Sunklands

It was right here where his ship landed years ago, perhaps 5 now, which would be about 42 or 43 years for him I suppose, given the 1 : 8 1/2 year conversion between Earth time and Our Second Lyfe time. Volcanic Zebrasil-Ichelus was and is the island, a well known landmark (infohub) to old timey Our Second Lyfe residents like me and perhaps like you. His robot parents were destroyed by hostile native glytches shortly after arrival but he survived by hiding in the bushes situated just here there and there, his littler body not detected by the marauding mutants, diminutive themselves but bad of eyesight. Then, not too long afterwards, vacationing adventurist Sugar Demossville, a brightly hued, small dinosaur who ran the eponymous Sugar Shack over in nearby Big Woods at the time, scooped up his little robot body found on an inner tube in the offshore water (glytches don’t like water, he’d found out in the meantime; too late to save his parents, though) and took him back home to the mainland with her. Since Sugar was red and green herself, just like Billy’s safe haven inner tube, she deemed it fate that he join her in the woods and live out the rest of his natural mechanical life there with her. But it was Sugar herself who died first from a stimulus induced heart attack brought on by one too many pieces of pecan and cherry pies at once several years later (2? 17?), freshly plucked from 2 of Big Woods’ many pie trees and too delicious to resist gluttonously gobbling down that fateful morning in late April’s May despite the warnings from her 2 doctors not to double up on the sugars like she did with her physicians. She was survived by mate Donald the Thong, a man-sized, almost naked duck to complement Sugar’s woman-sized, totally naked dinosaur — very tall but still within range, let’s say. He couldn’t deal with, let’s say again, Billy’s hypersomnia where his constant sleeping blended day and night until he couldn’t tell one from the other. “What time is it?” he’d ask now mate-less Donald. Then 5 minutes later, “What time is it?” “Five minutes after you asked the last time, little Billy,” Donald originally said to things like this but patience gradually wore away like his clothes did before (thanks Venus!), soon leading to harsh replies like, “You’re *clockwork*, Billy. You can’t tell time??” Time for Billy to be sent away himself, not to the Land of Death like Sugar thankfully but still regrettably to a robot orphanage over in Lesters Best, with many similar stories of eroded owner patience in the air, mostly for other kinds of conditions but with one in particular sounding very much like his own: that of Sally’s, who turned out to be the love of his life and the light in his eyes, particularly after the brain meld. What fortune, what fate! (once more!). He would never be left in the dark again.

Billy revisiting his “homeland”.

Billy staring over at his red and green inner tube, his safe haven until Sugar rescued him from this hellish landscape which took the lives of his parents (additional note: the glytches have meanwhile been rounded up and taken care of).