Brobots Page 4

  ‘No. It’s a formal complaint I’m making. I can’t afford for more units to go down on me so if you’re not replacing the three units I’ve lost free of charge - or addressing my concerns about the quality of the new batch of batteries you put in them - then that keeps me concerned about our future working relationship. I got tens of units twice the age as my new ones, and they ain’t retiring any time soon. So your new batteries are duff. I may not make the purchases, but I am responsible for deadlines on some of our larger construction projects. You can be sure that I speak for the whole of DC when I pass this on. Now, how do I file the complaint?’

  Alissa took down his details so she could email him the relevant form to complete online. He hung up, and Shaun turned back to his work having stopped to watch when Alex had raised his voice on the phone.

  ‘Darn shoddy new units.’ Alex exclaimed. Shaun nodded, looking busy on his spreadsheets already. Alex reclined in his seat, looked out the window and sipped his coffee dregs thinking as he watched the workers out the window dutifully carrying out their work like wind-up toys. At least site management wasn’t the stress it was when his father was of working age; at least, that’s what his father had always said. He doubted whether all that much had really changed. Snags. Unforeseen hitches; shoddy workmanship from suppliers. Managers breathing down your neck. ‘One week’, he said. ‘One week, and I’m going to the papers. The public won’t like the idea of men who lift heavy shit over their heads suddenly dropping their loads. If the supplier won’t play ball, we’ll shame them into doing so. God that sucks. I shouldn’t need to do this.’ He put a call in to the company CEO.

  Jared

  It was turning out to be a mundane Tuesday in the office. Jared’s line manager had dropped by at completely the wrong time to remind him about deadlines and a new project. He reflected defiantly that, with his flow state disrupted, he was now a full 20 minutes further behind on said deadline than he would have been had the manager left him with his code.

  All morning he’d had moments of thinking about the Brobotic Construcsapli Sentient back home on the dining table; lifeless, attractive, an unknown quantity, a mystery. If he repaired the man, would the man even thank him? Was he even repairable? Was he even nice? Jared shook his head in disgust at himself as he caught his mind going all the way to kinky zone and keeping the broken machine as an occasional sex toy.

  But that wasn’t Jared. Jared was interested in fixing, tinkering, repairing, nurturing and hopefully getting to make a new friend. The whole idea of ‘lover’ was just too far fetched. However, Jared couldn’t help but sense his deep inner wish in that regard. A wish that, when the two of them did finally meet, they would grow to like each other more than as friends. You always were a dreamer, son. He thought the words, but it was his deceased mother’s voice that was saying them.

  After lunch the thoughts about his mystery man only increased. He grew fidgety and was switching between coding and browsing for Brobotic information every half hour. One of those moments, of course, coincided with an inter-booth visit from Jason.

  Jason had in fact been standing behind Jared in full view of his console screen a good 30 seconds before saying something.

  ‘Brobotics, huh?’

  Jared, startled, swiveled in his chair and blushed.

  ‘Some of those dudes are so motherfreaking hot. Bet you got a secret kinky thing for them, J!’

  ‘Um….ugh….No! No, actually. Strange as it might sound I’m helping Yana with some research on a story.’

  ‘Mmmhmmm!’

  ‘Am too. And it’s none of your freaking business.’

  ‘Oh. You know me. Always looking for some gossip.’

  ‘You are. Now, what’s up?’

  ‘Oh…Nothin’. Just wanted a chat. I’ve been looking at the same documentation for hours and I’ve now lost the will to live.’

  ‘Project Altitude?’

  ‘Yep. That’s the one.’

  ‘The thing’s a monster.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Hey,’ Jason changed his mood, ‘You busy tonight? Some of the guys are doing softball in the park. Wanna play?’

  ‘Ah’, Jared leaned back, rubbed his face. He looked out the window, thought about not being able to wait to get home. ‘No, I can’t today. I’m cleaning the house. I have friends visiting later this week,’ he lied.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘But… invite me next time, hey?’

  ‘Sure! Okay. Leavin’ you to your robotic bromance.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Almost.’ (Jason stole a chocolate from Jared’s top drawer.)

  With Jason shimmying off back to his coding cub hole via the coffee machine Jared looked back at his screen. No, Jared. Do some work. That way you’ll be keeping pace with your work and then you can leave for home on time.

  RT had a pitifully short walkies that evening. Once back at Jared’s house she looked at him and whined like she knew she’d been short-changed. ‘Yeah, well. Look at it this way sweet heart. You had a bigger than usual walk last night and we can’t do that every evening. Besides, now you get to eat dinner super early! Yes you do!’ He rubbed her jaw and head as she hung out her tongue all stupid-like and wagged her tail so Jared knew that he was already forgiven. Once in, it was a joint race for the food bowl. (RT always won of course.)

  Jared checked the house for signs that Alma had been around. He couldn’t see anything moved. Sometimes she’d forget her cardigan, or a few things would be put in new places.

  She felt sorry for Jared losing both parents – one of them, a friend, so early in life. Being older than they had been she’d seen Jared grow up, move away, and return alone. But it worked two ways; Jared took care of Alma’s pups when she was away. And if she ever fell ill (which was rare) he would do trips to the chemists for her and so on. Neither of them knew many others in their street. They were a village community of two.

  Back in the kitchen to grab a glass of water from the tap, Jared saw a scrap of paper on the window ledge: ‘Who’s your new friend? Alma x.’

  Sheesh. Nothing ever got past her! Thankfully, Alma was very bright and also open-minded. She wouldn’t have thought anything sinister (for example, a corpse) or anything kinky (she knew Jared simply loved fixing machines). Oh well! Jared said to the kitchen ceiling. Better out than in.

  Finally in the lounge with the other day’s duties taken care of, Jared removed the dust sheets Alma had placed back on top of Byron. He looked the guy over and felt a rush of strong feelings. Admiration. Lust. Sorrow. Enthusiasm. He didn’t waste time recollecting the names of feelings. He removed Byron’s right round cap work boot and was surprised to find a cotton sock neatly pulled on. Taking that off he was able to locate the serial plate nestled into the right foot arch.

  ‘Construcsapli. Derivative of Brobotics, Inc.

  Serial number: 4942-307Z-YU59-C

  Make: Brobotics Construction Worker Type D

  Face/body: Unique

  Name: Byron’

  Jared stood upright and looked at the fading twilight out the window. He moved to draw the curtains and switch on some lights. ‘Hello Byron. Nice to meet you. I’m Jared and… I hope I can get you fixed.’

  He realized he’d largely been looking in the wrong places for information so far. He’d assumed it would all be available via Brobotics’ website. But a quick check revealed Construcsapli had its own separate operations. Much as he’d figured, he could do little in terms of accessing schematics or maintenance manuals without a customer account or any warranty papers. But he did manage to establish that “type D” was their latest model.

  ‘Look at that, Byron. You’re all shiny and new n’all. Two years old, tops. So why did someone leave you in the trash crate so quickly?’

  Jared considered his options and realized he didn’t have any right now. Too many school boy errors with hobby electrical kits as a kid had taught h
im to take a considered approach to anything mechanical, electrical or virtual: hence being a good programmer. He didn’t even want to open any concealed compartments without knowing what he was looking at, and these amazing machines were a completely unknown quantity to him.

  Standing over the table and sipping his water, Jared decided that all he could do was wash Byron’s incredibly dusty clothes before they tracked mess anywhere else in the house. He took off the other boot and sock, then unbuttoned Byron’s shirt at the chest and wrists and carefully slid it off. The attention to detail, he noted, was incredible. In the artificial house light at least, Jared couldn’t tell the man was a machine. The skin was soft to the touch and had elasticity like real skin. Chest hairs were punched in. Byron even had nipples. The inward belly button, however, housed a small plastic rectangle: possibly a light, and faint lines wrapped around the shoulders and elbows revealing the joints were mechanical.

  He moved round to the other side of the table and undid Byron’s belt. With that off he was able to wiggle Byron’s cargo pants off. Having seen that Byron wore socks, he wasn’t too surprised to see some briefs under the pants. He was surprised, however, to see that they looked …branded.

  ‘Do you get to choose your own wardrobe?!’ he asked Byron. He imagined Byron saying, ‘Hell, yeah! I love shopping!’ in a sort of muscle-Mary camp tone. Then he shivered. No way this dude speaks like that. Funny, though. It’s like he has taste or something.

  There was of course a bit of curious inspecting once the briefs were off. Byron’s maker may have gotten something fundamental wrong in his construction, but it wasn’t his member. The clothes were bundled together and placed into the washer on a long rinse. The rest of the night was spent cuddling Artie on the sofa whilst thumbing through the Internet looking for any trace of a story about faults with Construcsapli’s type D’s.

  Just before bed he tapped off his tablet and leaned his head back on the armrest of the big settee. ‘You know what, Artemis? Yana’s good with snooping just like you. Yes she is! And Daddy’s gonna see what snooping Yana can do.’

  On Wednesday, during his lunch break, Jared phoned Yana. When it went straight to voicemail for the third time he remembered. Yana was off on business until Monday. Asking his journalist friend for a favor was going to have to wait until then.

  A long, slow week set in. Wednesday night was spent sulking and taking RT for a longer walk out of guilt about the night before. Thursday night (the whole night) was spent getting Byron’s body up the staircase and into the spare bedroom without causing any further damage to the machine, or any damage to Jared’s décor either. Friday night was movie flicks and pizza; and the weekend was spent hanging out with Jason.

  This latter action was a callous move on Jared’s part. He knew that a weekend with his nosy work colleague would keep him off his back a little in the week to follow; and that could only be a good thing with a mystery to unravel and an exciting gossip coffee moment with Yana to arrange.

  Yana

  It was Monday night. Yana was still tired from her travelling and a busy itinerary in the week previous. But Jared being Jared and sounding desperate to meet up she’d agreed to go to their favorite coffee parlor in town after work. They were now sitting in their favorite booth. It had plush plum-red leather seats and a window view across the street. Autumn was definitely coming; it was raining. The reflections of the town’s lights in puddles conjured up fanciful or nostalgic thoughts of raincoat-clad strangers in black-and-white movies doing an umbrella-wielding dance. The mountain ranges beyond could usually be seen from their seat; tonight they were fully out of view.

  Back in the room, Yana realized Jared was still chattering on at her obsessively about his curious find and his inability to know where to start in working out what was wrong with it. Him. Byron. All manner of thoughts carouselled past her mind:

  Boys and their toys.

  Jared’s obsession with fixing anything but himself.

  An orphaned friend just trying to make sense of adult life much as anyone was.

  Men always thinking with their dicks?

  Jared never being content to be with someone well-adjusted who didn’t need any fixing. How that characteristic would take him a long time to work out for himself.

  What his life would be like if she didn’t help. What it would be like if she did.

  Why men and women felt the need to create life artificially at all. Is it to protect ourselves against the environment, time, each other? To understand ourselves?

  She realized she didn’t know the answer to that. Plus, Jared’s life could be better. She stirred her coffee and lifted it to her lips while thinking of a response and letting him finish.

  ‘…I mean…he’s amazing, Yana! So life-like! And he must be only two years old. Tops. So why would Dartonia throw him away like that? It doesn’t make sense, right? So, I figured, there has to be something wrong with him. But I did some digging online and found nothing. No clues, and I didn’t want to tinker. So then I thought I’d talk to you: see if you could use your journalism skills to find out more, you know?’

  It wasn’t an unreasonable thought. ‘My employers sometimes send our stories national if they’re good enough.’ She put her coffee down. ‘Everyone remembers Construcsapli being in the papers the first time. Was it right to create Sentients? What would it do to job markets? The fact that they hadn’t tested them properly and were letting early customers down. You know? All that stuff. So… there’s a good chance that if there is a story here – which we don’t know that there is – it’s national not local. So yes, I’ll investigate.’

  Jared beamed, ‘Thank you!’

  ‘But! We don’t know it’s a story yet. It could just be a one-off. Maybe it was faulty and just out of warranty. Maybe there was just some bad luck. And I can’t snoop on my own time; I’m not insured that much. But I’ll do some paid snooping and if there is a story I’ll do it for work and make sure to dig more.’

  ‘You’re the best, Yana!’ Jared whooped.

  Yana sipped. ‘But I still don’t get how this will help you? Dish the dirt on Construcsapli letting a customer down and they go all “sorry we’ll do anything to make it up to you, Miss reporter Ma’am. Here, have some spare parts.”? It doesn’t work that way. They’re more likely to tell me to get lost.’

  ‘Well… Maybe it’s happened before? Maybe Byron’s not the first? If you can find out what’s caused the malfunction then, y’know, perhaps the construction firm will benefit. Maybe they’ve been short-changed. You help them. They help you. I thought you could then ask them for a few extra faulty parts replacements and bring them my way. I can’t access support or parts supply without any ownership paperwork. I don’t even want to let on that I took the unit from the construction site trash because that’s trespassing and, well, some people would say weird.’

  ‘It is weird getting yourself a fuck toy, yes. But you’re Jared.’

  ‘And gee thanks. Not a fuck toy. So ignoring that and moving on… Without a key-in I’m kinda stuck and so is Byron. I can’t think what else to do.’

  ‘It’s a long shot, Jared. A really long shot. But… like I say. I’ll explore and let you know. Now, ask me how last week was.’

  Once Yana had bullied a better conversational exchange out of Jared (the one that she wanted to have rather than the one he’d planned for them) the tiredness drained all trace of sociability from her body. She agreed to call in a few days and caught the next taxi pod home to a hot bath with dead-sea salts, candles, and a little bit of opera.

  Her soap bubble islands became visual representations of chess pieces on a board. Shady characters in big corporates giving information away by what they didn’t say were represented by trails of soap as the islands moved above her submerged fingers.

  ‘Now comes Construcsapli; a whole new island. What are you about little island? And why have you pooped all over Dartonia I wonder? Is there something there? Give me your secrets and wash dirt from my
skin.’

  Things took a serendipitous turn for Jared on Tuesday afternoon in Yana’s office. But Jared wouldn’t find out quite yet. Being the reporter (among other things) for tech-related pieces in the city the call had piped straight through to her.

  It was a call from one Alex Grapelli of Dartonia. Once the call had been taken and Yana had turned her shorthand into more organized notes, she leaned back in her swivel chair and bit her electronic pencil. If only this kinda thing happened more often!, she said to herself. Out loud, she added: ‘But when it does, that usually means the story is big. How big, I wonder?’

  By the time Yana got to the south side construction site Wednesday at 10am for her meeting with Mr. Grapelli, plans had already changed on his side. He met her at the site entrance, gave her a safety briefing, a hard hat and a hivis jacket, and took her to the building site to show her the work in progress. Units moved politely out of the visitor’s way or stopped their work to clear the path for them without speaking to them; only to each other.

  Alex took her up a few levels to show off the pre-fabricated printed components of the construction as well as the welding and other handiwork of the units. Nodding, smiling, and hoping that she had made enough sounds of being impressed, Alex finally led her back down to ground level and over to a far corner of the site (away from his cabin office) to a wooden outbuilding with a meeting room.

  On the way there he explained. ‘I’m to hand you over to Dartonia’s CEO for the rest of this meeting.’

  ‘Oh?’ Yana was surprised.

  ‘Yes. Matters have been taken out of my hands already as usual. I briefed him – his name’s Michael by the way – about the complaint I’d filed shortly before I put a call through to your news office yesterday. He’s agreed to proceeding with contacting the press of course – otherwise you wouldn’t be here - but all he said to me was that he was party to information that I didn’t have and so he’d fly down and be here to meet you today.’