this is a story i wrote in 2004 but never got around to illustrating it.

“The adventures of bugbot#4”

It’s a great day for a launch, the sun is shining and there isn’t a cloud in sight.

The rocket is sitting on the launch pad, hooked up to a fuel truck.

Other support vehicles are scurrying around on the tarmac.

In the control room everyone is looking at their screens as final system checks are performed.

Finally the rocket is ready for launch, all vehicles and personnel clear the launch pad.

The Launch goes smoothly, as seen on one of the screens in the control room.

The spacecraft shoots through the atmosphere.

As it is about to enter space, a small metallic box falls off of it.

The spacecraft continues on its mission into space.

The small metallic box pops open a parachute…

…Lands in a desert, rolls on the ground and falls into some animal’s burrow.

The spacecraft continues onwards to Europa.
( Europa is the sixth of Jupiter’s known satellites and the fourth largest; it is the second of the Galilean moons. Europa is slightly smaller than the Earth’s Moon. Europa has a thin outer layer of ice. The images of Europa’s surface strongly resemble images of sea ice on Earth. It is possible that beneath Europa’s surface ice there is a layer of liquid water, perhaps as much as 50 km deep, kept liquid by tidally generated heat. If so, it would be the only place in the solar system besides Earth where liquid water exists in significant quantities.From this one might conclude that there is a good chance for life on this satellite.)

Five years later it reaches Europa. It deploys three metallic boxes and then maintains orbit.

The three boxes pop open their parachutes and then gently touch down one the icy surface.

The orbiting spacecraft sends a signal back to earth. The people in the control room send out an activation signal to all the boxes.

The shiny boxes open and out crawl little centipede like bugbots.

In the desert on earth, the dust covered box opens and out crawls the 4th bugbot.

On Europa, the robots split up; bugbot#1 goes north, bugbot#2 west and bugbot#3 goes south.

In the desert, bugbot#4 heads east.

In the control room THERE IS CONCERN it seems that there is something wrong with the fourth bugbot, its signal is very weak, the data it is sending back is garbled and the images are distorted.

(bugbot#4’s interactions with the inhabitants of the desert(on earth) and the messed up interpretations the people in the control room make of it, is the rest of the story.)