexagonal, including the street system. Narration: Revision of previous introductions, with Robo welcoming the reader back for a third visit and the conclusion of his tragic tale.
PAGES 3-4: Recap in narration and flashback of the previous chapter, while Robo is walking and flying through the suburbs of the new bee civilization. Because bees have a collective intelligence and concentrate their efforts in short but energetic lifespans, the progress of bee cities has been amazingly quick. Each city has two main artworks: a memorial to the first mutant bees to give their lives stinging the first human casualties of the Phylum War, and a reverent image of the Queen.
PAGE 5: Robo finds human slaves in every bee town he sees. They are in factories making honey products for bee luxury foods. They are constructing giant hexagonal hives for the next generation of bees to be born into. He discovers the last survivor of the lab where he was created, a woman now hard at work developing new systems for pollen processing. She does not recognize Robo.
PAGE 6: But there is a flaw in the bee civilization. While they have grown physically, the bees have not progressed beyond an “instinctual” level of thinking. Unable to be creative, they are now more mechanical than Robo-Insect.
PAGES 7-8: Robo believes he can solve this by bringing love into the heart of the current queen, whose image is artistically rendered everywhere. The gracious and all-powerful queen, Robo knows, is the only other creature currently living who might possess enough individual intelligence to understand his love for her and his concern for her world, the world he considers himself to have fathered.
PAGES 9-11: Robo overcomes many obstacles (including human and bee bodyguards, some of whom he directly but apologetically kills, having determined no other way to get past them) in his way to access to the queen, who is nearing her mating time, enthroned in her incubation chamber at the heart of the bee capital city, surrounded by honey supplies and chambers for her thousands of eggs.
PAGES 12-13: Eventually, his mad love overcomes them both. Unfortunately, Robo’s passion temporarily cancels out his memory banks.
PAGES 14-16: It is only after they have mated that Robo allows himself to remember a key facet of bee biology: that the queen can only mate once in her life. With that mating “wasted” on him, she cannot produce offspring, and the tribe will die off. Because this particular queen is the most purebred offspring of the queen created by Robo thirty generations ago, only her offspring could keep the mutation going. The queens of the other bee cities have too much regular-bee DNA in them, and their children and grandchildren turn out to be sickly things, incapable of keeping the advanced infrastructure of mutant-bee society functioning.
PAGE 17: The queen is the last to die, in Robo’s arms. His sorrow is compounded by the knowledge that no living creature can comprehend it.
PAGES 18-19: The ending reveals that Robo has been telling his sad tale in the town square of the crumbling bee capital city, to a gathering of humans who have been somehow bee-lined out of any memory of their own past, and who don’t understand what he’s saying. He has settled down to his last and greatest duty –before his material construction rusts or decays away, to teach humans how to be human again. Robo is giving poetry appreciation lessons to humans, trying to help them overcome their worker-bee “instincts.”
