A little more of the War on Drugs...

It'll begin on a winter day.

The old man enters a vegetative state soon after a failed operation on a brain tumor.
A robot stands by his side every morning of the winter of that year,
telling him the stories of their travels, conquests together,
and the boy had been so intent on fighting the world,
had wanted to die fighting, kicking, screaming,
in tears, was sure there was a meaning,
even in the search itself,
but now,

the IQ of a one-month-old infant, immobilized, catatonic...

So the robot hopes to wake him up, and near the end of their travels, the robot tells of this concert where the boy screamed, to the world, to everyone, and he was laughing for almost 3 minutes, nonstop afterwards, and the robot himself starts to scream, and he begins to scream-cry, because he didn't see any meaning in life, because all his emotions were built from the programmed simulation of neurochemicals, and they were every bit as real, or perhaps more real, than the boy's, and the boy was more of a machine than he, and the boy would die not-fighting, and he would be right in saying there was nothing at all in the end, and...!

Oh, I need an ending!
What should happen to the robot? I'd like something ironic, like the robot entering a vegetative state after an operation going wrong, or... in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the main character turns into a vegetable, but I wouldn't like to copy them, see...

How about fireworks? It's night, and the man's fallen asleep, and the robot realizes he'll die eventually anyway, and the robot pulls the plug on him, and it rains and it rains as he does so, and the lightnings light a million shadows around the boy, and his arms look like the arms of Shiva, spread around the robot, and the boy-god is staring at the robot intently now, peacefully, and the robot falls asleep at the foot of the dead god. The next day, it keeps raining, and the robot realizes he's lost the argument, and the boy fought in the end, and so he decides to leave for Seattle to work at a bookstore. As he leaves,

See, I suppose I'm pretty skilled at coming up with stories on the spot... What should come next?

As he leaves, he stops by a robot repair shop, because he never wants to die, and being human really sucks. The music playing there is some crazy punk band singing about killing people and themselves, and he laughs, because merely existing was amazing, and suicide was stupid, and he would never die, and he suddenly feels horribly guilty listening to the song, so he leaves for lunch.

The scene switches back to the band so long ago, and the boy is screaming wildly and cursing onstage and laughing himself silly with a childish grin, and everyone else is jumping up and around because they're pretty much high on E...

I think...
Tis almost as corny as PSKT,
and a whole lot worse than Ken...
and so I really must revise the story sometime....

I'm beginning to doubt my own writing skills, as are many, many teachers,
though I mustn't quit! I really do want to become a sort of text-heavy comic book writer...

ENFP again, naturally.