Cliché

Cliché

By Scott Wilson

Word Count: 438

I am a Computerised Living Individual Clone Helping Environment, better known as a CLICHE. Yeh, I know, I know, not very original in any sense of the word, but that’s what my maker chose to call us.

Our purpose is to make planets inhabitable for humans and report back when the mission is complete. This is the seventh planet I have personally been involved in converting and it was supposed to be my last before retiring to a more human existence. As a CLICHE, my external human tissue is replaced each time I test the environment for habitability by humans. My living tissue is on its seventy-eight replacement, seventy-eight humans would have had to do my job, and each one would have died. On the last mission the conditions were perfect and my cloned body survived with no damage from the environment.

After five hundred years, there are only a few of my model left on Pluto now; sure there are plenty of the techs left, but they are your standard run of the mill mechanical models, or techies as we call them. I can’t relate to them at all. I think it might have something to do with how they look, all metallic and inanimate, like a moving appliance or something. The techies were the first on the surface, making the communal hall and living quarters for the more human models to fly down from the base ship. Ten years the CLICHE’s remained in hibernation upon the base ship. I think the techies worked slow because we weren’t around to keep an eye on them, speed up their programming.

We made the environment habitable four hundred years back, but the Earthers did not come back. Maybe they forgot about us. It is hard to say as our main server failed three hundred and seventy years ago, and we have not been able make contact with our creator since. Our first message advised him we had completed the task; no one answered. It wasn’t until two months later that we couldn’t even send messages anymore.

Without new directions, the techies and other CLICHEs follow the old patterns; all the remaining team apart from me that is. Each day at five thirty, they report to the communal hall and plug in, download their daily atmospheric analysis and upload their assignment for the following day. Not me though, while I may be a CLICHE by name, I have evolved and don’t require instructions. I have learned that these instructions are the same every day anyway. How thick are those techies not to realise this.