Harry's Coming for New Years
Written by Jackson Jewell
Edited by Jackson Jewell
On January 2nd, 1940, the front pages of newspapers across the United States were occupied by a striking image. A young woman, battered and stained with soot and blood, being carried to safety by a mechanical man. The automaton’s wide face, cracked eye lens, and ripped dust coverings showed the heroic efforts it had gone to in performing this rescue. In an age of mechanized death, it was easy to forget that sometimes, machines are capable of good. The automaton framed by this picture was Unit H-377, an industrial model in use by the Fulcrum Construction Company of Victoria, British Canada. In its arms was Julia Duchamp, a seamstress from Seattle, Washington, one of many thousands of civilians who had been trapped in the rubble left in the wake of the firebombing that had occurred just days earlier.
The residents of Victoria had watched the glow across the water as their sister cities burned in the phosphoric fires of the Russian attack on December 27th. Though each city owed allegiance to different states, politicians, and even ideologies, geography is hard to deny. The web of relations was tangled, with many citizens having relatives, friends, or jobs in the other cities. Heedless of the danger, small boats departed to struggle across the choppy water as soon as the screams reached their shore. These crafts arrived in Seattle with open holds and helpful hands, rushing the survivors on board and away from the quickly spreading pillars of flame.
“I got a call from the cap’n at around half-past-three in the morning. The phone likely wouldn’t have woken me, but the awful droning from the planes had roused my daughter, and we were having a hell of a time putting her back to sleep. He says to me that Seattle’s burning. Burning white hot. The cap’n said that we had to do something about it. So, I puts on me gear and heads to the dock. The passage across the bay was silent, save for the roar. Those fires, even water couldn’t put them out. When we reached the harbor, there was heaps of people backed up to the edges of the piers, trapped there by the fire. We took as many as we could, but it wasn’t enough. Twelve trips we made that night. By the third, the waters was thick with bodies.” -William “Bill” Roper, Sailor, Advisable
Over the next few days, as formal pronouncements were made and the world sank deeper into the crushing depths of the Great War, the city council of Victoria made a decision. Though their laws strictly forbade the exporting of automata technology, they made no such explicit forbiddance of loaned units to be sent in with their handlers. And so on New Year’s Day, the 'Harrybots' were taken off of their factory lines, worksites, and stockyards and sent into the ruins of Seattle. Far stronger and more durable than the average man, the autonomous workers dug into the rescue efforts. Lifting beams, digging into collapsed structures, and carrying injured people out to safety. Thanks to their efforts, and the people working alongside them, thousands were saved from slow and painful deaths.
“I heard a sound, like metal shearing, and for the first time in god knows how long, I saw light peeking through the rubble. I summoned the last of my strength and cried out, though my lips were cracked and coated in dust. When that metal man tore the beam that was trapping me, tears that I didn’t know I still had started flowing, I was going to live!” -Fran Smith, former Belltown resident
Very soon, the people of Victoria and Seattle would be at war with each other, and both knew that this was the likely outcome of the event. But for this moment, despite the bleak promise of the future, human nature, their empathy, and basic desire to help one another, won out.
Through it all, humanity keeps marching on.
