Broken Things Read online

  “I want to go home,” he told the man, fighting back more tears, “Please just let me go.”

  “You are home, kid, or as home as you’re ever going to see again.”

  “I want to call my parents,” he said.

  The man sighed and scratched his chin. “Why didn’t they ever give these things a power button?”

  “Please,” he said, “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

  The man studied him for a second, and then motioned back into the room. “Go sit down. Let’s talk for a minute.”

  Finally he’d found someone that could help him. Josh nodded, and allowed himself to be led back to the table and sat down. The man took the other seat across from him, resting his arms on the table. He wore a name tag that read Michael Hoskins. “Do you even know where you are? Do you know who you are?”

  He nodded. “My name is Josh Norton. I’m at Kidsmith.”

  “And do you know what we do here?”

  “You make and sell kids.”

  “Yes, we do sell kids, but we don’t make them here anymore. We refurbish models that can be fixed, and we scrap those that we can’t.”

  Josh sat up. “You can fix me?”

  “Perhaps. Tomorrow we have you scheduled for an exam. If we can fix you, we’ll replace what we can, wipe your memory, and resell you. If we can’t, well, hopefully we can recover a few usable parts, and dispose of the rest.”

  “But if you can fix me, why not just let me go home?”

  “Your parents… I mean, your owners, were contacted. They aren’t interested in fixing you, and you’re out of warranty. You’re malfunctioning badly. Everything is shutting down, and now it looks like it’s affecting your motor skills, or the programs that allow you to control your movements. If it’s the program, you could have bad sectors in your drive. The bottom line is it may not be worth our time to even try to fix you. You’re so scarred up that I doubt we could give you away. I don’t know if we could even recoup our costs. You’re just too badly broken.

  “Besides, if your parents could have you fixed, don’t you think they would’ve?” he continued, “And furthermore, they probably were the ones that did this to you, am I right?”

  “No, they never hurt me. I was in an accident.”

  “Nine times out of ten a machine in your condition has suffered heavy abuse at the hands of its owner. Maybe you don’t remember or maybe you don’t want to tell me about it. That’s okay, I don’t care. Regardless, your damage is severe enough that I’m hoping we can recover a few good parts from you.”

  “Please let me just talk to them,” Josh begged.

  Michael Hoskins laughed dryly. “Not going to happen. You’re just another abandoned kid. We help people that have problems with machines, every day. Sometimes we get our hands on defective ones, just like you, and sometimes we fix them for owners that want their machines fixed. Your parents are not interested. Nobody wants an old mistreated kid that crashes every ten minutes.

  “Your Ram is probably still good,” he went on, “You’re not that old of a machine, maybe only five years, I’m guessing. Your motherboard and circuitry are probably okay. Your memories are garbage. There’s nothing there to save, nor any reason to.”

  The kid shook his head, feeling tears run down his cheeks. “I don’t want to die!”

  “Is this not getting through to you? You don’t die. You’re a machine. You are soulless. There’s no Heaven or Hell waiting for you. When I unplug your power supply it’s lights out, and as far as you’re concerned, it’ll be as though you never existed.” He let out a deep sigh and leaned back. “Look kid, this day’s about over, I’m tired, hungry, and want to go home myself. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  With that he stood up and walked out the door.

  Josh sat there for a while, thinking. His odds of getting fixed sounded slim, and even if he did, they would take away his identity. His only hope rested with his parents. He had to contact them somehow. He walked over and flopped down on the cot, covering his eyes with his arms.

  He had nothing to do but think, think about his parents, how he’d been treated, and if they were robots too. He had plenty to think about, but no definite answers. He would die never knowing, and that felt unbearable. They planned to dissect him like an alien and rip his insides out. Worse, he had nothing to look forward too. He was pretty sure that the man was right. God didn’t have a place for robots in Heaven.

  “God?” he prayed aloud, “If you’re there, if you can hear me at all, please get me out of here. Send me an angel. I don’t want to die…”

  15

  James Hamilton had spent more of his life at Kidsmith than outside of it. He’d been with them through their rise and fall, and hoped to be there when they once more reached prominence. He’d begun as an engineer, and stopped his corporate climb at Engineering Manager. He’d managed to father two children before such things became impossible. They were grown and in other parts of the world. He hadn’t spoken to his oldest son in fifteen years.

  Many had come and gone, but James remained. He often referred to all of the children Kidsmith had sent out the door as his own. That would’ve made him the father of over one million boys and girls, and with the exception of the occasional twins, no two looked alike. He’d even owned a couple over the years. His current one was getting a bit run down. He kept tampering with her though, and changing her personality. It drove his wife crazy.

  These days though, it felt as though the company had become infertile too. Children didn’t walk out these doors, at least not the new ones. Few of the older models did either. Nowadays, he didn’t spend much time working with the kids. He spent his days behind a desk dealing with work orders. Sometimes it felt like a daily struggle just to stay employed. As he neared completion of his day, Tamara Hart popped her head into his office.

  “You about out of here?” she asked.

  “He set down his pen and stretched. “Hey Tammy, I think so. I’ve done enough damage for the day. How about you?”

  “I’m as good as gone,” Tamara said, “I had to drive into the Boise Mountains. My whole day was shot.”

  “Well at least you got out of the office, that’s better than my day.”

  “Yeah maybe, if I didn’t have my own stack of paperwork. Did you see what I brought in?”

  “No. What did you get?”

  She leaned against his door frame and smiled. “It’s not a kid. I found some type of adult android. Check it out before you leave. I had them put it in your workshop.”

  “An adult? What was it doing in the mountains?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s in bad shape. It looks as though it’s about thirty years old or so. Most of the living tissue is gone, but I bet you could get it going again. Maybe it’s an old butler android.”

  James pushed his chair back and stood up. “It could be something from the Mountain Home Air Force base. Maybe they lost one.”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You can tell me in the morning.”

  “You’ve got me interested now. I think I’ll swing by there.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He waved as Tamara disappeared down the hall. He grabbed his coat and kicked his door shut. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly seven in the evening. His wife would have supper ready. He really wanted to see that android. He made a mental note to come back and lock his office, but his mind crumpled the note and threw it away not five steps from the door.

  The other offices were already locked for the night. It seemed any more he was always the last one out. It didn’t bother him, this place felt as much as home to him as his real one. Some people thought it a bit creepy at night, but not him. He knew these halls almost intimately. There weren’t any ghosts here, but if there were they probably knew him all too well.

  He found Tamara’s present on his workbench. It smelled something terrible. He covered his mouth as he approached. “Well what do we have here?”
r />   It took him a minute to determine that the thing’s gender was male. Sometimes if you knew the gender it gave you a clue as to the android’s function. There were few roles for adult androids. All of its hair had fallen out, and its flesh stretched across its skull like a mummified cadaver.

  James flipped it over, looking for the access panel. There were no tell-tale signs, only scar tissue down the spinal column. “How the heck do you open? Somebody wanted to hide their handiwork, didn’t they?”

  The android took a single rasping breath as he searched. He ignored it. Sometimes androids never fully died. He’d seen broken children live for almost a decade with their power supplies keeping them alive long after their bodies had failed. Androids were such amazing things, the technology still fascinated him. It didn’t startle him in the least that this one still clung to life.

  Time had not been kind to it. A normal android had synthetic muscle and skin tissue that did not deteriorate or rot. A ‘dead’ kid would sit in a landfill for generations. They were resistant to both biodegradation and the photedegradation that effected plastics. After all, you couldn’t have your kid showing signs of sun damage.

  He pulled out his android marker and made a swipe across the back of its hand. He shook his head as it turned a dark blue. A light blue meant living tissue, black meant android. So what did this mean? Had somebody built a better flesh?

  There had to be some type of access to the android’s power cells without cutting it open, but he couldn’t find it. That left the Dr. Frankenstein method. He grabbed his cell charger and attached the paddle electrodes to the android’s chest, a defibrillator for artificial life. Instead of a brief shock, it delivered continuous electricity. As James suspected, his monitor detected the android’s cells. Once it read that it had a full charge, he disconnected the electrodes and waited.

  Its breathing regulated to something more akin to a sleeping state, but otherwise it didn’t budge. Tomorrow he’d have to try a few other things to get it to awaken. He might even have to cut it open. He couldn’t stay much later though or he’d never hear the end of it from his wife. He didn’t see it turn its head to watch him leave.

  16

  Gus Baskin walked down the hallway of Kidsmith. The building only utilized emergency lighting after dark, giving the place an abandoned eerie feel. Few people stuck around after five and the management no later than seven. Not that long ago the building operated around the clock. Back then Gus hadn’t worked in security. He’d worked in assembly.

  The parts would come in from all over the world, wherever Kidsmith could get the best prices. Gus worked on the skeleton, the metal foundation of the children. The difficult stuff, the skin and the circulatory system and a whole host of other complex biological stuff, all of that happened in the labs upstairs. They used to tell them to treat each one as a life, but after a while all you could see was the machine. The skeleton, brain, internal organs, and central nervous system, that was all mechanical. At one time the entire android had been metal and plastic. But the technology had such a high demand, and so much money poured into it that they became more and more realistic, until they were developing synthetic tissue and blood to make robots that passed entirely for human. People wanted as real of a kid as money could buy.

  They were amazingly clean to work on too. All of the messy biological stuff was carefully contained. You could open them up and work on all of the tech components without ever getting your hands dirty.

  He missed it, but at least Kidsmith kept him employed. Many of his friends were laid off, had to find nine to five jobs somewhere else. He sometimes pined for the good ol’ days when the benefits had been exceptional. They’d even had a retirement plan, though the company had reabsorbed it as the demand plummeted. Nobody retired anyway.

  He whistled while he patrolled the hallways, it made the place feel less creepy. Reclamation had brought in a few broken things that he needed to keep an eye on; two abandoned children and an old adult android.

  He had to feed the children. It only reaffirmed the wasteful nature of the country, creating robots that needed to eat and shit. Resources that could be used for more import things went to giving people that ‘real child’ experience. In all the time that he’d worked for Kidsmith he’d never had the urge to get one of his own. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he knew what they looked like under their skin. You couldn’t make something feel real if every time you looked at it you detected the metal.

  Both kids were boys and were shoved into rooms barely larger than closets, but with thick metal doors. The first stared at him sullenly as he placed the soup on the table. “If you so much as move I’ll put you down, got it?”

  If the kid tried to run past him, he was empowered to stop the kid in any way possible. His metal flashlight had only cracked two robot skulls in his entire career, and Kidsmith hadn’t even bothered to investigate if his use of force had been necessary. After years of being so careful with the kids it felt liberating to break one.

  Still, he took his job seriously. He would never crack any skulls unless absolutely necessary. But he wouldn’t hesitate if the kid tried anything. They so rarely did.

  The boy watched his every move. He didn’t turn his back on the kid as he backed out, relocking the door. He shuddered involuntarily. “Damn kid gives me the creeps,” he muttered. They weren’t supposed to be programmed with such hostile emotions. Somebody had done a number on that one.

  Gus took another bowl to the next room. This boy slept on the cot and didn’t budge as he set the bowl down. He didn’t get too close. You could never tell what the children planned. They could fake sleep. The boy’s face seemed permanently touched by sadness that even the peace of sleep couldn’t erase. Some kids responded to their treatment like the first boy, fostering resentment, others responded like this one. Nobody told him the children’s stories, and he didn’t want to know. Robots or not, there were a lot of creepers out there that had their own ideas of what children were good for, and they’d sold to them all. People didn’t need background checks for toys.

  The only thing he ever fed the kids was soup. Kidsmith gave him a food budget, and two dollar packets of instant noodles let him tap into the budget to keep up his supply of beer. His last guest wouldn’t need food. They told him it was inoperative.

  He rarely got to see adult androids. Kidsmith never manufactured them, but there were plenty of other businesses that did. The problem with adults was that they were designed for labor, taking jobs from real people. Even though it made sense for productivity, those companies were boycotted and put out of business for utilizing them. That’s why there were so few of them around.

  As far as he knew, the only places that still used adult androids were the adult sex industry (illegal in Idaho, but not Nevada and Oregon) and the military. Overseas the laws were different. Kidsmith, as a leader in android technology, had stepped up to reclaim them as they wore out or were abandoned. He imagined that they did so for access to the technology of other companies.

  They hadn’t locked it up, but dumped it in the workshop. From what he’d been told the thing looked like an antique.

  He entered the shop, his eyes instantly finding the thing. It looked more like a desiccated corpse than any android he’d ever seen. As he walked in the smell of rot hit him so hard he gagged. He covered his mouth with his hand as he approached it. The damn thing would make the room stink for weeks.

  The android’s skin had shrunk tightly to its bones. Maggot holes were all throughout its flesh and he swore he could see the things moving just beneath. Its clothes were nothing but rags. “I can’t believe they’ve left you out like this,” he said to the thing, “you’re infested.”

  Its eyes were open, giving him the uncomfortable feeling that they watched him.

  He gripped his flashlight tightly, knuckles white with tension and leaned in to look closer. Yes, the chest moved, ever so subtly. The robot’s lungs still worked, pushing out stale air, and a sound, if h
e listened carefully, like a death rattle.

  “Well, son of a bitch,” he said, “I think you’re still functional. How did they miss that?”

  The android turned its head to face him.

  Gus shouted and took two steps back, dropping his flashlight. The thing didn’t move any farther, and he chuckled in relief. “Oh man, you startled me.”

  He bent down to grab his flashlight. He’d never been the most limber of guys, even in his youth, and touching his toes remained an impossibility to this day. He squatted down, feeling for his flashlight amidst the heavy shadows that blanketed the floor. He hadn’t turned it on. He just liked the feel of its weight in his hand.

  He found it under a bench where it had rolled up against the legs. He stood up, legs protesting, and found himself face to face with the rotting android, its face inches from his own. Despite himself he dropped the flashlight again. He hadn’t even heard the thing move. Its foul breath hit him squarely in the face as its arms shot out to grab him by the neck.

  Gus had a lot of weight advantage. The android had strength built into its bones. It fell on top of him, hands tightening like vices. He fought for air, struggled to pull the thing’s wrists away but to no avail. It brought its face toward him, teeth snapping eagerly at his face. His vision blurred, mercifully hiding the thing’s visage as it dug its teeth into his cheek, but nothing diminished the pain.

  Nobody living remained in the building to hear his screams.

  17

  It stumbled down the hall, blood dripping from its mouth and chin as it followed the fear scent. It kept one hand on the wall for balance, leaving a sanguine smear in in its wake. It wore the guards clothing about its emaciated frame, hoping to give it some semblance of its humanity. They hung from it only slightly better than its rags, but maybe enough to fool someone at a glance.

  Its limbs worked again, maybe not perfect, but well enough. There were parts of it still broken, but it could walk again! Its arms had more strength than ever.