Prologue

In the vast regions of outer space, beyond the twinkling lights of a million stars, a murky, smog-covered Earth floats lonely and silent. The deepest oceans are all but dried and gone. What had once been blue sky is now a dust-choked brown that can still look almost golden when sunlight filters through it.

Beneath the thick atmosphere that surrounds the planet, mountains still rise up through the haze, and once-great cities filled with vacant, crumbling buildings share the landscape with towers of trash, neatly cubed and stacked as far as the eye can see. Only one thing moves along this bleak twenty-ninth-century skyline.

Day in and day out, for more than seven hundred years, he has worked to clean up the mess left by humankind. The scouring sands that sweep along the avenues seldom deter him as he thrusts his shovel-like hands into the heaps of trash and scoops it into the compacting unit in his chest. Once full, he closes the squeaky doors of his front panel, shakes a little, and produces yet another perfect cube ready to be stacked.

This is his directive.

It is what he has been programmed to do.

His name is WALL · E: Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class.

He is a robot.

He is dented, dirty, and rusted ...

And he is about to change the entire world.