The tower was wavering and wobbling, shifting like a boiled noodle and most like that was because I’d been drinking and drinking until I got myself drunk. The walls wavered and seemed to shiver with frissons of excitement as I passed them, thick gray blocky stones made out of as they were. Doors had frames that just wouldn’t sit still. I’d of pounded sense into them if I hadn’t known that would be seen as crazy talk made flesh and bone. Bone that would break if I hit them hard enough. In the war with wood bone will lose, most times, unless you got kung fu training.
Which I don’t.
So I ignored it all with glorious superiority which I don’t know if the walls and doors noticed. I made my way into the tower, which is a vertical progression, not a horizontal one, but I had to ascend to get to where the work was waiting for me. Some droid or robot or automaton that needed fixing. The owner had probably failed to plug it in. Or turn it on. Waste of my time, as almost all of these things were. If I could bury one of my leadrouters into an eye socket every time I was drawn out here for no reason I’d have a lot less leadrouters. So I guess it’s good I don’t.
Sometimes I think about turning these robots into maniacal suicidal doodads. Just amp up their kill factors till they can’t see straight, till they see snakes and bugs everywhere and go a chopping till their paychecks get cut. I could do it without much bother, just find myself a nice fine tough robot and get it all ramped up and let it loose, but hell, it’s an idea that appeals as long as you keep it abstract. You go implementing ideas like that, you’ll just make a mess everywhere. And then people would be yelling and getting all excited and demanding answers and these days I just want to be let alone because, really, is that too much to ask? You’d think it was.
Didn’t always used to be like this. Some time ago it was better, golden age years, halcyon times, you know? You could roll up with a gleaming set of spanners and reap all the respect you wanted, offered up, proffered up like you were some passing God, some bastard child of James Dean and Pan, harvesting adulation wherever it was you went. Back when the droids and robots and servitors and metalheads were all brand spanking new, the new wave, the ultimate in revolutionary home décor, the flim flam of the ne plus ultra. And we were their high priests, their ablutors. Magic time.
Not any more. These days I don’t even shave when I wake up, don’t comb my hair, can barely bother to rub the grit out of my eyes. I just roll out of bed and figure out where I’m heading next. Sucks when you become obsolete, when you don’t have a skill set to roll you into the next wave of ultimate home décor or robot apparel. I guess I could adapt, learn a new trade, but I don’t have the inclination. School ain’t for me, not any more, and hell, I like them old rusting metaljunkers and ambulatory system droids. They’re mute and sorrowful like an old dog, too tired to get up, gazing up at you with that same mute adoration that just gets the more painful to regard the closer the damn beast gets to needing to be put down.
Sometimes I sit down before one of them old robots and just stare them in the face. They don’t have much as far as faces go, just enough to orient a body when you’re dealing with them, but in that very simplicity I find a poignancy that I don’t think would be there if there were finely articulated features. Just bland, innocuous contours and hints of eyes, nose, mouth. Those eyes. Dead rings of burned out LCD’s around the camera lenses. I just sit down before them, knees popping like old wood getting snapped, and stare them in the face. Wish they could speak, sometimes. Not because I would want them to jabber at me, but it would make the silence more companionable if I knew they had the ability but were choosing to just sit quiet. Sit quiet like I do.
Never mind. I’m just an ornery old man. Grease and oil stuck so deep into my skin and calluses that my hands look permanently bruised. Got a wealth of knowledge on systems outmoded, outdated, prehistoric, gone and vanished down the obsoletion well. Some point along the way I went from being an automaton repairman to a custodian of history, a guardian of forgotten lore.
One of these days I’ll program a robot to do something foolish. Something that’ll make a mess. Maybe I’ll have him turn on me, take me down, end it all. Fitting, that, disassembled by the very things I’ve spent my life constructing. Maybe some day soon. Till then, I’ll just keep working. Day by day. Starting with this droid, here in this tower. Look at his dumb face. Dumb as a load of bricks. Poor idiot. More like me than the people I see around. We’re dying breeds, both.
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