Tiny Robot Archimedes

Tiny Robot Archimedes once built a ship. Well, it was more a schooner.  Well, no, it was actually more of a sailboat. That is, it was a few planks nailed together while Archimedes held up a towel tied to a stick.

But by tiny robot standards, it was a ship.

Archimedes, after all, wasn’t built to build ships. He was built to solve mathematical equations and predict the outcome of certain events. Archimedes had thus far calculated the precise movements of pigeons while mating, the precise outcomes of humans while trying to mate, and the effects of pollen dust on bees’ flight patterns. If it had to do with nature, Archimedes could predict it (and if it had to do with nature, it was 98.4 percent likely to concern procreation).

Oceans, however, eluded tiny Archimedes. He had calculated the behavior of various sized puddles, as well as the movement of streams and lakes. Oceans, however, were just too large for Archimedes to calculate. Logically, the tiny robot would have to build a ship and survey the entirety of the world’s oceans to get the correct calculations.

To the naked eye, a human would think that Archimedes had built his ship poorly. Tiny Robot Archimedes, however, had built his ship well enough so that it would traverse the extent of his vision of the ocean: 2.9 miles. After 2.7 miles, Archimedes began to see errors in his calculations. Having not made the calculations for a return trip, however, he pushed on. Then he capsized.

Tiny Robot Archimedes was unable to make calculations about the water’s movement while he was in the water, though he was fascinated by the mating patterns of the fish, which often turned into fleeing patterns while larger fish enacted their eating patterns temporarily to continue their mating patterns again. The ocean was truly a wondrous place.

Tiny Robot Archimedes, being waterproof (but not buoyant), sat there for a good seventeen hours before he observed the current patterns and the patterns of passing vessels. Many were fishing vessels, no doubt humans exhibiting hunting rituals so that they can continue eating and mating. Tiny Archimedes moved a few more feet to the right, and… snag! He was up in a ship in no time.

This ship was much larger than his own and must have been made from beings who had made more thorough calculations about the ocean than himself. Tiny Robot Archimedes decided to stay with the fishermen. They placed an patch over his eye, limited his own vision, but optimized his cuteness among female humans in the harbor, thus allowing the sailors to mate more effectively. Tiny Robot Archimedes calculated that his presence in a harbor with an eye patch ran numbers similar to a man with a corgi puppy in a brothel. The new numbers fascinated Tiny Archimedes.

The sailors took the robot on as their mascot. Archimedes was able to obtain valuable data about ocean wave patterns, and sailing ship patterns and bullet trajectories. You see, the fishermen only used fishing as a cover. They were actually pirates, and they valued Archimedes for his abilities to predict the most efficient way to loot and to find loopholes in human beings’ living patterns (this usually involved fear and bullets and drowning and fire). Archimedes had become a pirate robot, though he’d never stopped his current primary objective: making calculations to predict the movements of the ocean.

There eventually came a time where the pirates could not take Tiny Robot Archimedes into colder waters, due to it being Winter and their having an unwillingness to die. Archimedes threw himself off of the ship and onto a whale, which was headed for a whaling vessel the pirates had passed earlier. The pirates cried as the robot left. Archimedes added their tears to his calculations.

When the whale was caught, Archimedes hopped off of the dying whale and joined the crew. They were confused at first, but then they saw his eyepatch and laughed and continued their whale research, which involved puncturing the whale with several more holes than before. Archimedes added this to his memory files as well. He had never seen a humpback whale die from harpoon wounds before, so this experience was invaluable to him.

The men brought the tiny robot back with them to their home. The people there were very interested in Tiny Robot Archimedes’s studies and asked him many questions about his data findings. Following this, they built him the mightiest ship on the ocean and duct taped a harpoon to his body. So, adorned with eye patch and harpoon, Tiny Archimedes drifted out on his vessel  to continue his research until the mysteries of the world and the seas were finally calculated with less than a .01 percent margin of error. The whalers waved goodbye and Archimedes added their tears to his data.