Broken Things (9 page)

He pounded for a few minutes until finally he heard the
click of the lock. He stepped back as it opened, and a nearly bald man poked
his head in and said, “Hey, Keep it down. People are trying to work here.”

“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?”

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.