The Sheriff of Faraday

The ninth day of the bicentennial eclipse had been unlike any other days on that distant sector of Faraday. For starters, Faraday’s eclipses only ever lasted the course of a workday, with the exception of the eclipse of August 3rd, 5933, in which the solar alignment lasted for exactly 24 hours. Interestingly enough, the only arrest that was successfully carried out that day was when George Harlon was detained for his late grandfather’s charge of public urination.

The “Harlon Case” aside, the eclipses, which had become famous for the way that they refracted the atmosphere at certain times of day like a kaleidoscope, had not ever fluctuated in their schedule before. They would always begin on the third day of the eighth month of the year, once every fifty years. At exactly 3:52 AM, to be exact.

The alignment of all fifty-seven baby suns over the sky at this time, through some strange thermodynamic phenomenon that no one in all of Faraday had ever bothered to figure out, would bring the temperature down to “a bit cooler than usual” degrees Fahrenheit (as opposed to “thermometers don’t work because they explode out here” degrees Celsius). This system of using descriptive adjectives as opposed to numbers was first pioneered by Dr. Carmichael Faraday
himself, who, among other worthless accomplishments, such as being the first man to earn more than one PhD from another planet, founded the town of Faraday and constructed its unique defense system before he himself was caught in the act of sexual congress with a bag of cocaine
and was promptly decapitated by forty-six rapid fire high caliber gunshots. 

Although early in the morning, the first stray rays from the infant stars would slither out from between the nebulas of the night and threaten to scorch the little village into nothingness
(which would have been the case, had the houses — like all the foreign matter on the planet,
 including the townsfolk — not been altered and mutated by these same rays to thrive on the infernal world [These mutations had no ill effects on the inanimate building materials, but cursed the humans with a chicken pox-like skin disease which burned like hell after a hard workout.]).

In the age when Dr. Faraday and his plucky crew arrived on the scalded rock, The good doctor had the first town built to emulate the romanticized locales of Earth’s wild west, complete with a saloon, barbershop, schoolhouse, hotel, windmill, and stable, all of which were loving recreations of the buildings of the time of showdowns and desperadoes. 

Yes, as anyone could see, Faraday had a theme — a theme broken only by the jailhouse, which had been constructed
from scraps of the original starcruiser which the ancestors who built Faraday arrived in. The haphazard dome had no paint or decorations, save for a tall pole just right of the jailhouse, bearing an aged megaphone, which, since the dawn broke, had been blaring nonstop.

On a usual day, most of the folks would be wide awake, sweating, panicking, and preparing futile attempts to hide or fight what was to come. Sometimes Johnny Bosch would be
 prancing about, yodeling from his window in his room above the saloon, attempting to convince his newest lover to allow him to procreate with her before he was hauled off. 

Downstairs, Abner Fitch, the bartender, would be shoving his barrels of moonshine deep beneath the floorboards of
the bar, all while Howard and Franklin Jennard, the twin boys, ran about hooting and hollering in the main street, rousing their neighbors from their homes. Then, as the thirtieth, fourth, and sixteenth baby suns would turn the dawn sky into a mirror of frolicking silver, the wake-up call would come.

There had not been the need for a wake-up call in eight days.
Back when things were normal, the call would come as a roaring, foghorn voice, signifying one thing for the poor people of Faraday. The Sheriff’s Boys were out and about.

“MOUNT UP!”

They would hurdle out of the jailhouse at the call from their leader Hoss. These six humanoid robots, each with a single treaded wheel in the place of legs, looked and acted identically, but it had long become tradition for the people of Faraday to dress up and decorate the robots the day before the eclipse. As a result, each robot was given an outfit and nickname to denote each other. Hoss was adorned in a ten-gallon hat perched atop his smooth, visored cranium, which would be fastened in place with a dollop of cambull glue.

Hoss was famous for the twin megaphones molded to the sides of his head, which would project his computerized voice to the people of Faraday. Not that he had much to say. As Hoss was not a living thing, he had not learned any words or phrases other than “mount up,” “freeze, you crook,” and a recital of the Miranda warning, and therefore found it pointless to attempt to commune through these statements. As Hoss and company thundered out of the jailhouse doors and onto the main street, he mimed clearing his throat, before roaring his words for all to hear.

“FREEZE, YOU CROOK!”

“Cheese it!” young Howard Jennard would yell. “The Sheriff's Boys’re here! Everyone scatter!” The people of Faraday sprinted as they could, out of their homes and heading for the
hills, while a few chanced peeks out of their curtains, saw the chaos, and ducked back down.

Hoss and the others wasted no time in rapidly approaching them and scanning them. There was no need to be picky. The Sheriff’s Boys could easily outspeed the people if they wanted to, but as it stood, it was far easier for them to separate the criminals from the innocents by herding them down the streets.

Hoss’s sensors locked onto a young woman in the crowd, and he sped up to approach her.

Maria Fetters, he registered. Great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Felicia Fetters. Crimes:
Petty theft, cambull tipping, and public nuisance. Sentence: eight months. 

Hoss’s engine roared as he ripped through the wave of fearful humans. He raised one hand to hold his ten-gallon hat
 on his head. Hoss’s magnetized joints in his other arm began to shift and reconnect his arm into a spool of steel wire, fashioned like a lasso. The arm shot ahead, snaking around Ms. Fetters’
ankles and yanking her to the ground. Hoss began to broadcast the Miranda warning, drowning out the crowd’s panicked screams and yells as he pulled Ms. Fetters toward himself, his expressionless face unperturbed by her tears and frantic cries for help. She kicked and struggled
until Hoss’ Surround Sound audio sensors detected a wet, quiet snap, and she quieted her screeching to a light moaning. Hoss’ grip had shattered her shin.

The Fetters had lived on Faraday for sixteen generations, and they had developed a bit of an initiation sequence for the eldest daughter on the day of her first eclipse. This had become a strictly female ceremony ever since Terrence Fetters divorced his wife Lucriecia, before leaving her to care of their three sons and her daughter Felicia (no relation to the criminal). These boys would grow up to lead dull, uninteresting lives, with the pleasant exception being the middle brother, who would gain a significant amount of notoriety as the ringmaster of a flea circus.

Nonetheless, the tradition remained. The advice was quite simple. Don’t let them see your guilt.

Maria’s mother was a firm believer in the intelligence of the robots, which was complete unfounded and, as far as Maria was concerned, absurd. Just because the robots looked kind of like people didn’t mean they were people. If they felt emotions, she argued, why did they capture people with so much as a ‘hello?’ Maria had always thought a response to the eclipse was stupid, anyway, and so absolutely nothing about the advice she learned when she was seventeen was
keeping her safe at sixty-seven.

It had been a few hours since Maria was taken back to the jailhouse. She had given up on pleading and had fallen silent in thirty-six minutes of being taken away. Had her mutations not relocated her tear and sweat glands to the base of her spine, she mostly likely would have been bawling. The best she could manage was a dry heave which sounded oddly similar to the gurgled cries of an alley cat she had drowned in a ditch when she was nine. This had never been listed as
a crime because, quite frankly, when she had told her parents, they refused to believe that a cat was capable of surviving in a place like Faraday. They brushed it off as a spoiled little girl wasting time for attention and forgot all about the incident.

The jailhouse wasn’t intended to make its residents or prisoners feel uncomfortable, but ages of little to no attention had left the interior without much in the way of “fancy decor.” Not that there was any need for ornamentation. The single room was about the size of a ballroom and was completely dark. Or maybe it was really bright. Maria’s head was swimming down her gut and it seemed to be trying to get home, but it got stuck near her lungs and couldn’t get out. It was like this light. Not there when you needed it, but only when you didn’t.

During eclipses, Maria recalled from her school textbook, the conventional rules of light and space do not always apply.

“Hoss?”
Maria couldn’t understand why she thought of her jailer at that moment, but she was struggling against what she thought were chains in what reminded her of medieval torture
chambers and the color pink and suddenly she really just wanted to tell Hoss something.

“Hoss?”

In the dark that smelled like machine oil and glue, Maria baked in silence like it was a warm, fuzzy feeling. After nine minutes exactly, she was aware of the cold, inanimate surface
that hovered in front of Maria’s face. She wasn’t sure which one of The Sheriff’s Boy’s it had been, but Had she been a little girl again, she might have been star-struck at the chance to be so close to this legend, let alone being able to talk to him.

She spoke slowly, with the grin intonations of someone on their deathbed choosing their last words. Unfortunately, as emotional intent is lost on someone like Hoss, that only made Maria said next all the more ridiculous and confusing. She spoke between parched sobs, heaving for oxygen with each pause.

“‘In…5276, Doc..Doctor Carmichael Faraday…found a solution to the livestock issue of the..then-code named Planet Goldilocks-5, via…splicing the genes of dromedary camels and cows. These experiments are known today as ‘cambulls,’ and serve a variety of purposes in our daily lives. Yet, when these multipur……purpose beasts of burden were first unveiled,…Dr. Faraday was vilified and ridiculed. They accused of playing gif and had threatened to kill him, and they succeeded in killing many of the first cambulls until it was revealed that the camels and bulls that had been brought to the planet had procreated of their own will, and that Faraday
merely helped these burgeoning animals become an entirely new species. And yet, those first cambulls are neither mourned nor remembered for their sacrifice.’”

Maria coughed.
“That’s…that’s a quote from my old school textbook…before the paper had been
 heat-treated, they soaked those books in liquid nitrogen to keep them cool. Buy you get it, right?

You see, Hoss? I think you do. Everyone in this town fears what they can’t understand. You must think we hate you. We don’t. We shouldn’t. Our ancestors made you because they knew we couldn’t make it this far on our own.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Hoss. Never forget that.”

She coughed once more, and then she could no longer feel that cold slate in front of her.

In fact, she could no longer feel anything.

She had smelled of clover, Hoss would have thought if he could think days later. Not that he was sure it was that long after. Days later, there was nothing. Something had happened. That odd eclipse didn’t go away. It was still cool enough for The Sheriff’s Boys to continue their work. 

Faraday’s criminals were gone. Faraday’s innocents were gone. The other Sheriff’s Boys, due to the destruction of the windmill, were unable to charge their batteries, so they, too, were gone.

There was only Hoss. Well, Hoss and the cambulls. But mostly just Hoss.

Hoss’ final moments, if he was alive, could have had him pointlessly wander about the ruined wastes of the town, shattered from gunfight after gunfight after gunfight. Hoss’ final moments could have had him ponder on certain things he still didn’t know, like what is justice? What is peace? Are they different? Does it matter?

Did it ever matter?

Hoss’ final moments could have had him go through a range of emotional realizations, like the irony of his creation at the hands of those he was built to punish, or how with no one left
to arrest, the most logical thing to do was to throw himself off a cliff with some poetic epitaph for a grave that would never be.

Hoss did none of this.
He merely sat among the wistful cambulls. The cambulls had, by some miracle, found a patch of shrubbery around the back of the saloon’s remains, and were more than content to
guzzle a clear liquid from the barrels that certainly wasn’t water, but didn’t spike anything on Hoss’ built-in breathalyzer. So, Hoss sat down among these innocent, grazing animals, thinking on what he would think if he could think, and counted down his battery’s percentage until he remembered he couldn’t count.