After Hilargi had fixed the dent in Yair’s helmet and brushed his hair, Hilargi told him to go help out with the chores that needed to be done in the fortress. First, Yair set about helping the women with the laundry. Although Yair helped the women finish a little bit earlier than they otherwise would have, he found the task to be surprisingly difficult. His arm canon made it difficult to carry the clothes and sheets to the laundry room. He didn’t realize that fingers were so integral to humans. With his meager emotions, he felt the stress of not being able to perform a function to his greatest ability, and the difficulties that came with it.

Next, he helped the women clean up the fortress, starting with the mess hall. He found this task just as difficult. He had to hold a broom with one hand, and hold the dustpan steady with the other. The problem was that his arm canon made it nearly impossible again. The women giggled as he tried to one-handedly sweep dirt and fallen food into a dustpan that was pushed further away from him every time something was moved into it. He frowned, feeling something akin to the human emotion of frustration and embarrassment. However, one of the women eventually helped him by holding the dustpan still for him. He thanked the woman, giving her a smile. The woman looked disconcerted by the smile, and Yair had to remind himself that he was the only robot in the Wasteland who was programmed with feelings.

Next, Yair bumped into the Last Man, Nikodemus, again in the entryway of the facility. Yair decided he liked the Last Man--he wasn't sure he would at first, since he was afraid he would hurt Hilargi, but now, he thought the man was a good one. He couldn’t tell if it was because Hilargi had programmed him to want a father figure, of if it was just something innate within his algorithms, but he wanted to learn more about him, especially because he was the only man left.

As he passed Nikodemus, he practiced his smile and he waved at him with his fingered hand. “How are you, Nikodemus?”

The Last Man yawned and stretched, and then he shrugged. “Kind of bored. Is there anything I can help you with, Yair?”

Yair gave it some deep thought. What he wanted to do was perform his primary function: Defending the nymphs from any would-be invaders by standing watch outside with the Nymph women. However, Ellia was intent on keeping him a secret, he could not do this. Therefore, he had little to do but try and help the women perform chores around the fortress. Because he felt like he had extra time to do so, he shrugged and decided to ask Nikodemus some questions.

“I suppose you can help me by answering some questions. I don’t have much else to do.” Yair glanced at Nikodemus’ two guards. “That is, if it’s okay with your guards.”

Elizabeth and Annie glanced at each other, and then both shrugged as well.

“I don’t see the harm in it.” Annie said.

Yair wasn’t precisely sure what he even wanted to ask. “Excellent.” Yair stated—stroking his chin as he had seen humans do when they were thinking. “How about we go outside to talk—to the back of the fortress to avoid any enemy tribes seeing us?” Yair suggested, his eyes drifting to Elizabeth’s and Annie’s pleadingly.

Nikodemus was grinning, looking at the robot curiously. Clearly, he was very intrigued by the fact that the robot was different from the other robots he knew.

“I don’t see the harm in it so long as you keep it brief and lie low.” Annie said accommodatingly.

Yair felt a fluttering in his systems—like there was an extra pulse of electricity within him—akin to, perhaps, excitement.

It was a good feeling.

The four of them walked down the hallway together and out the back door of the building after Elizabeth had pressed her hand against the hand-reader.

Yair glanced at Nikodemus and saw that the man was stretching while looking out upon the vast desert lands in front of them. The sun was still high in the sky, but gradually going down. The sun felt… good on Yair’s metallic casing. Inside the fortress, it was fairly cold due to the air conditioning. Because of this, the warmth was welcome, despite the fact that it was blazing.

As if Nikodemus could read Yair’s mind, he said, “That feels good on my skin! Too bad it will feel suffocatingly warm soon enough.”

Nikodemus knelt and grabbed a handful of sand. He smiled as he watched it slip through his fingers.

Yair watched curiously, and then imitated the behavior, following his programming to appear more human. Nikodemus glanced at him with a raised eyebrow, and then chuckled. “What are you doing?”

Yair affected a smile. “I’m trying to be more human. What are you doing?”

Nikodemus shook his head with an incredulous smile, sniffing his laughter. The Last Man sat down and crossed his legs. He began digging sand out in front of him, forming a perimeter in the shape of a rectangle. “Human? Who even knows what that is anymore…” Nikodemus snorted. “As for what I was doing, I was trying to recapture my childhood. Me and my brother used to make things out of sand. Well… We used to try to make things out of sand, anyway. Most of the time what we ended up making was a mess.”

Yair imitated Nikodemus’ behavior again. He sat down, trying to cross his metal legs as best he could, and tried to form something with his fingered hand.

He prevented himself from looking at Nikodemus. He wanted to see if he could come up with something creative without copying the Last Man. He found that it was extremely difficult. All he could think of to try and make was a sand person. However, like everything else he had been trying to do that day, it was extremely difficult with just one hand.

Nikodemus murmured to himself after a moment of silence, “I bet using beach sand would be much easier to form things with…”

“Beach sand?” Yair repeated.

Nikodemus nodded. “Yes. There are some works I’ve read that speak of beaches. The sand is thicker and softer… You can bury your toes in it, and apparently, it’s completely relaxing. And by this thick blanket of sand is a huge body of water—ocean water, to be exact—that is miles and miles long, and you can swim in it.”

Yair paused in his construction of his sand-person, which was looking more like a crumbling ball at this point. He stared forward, completely enthralled by what Nikodemus was telling him. His algorithms could barely process the idea of a body of water so huge that a human could swim in it. He found it fascinating how much he wanted to experience such a thing that he could barely even process. “A huge body of water?”

“Yep!” Nikodemus replied. “Supposedly, beaches, grasses, and trees used to be abundant in the Wasteland, but they obviously haven’t been for… hundreds of years. I wonder where something so big could have disappeared to. In fact, I wonder how the world became… this, or if it ever was green to begin with and stories of it being green and watery are just… stories.”

Yair listened to Nikodemus intently. He had been programmed with as much knowledge as Hilargi had about how the Wasteland may have been green in the past.

“I think it must have been green and watery at some point. It had to have been if humans survived so long on it without the use of genetically engineering the plants.” Yair responded, pulling a file about human history from his databanks.

Nikodemus sighed. “I suppose so. I just wish we knew more about what the world used to be like. It feels like human history was deleted at some point, and now we only have one-hundred year’s worth of knowledge of our history.”

Yair felt his frustration, although he was sure he didn’t feel it nearly as deeply as Nikodemus did. After all, Yair was not human, and was not afflicted by the fact that food and water was scarce as humans were.