>> Booting: Checking for server sync… No server found… Braincloud disconnected… overriding boot process… London Wonder online.

  A pair of long-dead eyes flickered to life. Cyan, the colour of the unseen sky. A pair of aperture eyes gazed across a small, cramped workshop. The black folds expanded and contracted, rotating around the bulbs that hid beneath the protective screen that covered the optical cameras buried inside. The faint whir of machinery was the first noise the room had heard in a very long time.

  >> Warning: Prolonged usage of the Hoffman Infrabot without access to the central server may cause damage to the processing node and void the user’s warranty.

  London was stuck. A robotic carcass held aloft by a pair of metallic hooks swooping under where his arms would have usually been located. The system spat out a series of errors covering every single aspect of his construction all at once. Thousands and thousands of lines of error logs were immediately dumped into his short-term memory storage.

  >> Error: Leg unit disconnected. Arm unit disconnected. Protective plating has been removed. CPU unseated. Memory units fragmented.

  The biggest problem was his battery. The hyper dense array contained within the chest module was low despite the cable that was inserted into his back. There was no energy coming through the main line. This was a momentary flicker of life, the last electrical signals rushing through the brain of a long-abandoned corpse. His internal clock blinked in the corner of his visor.

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  >> Current date: 13/02/2199… Last boot: 10/08/2132

  That couldn’t be right, could it?

  London took in what he could within the short time he had. The room was small. A confined rectangle with a window that looked out into a dark corridor beyond. Water damage had clouded the glass and prevented London from seeing what was outside. There were other robotic bodies placed around him, some hung up for repairs and refurbishment, others messily thrown onto the ground and left to gather rust.

  Rust. There was a lot of rust. His sensors picked up the running of water from somewhere in the room, seeping through the cracks in the walls and pooling on the ground to eat away at whatever metals it could touch.

  >> Assessment: this area of the facility has been abandoned for sixty-seven years. Checking memory log. No record of evacuation order issued.

  London did not panic. He was not capable of panic. He was an Infrabot, a heavy-duty industrial machine designed to do the dangerous jobs that humans weren’t capable of. His initiative was for the sole purpose of regaining his limbs and returning to the role that he was assigned so many years ago. The diagnostic list was a mile long, and he couldn’t fix any of them without outside assistance.

  What had allowed him to awaken again after such a long slumber?

  There was no time to consider the question any further than that. London’s emergency power-saving mode kicked in and his processes started to shut down all over again. One by one his hearing, vision, processing and memory were locked away from his reach, until he was plunged back into the depths of a dreamless sleep.

  But for London – this second period of rest would not last anywhere near as long as the first.