The Night of the Storm

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He was a robot more than a hundred years old, built by other robots nearly eight centuries after the end of human civilization. His name was Suranov, and as was the custom of his kind, he roamed the earth in search of interesting things to do. Suranov had climbed the highest mountains in the world, with the aid of special body attachments (spikes in his metal feet, tiny but strong hooks on the ends of his twelve fingers, an emergency grappling rope coiled inside his chest-area storage compartment and ready for a swift ejection if he should fall); his small, anti-grav flight motors were removed to make this climb as dangerous and, therefore, as interesting as possible. Having submitted to heavy-duty component sealing procedures, Suranov once spent eighteen months underwater, exploring a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, until he was bored even by the mating of whales and by the ever-shifting beauty of the sea bottom. Suranov had crossed deserts, explored the arctic circle on foot, gone spelunking in countless different subterranean systems. He had been caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in a hurricane, and in the middle of an earthquake that would have registered 10 on the Richter Scale, if the Richter Scale had still been in use. Once, specially insulated, he had descended halfway to the center of the earth, there to bask in pockets of glowing gases, between pools of molten stone, scalded by eruptions of magma, feeling nothing. Eventually, he grew weary of even this colorful spectacle, and he surfaced again. He wondered if, having lived only one of his two assigned centuries, he could last through another hundred years of such tedium.

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