don't you dare say ONE WORD
And Then There Was One
by vikki
Summary: I've struggled with the idea of how Wall-E ended up with a 'personality'. Here's an idea of how he progressed from simply 'robot' to 'robot with a soul'.
Rated: G
Setting: pre-movie. no spoilers.
In the year 2040, Buy'N'Large began turning out its first line of robotic conveniences. Shelby Forthright said he was inspired by The Jetsons, a cartoon he watched in his youth. Soon there were SALL-Es, PR-Ts, M-Os, ORGs, DRV-Rs, and more, doing laundry, vaccuuming floors, cooking, driving - even shopping. Humans had almost nothing left to do - robots did everything, and they did it faster and more efficiently than their human owners.
Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-class, although the designation was not added until the year 2060 with the plan to build a Buy'N'Large mall on the moon) was a less-celebrated creation. Every Buy'N'Large parking lot had one, but they were small, quiet things that trundled around hundreds of feet away, collecting disposed cups, food, cigarette boxes, empty toy wrappings, and more, compressing them into tiny squares of trash, and depositing them at the side of the road for pickup the next day.
WALL-E was not a noticed robotic achievement until even the biggest slobs couldn't live with the stench of filth, the toxic air, the overfilled landfills and polluted rivers. The Great Plains of North America, once the source of so much farm produce, had become a barren wasteland of trash. New York was nearly unlivable for the stench. One could practically walk across the English Channel on landfill. Children no longer knew what 'plants' were - all their food came in convenient B'n'L cups.
Suddenly WALL-E was the hero. WALL-E was mass-produced like never before, set to work all over the world by the truckload, and all humanity - what was left of it - promised delieverance from their self-made hell. Five years in space, and the WALL-E robots would clean up the whole earth by that time. Then the humans could come back and start all over again.
* * *
Every WALL-E was installed with a Differentiation Module. Not everything that ended up on the ground was trash, after all - car keys, shoes, toys, and more could be dropped and forgotten. WALL-E could distinguish between up to one hundred thousand various discarded items and trash or save them accordingly. With the humans departing Earth en masse this Differentiation Module was, perhaps, no longer needed, but it remained in the programming, forgotten in the haste to turn out WALL-E as rapidly as possible. WALL-E could also 'learn' what was trash and what wasn't, and how to problem solve (a washing machine, for instance, could not be compacted without being cut into smaller pieces). WALL-E was solar-charged, self-maintaining, and virtually unstoppable.
Yet one by one, the WALL-E robots simply stopped. Humanity would never know why - indeed, humanity was not there to see them stop at all. The lack of vegetation had destroyed the topsoil across the world and turned it to dust; the storms that blew up every few nights could break circuit boards and grind gears to nubs. Days and days would pass without enough sunlight to charge by. WALL-E robots were building skyscrapers of waste - an ill-timed wind, a single mis-tread, could send a WALL-E hurtling one hundred stories to a crushing end.
The humans never came back, and the WALL-E army ground to a halt. And then, one day, there was one.
* * *
After hundreds of years of trash, there is a point when everything looks the same. There is also a point when everything starts to look different. For Wall-E, with his Differentiation Module, there was merely a point at which everything began to look interesting. Designations of 'trash' and 'not trash' meant nothing without human input. Wall-E began to assign his own value system to the miles of junk he collected and crushed. The top layers were Fries - In a Cup! and old computer parts, CDs, mini-disks, discarded clothing and plastic scraps, but the more he razed, the stranger things became.
There were tiny robots, outdated utensils, small silver boxes whose purpose remained a mystery. Shoes with thick soles, not the useless ones sold by the bucket to humans who never had to leave the conveniences of home. Tires and their hubcaps, bells that buzzed when you pulled the lever, squeaking dolls, ceramic pigs, multicolored cubes, metal keys, strings of tiny blinking lights. Wall-E had never seen these things before, built in an age when everything was convenient and entertainment came on a computer screen.
He saved them, a lost-and-found that would never have visitors, in an old storage truck. It was, at first, merely a refuge against the dust storms that had torn so many of his robotic twins apart, but with time it was filled with such odd knicknacks that Wall-E did not even have room for himself. He then did what he was designed to do - organizing and categorizing his treasures neatly. His lenses, not designed for the dark, rendered him blind in the cavelike interior, so he used the strings of blinking lights to let him see.
It was all very interesting, and still there was more.
When Wall-E first saw the small black box, he 'ooh'ed at it. It had a thin strip of black tape inside, curled onto two interior wheels that could roll back and forth. It said 'VHS' in big black letters, but it was not a robot and Wall-E could derive no meaning from the letters. He had never seen such a thing before. He threw it in his box and crushed more trash.
There were more black boxes like it afterwards. Wall-E did not know what they did, but he diligently saved them. Sometimes they were in colorful plastic containers, but more often they were discarded alone, forgotten mysteries. So they remained until Wall-E found his first VCR.
It was too big to crush without cutting it down, so Wall-E applied himself to the problem and recognized the innards corresponded to the 'VHS'es he had found before. He panicked over destroying it for a while, but soon enough he came across another. It made for an immediate trip back to his home. For a robot intimately familiar with wiring and circuitry - he was designed to be self-maintaining, after all - it took very little time for him to discover the purpose of the machine, and by the time the evening dust storm hit, he was watching his first VHS tape.
If his treasures were things he had never seen before, the tapes opened up another world entirely - a world where, perhaps, his treasures were not found in piles of trash. Humans! They had built everything he saved and everything he crushed. On the tapes, they did not build - they talked and danced and laughed and cried, and did many things that Wall-E did not understand. They kept small animals as pets. Wall-E had never seen an animal - at least, nothing bigger than the insects that lived in the trash. (Wall-E never let them get crushed. Anything that moved wasn't something that should be crushed.)
It was different from Wall-E's world, and Wall-E learned.
When Wall-E found another VHS, it was inside a colorful box with smiling humans on the front. It said "Hello, Dolly!" at the top in bright letters. He immediately went home and watched it. That was how Wall-E learned about holding hands. It was quickly the movie he watched the most, until it was the only movie he watched, over and over again. He folded his metal claws together as he watched, and it was a little bit like holding hands, but Wall-E wanted to learn about holding someone else's hand.
That was how Wall-E learned what it meant to be lonely.
ende
by vikki
Summary: I've struggled with the idea of how Wall-E ended up with a 'personality'. Here's an idea of how he progressed from simply 'robot' to 'robot with a soul'.
Rated: G
Setting: pre-movie. no spoilers.
In the year 2040, Buy'N'Large began turning out its first line of robotic conveniences. Shelby Forthright said he was inspired by The Jetsons, a cartoon he watched in his youth. Soon there were SALL-Es, PR-Ts, M-Os, ORGs, DRV-Rs, and more, doing laundry, vaccuuming floors, cooking, driving - even shopping. Humans had almost nothing left to do - robots did everything, and they did it faster and more efficiently than their human owners.
Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-class, although the designation was not added until the year 2060 with the plan to build a Buy'N'Large mall on the moon) was a less-celebrated creation. Every Buy'N'Large parking lot had one, but they were small, quiet things that trundled around hundreds of feet away, collecting disposed cups, food, cigarette boxes, empty toy wrappings, and more, compressing them into tiny squares of trash, and depositing them at the side of the road for pickup the next day.
WALL-E was not a noticed robotic achievement until even the biggest slobs couldn't live with the stench of filth, the toxic air, the overfilled landfills and polluted rivers. The Great Plains of North America, once the source of so much farm produce, had become a barren wasteland of trash. New York was nearly unlivable for the stench. One could practically walk across the English Channel on landfill. Children no longer knew what 'plants' were - all their food came in convenient B'n'L cups.
Suddenly WALL-E was the hero. WALL-E was mass-produced like never before, set to work all over the world by the truckload, and all humanity - what was left of it - promised delieverance from their self-made hell. Five years in space, and the WALL-E robots would clean up the whole earth by that time. Then the humans could come back and start all over again.
* * *
Every WALL-E was installed with a Differentiation Module. Not everything that ended up on the ground was trash, after all - car keys, shoes, toys, and more could be dropped and forgotten. WALL-E could distinguish between up to one hundred thousand various discarded items and trash or save them accordingly. With the humans departing Earth en masse this Differentiation Module was, perhaps, no longer needed, but it remained in the programming, forgotten in the haste to turn out WALL-E as rapidly as possible. WALL-E could also 'learn' what was trash and what wasn't, and how to problem solve (a washing machine, for instance, could not be compacted without being cut into smaller pieces). WALL-E was solar-charged, self-maintaining, and virtually unstoppable.
Yet one by one, the WALL-E robots simply stopped. Humanity would never know why - indeed, humanity was not there to see them stop at all. The lack of vegetation had destroyed the topsoil across the world and turned it to dust; the storms that blew up every few nights could break circuit boards and grind gears to nubs. Days and days would pass without enough sunlight to charge by. WALL-E robots were building skyscrapers of waste - an ill-timed wind, a single mis-tread, could send a WALL-E hurtling one hundred stories to a crushing end.
The humans never came back, and the WALL-E army ground to a halt. And then, one day, there was one.
* * *
After hundreds of years of trash, there is a point when everything looks the same. There is also a point when everything starts to look different. For Wall-E, with his Differentiation Module, there was merely a point at which everything began to look interesting. Designations of 'trash' and 'not trash' meant nothing without human input. Wall-E began to assign his own value system to the miles of junk he collected and crushed. The top layers were Fries - In a Cup! and old computer parts, CDs, mini-disks, discarded clothing and plastic scraps, but the more he razed, the stranger things became.
There were tiny robots, outdated utensils, small silver boxes whose purpose remained a mystery. Shoes with thick soles, not the useless ones sold by the bucket to humans who never had to leave the conveniences of home. Tires and their hubcaps, bells that buzzed when you pulled the lever, squeaking dolls, ceramic pigs, multicolored cubes, metal keys, strings of tiny blinking lights. Wall-E had never seen these things before, built in an age when everything was convenient and entertainment came on a computer screen.
He saved them, a lost-and-found that would never have visitors, in an old storage truck. It was, at first, merely a refuge against the dust storms that had torn so many of his robotic twins apart, but with time it was filled with such odd knicknacks that Wall-E did not even have room for himself. He then did what he was designed to do - organizing and categorizing his treasures neatly. His lenses, not designed for the dark, rendered him blind in the cavelike interior, so he used the strings of blinking lights to let him see.
It was all very interesting, and still there was more.
When Wall-E first saw the small black box, he 'ooh'ed at it. It had a thin strip of black tape inside, curled onto two interior wheels that could roll back and forth. It said 'VHS' in big black letters, but it was not a robot and Wall-E could derive no meaning from the letters. He had never seen such a thing before. He threw it in his box and crushed more trash.
There were more black boxes like it afterwards. Wall-E did not know what they did, but he diligently saved them. Sometimes they were in colorful plastic containers, but more often they were discarded alone, forgotten mysteries. So they remained until Wall-E found his first VCR.
It was too big to crush without cutting it down, so Wall-E applied himself to the problem and recognized the innards corresponded to the 'VHS'es he had found before. He panicked over destroying it for a while, but soon enough he came across another. It made for an immediate trip back to his home. For a robot intimately familiar with wiring and circuitry - he was designed to be self-maintaining, after all - it took very little time for him to discover the purpose of the machine, and by the time the evening dust storm hit, he was watching his first VHS tape.
If his treasures were things he had never seen before, the tapes opened up another world entirely - a world where, perhaps, his treasures were not found in piles of trash. Humans! They had built everything he saved and everything he crushed. On the tapes, they did not build - they talked and danced and laughed and cried, and did many things that Wall-E did not understand. They kept small animals as pets. Wall-E had never seen an animal - at least, nothing bigger than the insects that lived in the trash. (Wall-E never let them get crushed. Anything that moved wasn't something that should be crushed.)
It was different from Wall-E's world, and Wall-E learned.
When Wall-E found another VHS, it was inside a colorful box with smiling humans on the front. It said "Hello, Dolly!" at the top in bright letters. He immediately went home and watched it. That was how Wall-E learned about holding hands. It was quickly the movie he watched the most, until it was the only movie he watched, over and over again. He folded his metal claws together as he watched, and it was a little bit like holding hands, but Wall-E wanted to learn about holding someone else's hand.
That was how Wall-E learned what it meant to be lonely.
ende