He sat down on the toilet even though he didn’t need to go to the bathroom. Mechanism, you see — no inner fleshy workings of that type to maintenance. He needed *oil* yes. Oil to think. Because he was lost. Lost in a forest that had inexplicably, to him, turned white. Too early for snow he knew. Maybe some kind of virtual blight? But here he is, trying to cogitate with the limited power he had left. Suppose to meet someone named Fern here who would take him to an isle named after food. 2 isles actually, she said, a 2n1, she described it. Breakfast… and some other type of food he couldn’t recall.
He also couldn’t recall how to contact Fern for help. She was not the same core as him; he had that at least. Something about flesh again. Yes, he went into the bathroom to think about flesh, hmm. The bathroom and its toilet would help him remember.
If he just had his trusty oilcan he could squirt some in his left right ear and the gears would begin to spin properly up there again. But he lost it somewhere in this forest, too confusing with its whitewashed nature to retrace his steps to that tree stump he left it by.
*Sally*, he then recalled. He could ask his *wife*. His better, mechanoid half. Yes, of course. Sally. Speed dial so he didn’t have to come up with the number. He could ring her up in his head they were so close. Almost the same brain workings.
—–
Sally woke up with a ringing in her head, cursed the extra glass of diesel wine she had before bed, then realized what it was, *who* it was. “Hello?” she spoke to no one around.
“I’m in trouble, er…” Long pause.
“Sally,” Sally said, understanding that he *was* in trouble if he forgot her name in the moment. Lack of brain power, lack of oil most likely. Where *is* he?
“I don’t know,” he spoke back, understanding her thought. “Somewhere white. The trees… are white.”
She intuitively remembered the “blight” starting in upper right central Maebaleia, in the middle of that new super city developing there. “Hold on,” she thought back. “I’ll be right over.”
(to be continued)
Sunklands 