Windrows 2095

Ford Culvert dozed as the robots did the roadwork.  A parade of bots passed. First, a stern-faced grader with heavy treads and blades and last, a troop of small paint droids striping the cooling pavement.  Meanwhile comfort units breezed through the monitoring tower offering water, protein supplements, hand jobs, whatever. It was good to be on the surface again, not in a hovering city above being irradiated by solar arrays. Terra-X-66 would be the first new surface road in 50 years, a step to rejoining a rejuvenated Earth.

It was not without uproar from the troglodytes living underground. One such saboteur, Shady Dolomite, crept from behind the recharging station towards the tower as the last paintbot passed. He ascended quickly, catching Ford by surprise and hurtling him out the window. This alerted a squad of medico-units as Ford’s biometric link blanked out. Dolomite tossed out a soiled sexbot next—similarly alerting the tech-units as her CPU blinked. But, by the time Dolomite downloaded the Terra-X-66 schematics, the hack had alerted the security-units which surrounded him as he climbed down the ladder.

The PK-33 comfort unit, or Pinky as Ford called her, was soon back on-line. Not-so-lucky, Ford was unceremoniously interred at STA 33+50 by a platoon of shovel drones borrowed from the stormwater crew. The gap in Pinky’s timecode followed a last image of Ford standing, instinctively shielding her chassis as Dolomite surprised them. This processed as logical; PK-series droids, after all, were more valuable than Gamma-class men. Self-sacrifice, however, coded as uncharacteristic for humans. So the muddled PK-33 initiated a simulation to provide additional data on the anomalous Ford.

Despite servicing, interior scans detected residual human DNA on Pinky’s aft exhaust port. It was now replicating in a late-model Incubot found in a trash heap along the Terra-X-66 corridor.