The Water Mule
The Water Mule

They cursed the thing that kept them alive

Image public domain, courtesy of comicbookplus.com, modified from original.

The mid-summer heat boiled the sweat off their backs as they dug a trench along an old, eroded highway. They used the tools of their ancestors: shovels and axes. The people, like their tools, were cheap and replaceable. A self-governing trencher could prepare this same half-meter-deep ditch quicker and of better quality. But it would have to be leased, transported, insured, and maintained, which made it vastly more expensive. Humans, by contrast, only needed to know where to show up and when, then they would transport themselves and see to their own needs. They were each paid a small sum of money and one gallon of water per day.

The water mule trundled along at half-walking-speed behind them. It balanced a sloshing, hundred-gallon tank above two massive wheels. As it approached them, the people set down their tools to extract a brief respite from its many spouts.

To the syndicate who owned the water mule it was a means to an end, but to the people it watered it was a humbling life-giver, a deity. They adorned the mindless machine with gifts and incense, touching it and mumbling thanks in their many tongues. They glued religious figurines to it, taped plastic coins, and painted the names of their ancestors on its large, white plastic surface. They draped cheap beads across the spouts that had failed them last time and kissed a hand to touch its wheels that had once broken years ago. They implored it with their superstition to keep moving and keep giving them water. They needed very little else while they worked. The otherwise mundane visage of a simple industrial cart was transformed into a gaudy, jangling tower of trinkets and streamers. A palanquin that transported not royalty but water.

But the water mule was a mindless robot and had only a few simple rules by which it conducted itself: roll back-and-forth and deliver one-gallon of water to each person. It rationed their water by identifying their faces and shutting off the spout with a polite beep-beep-beep. It was these moments that the person’s affection was most likely to spin instantly into wrath. They spat on the spouts, hurt their hands hitting its metal frame, and impotently pushed at its tires that could not be deterred. They tore off the talismans and stomped on them, revoking their tithing and replacing it with cursing and damnation.
['S.F.N. Cook']
['Flash Fiction', 'Futurism', 'Quick Reads', 'SciFi', 'Dystopia']