Chapter Text
Erwin had saved the biggest box for last, as he’d been prone to do since childhood. It was a long, flat, rectangular package all done up in leftover wrapping paper from Christmas, reindeers with glowing noses and fat jolly Santas dancing across the bright green, glossy paper that tore apart in long, neat strips under Erwin’s eager fingers. It was a graduation present from his parents, his well-meaning, kind-hearted, corn-fed parents, who had absolutely no idea why their only beloved son wanted to transplant himself directly to a far off land (see: San Francisco) with new ideas and new people and new foods (see: the concept of agnosticism, baristas with pierced tongues and black lipstick on every corner coffee shop, and garlic noodles and Dungeness crab). Completely foreign concepts to these two well-meaning, big blonde people who’d never stepped a toe out of the Midwest in their lives and whose only daily concerns were how the corn was doing (Papa Smith) and how many doilies they could crochet for the church fundraiser (Mama Smith).
The resulting box gleamed back at him in a glossy shade of pearly white. SONY Housekeeper 228, the box proclaimed in large grey letters, just this side of upraised as Erwin ran a finger along them, marveling at the texture.
“Oh, goodness,” he gasped, all but blubbering at the – frankly – exorbitant gift his parents had given him. “This is far too much.” He had seen commercials for the housekeeping android model in question on their bubble-butt TV in the living room, standing half-hunched over the screen, one hand on the dial and the other on the antenna his father had stuck on top, stabilized with a crumpled cone of tin foil, to keep the signal from being disrupted. The commercials had always been rather flashy, airing right in the intervals between the Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune segments that Erwin watched, rather religiously, every night on the dot at seven. The robot had been, according to the ever-truthful advertisements, one of those more advanced models that replicated human speech in which it communicated with its owners about their cleaning preferences. It had been proclaimed as the most lifelike android of its class at one of those technology shows or another somewhere in Silicon Valley.
The jingle for the commercial played in Erwin’s head even now, a series of arpeggios in little mechanical chimes that reminded him rather fondly of the time his parents had taken him to Disneyland for his thirteenth birthday. It had been their first, and only, trip out of Nebraska. He had been infatuated with “It’s a Small World,” the little mechanized dolls from different countries and cultures all dancing and singing in sync. It had been almost a religious experience, and, if one had asked, might have significantly influenced Erwin’s decision to take the associate lawyer’s position at Sonoma and Sons in the heart of San Francisco.
“Oh, not at all, son,” his father said, surreptitiously wiping a tear from his eye as Erwin crumpled up the wrapping paper and chucked it into the already overflowing garbage bag in the corner of the living room designated for just such this purpose. “We know you’ll be so busy with your fancy lawyering job, and it’s important to your mom and me that there’s something watching out for you. You know, making sure you get your three squares a day and you have clean underwear in your drawers.” Oh, no. Papa Smith was dangerously close to tears, if the furious bristling of his bushy eyebrows and equally as bushy mustache had been anything to go by. Erwin hastily accepted the gift before the waterworks started, and hefted the long cardboard box over his shoulder to slot it into the only remaining spot in the trunk of his SUV.
That had been three days ago. According to Erwin’s mother, he hadn’t even driven off their property yet when his father had started bawling. Since then, his mother informed him over the grainy FaceTime connection – she kept pointing it at the floor instead of her face, presumably in attempts to see Erwin better – his father had been cooped up in the henhouse, moping over his chickens and reassuring himself with their cheerful clucking. In other news, their egg output had never been higher, and did Erwin want some eggs?
“No thanks, Ma,” Erwin replied, propping his phone up against a roll of paper towels while he continued unpacking the rest of the kitchen cleaning supplies his mother had stuffed into a suitcase, the Windex and Comet powder wrapped up in a few old T-shirts. “They’ll probably break in the post. You know how USPS can be.”
He was finishing up the long, three-day process of moving into his new apartment in San Francisco, a tiny little closet of a place with doors that Erwin could barely squeeze through and cabinets just big enough to hold a single squeeze bottle of barbecue sauce. The only large thing left to be unpacked was the housekeeper, although, hands on hips and surveying his new domain, Erwin privately couldn’t help but imagine that there probably wouldn’t be much housekeeping to be done. The apartment was exorbitantly expensive for a space roughly the size of a matchbox, but he supposed it would be rather rude of him not to make use of the gift he’d been given.
He sat down on the floor, his mother still chattering away about their 362 chickens, each individually named, and pulled out the contents of the android’s box, laying them out on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. After he’d unpacked all of the components, his mother had moved on to the problem of the county fair and what type of preserves she was going to bring to the jam-making contest, and his kitchen floor was covered with pieces of cream-colored plastic wrapped in their own individual vacuum-packed plastic bags, labeled with large black numbers. The instruction manual was as fat as a textbook, and Erwin nearly groaned in dismay. He had half a mind to put all the parts back into the box, jamming them in haphazardly and flinging the thing into some unused corner of the apartment, but his mother had finally managed to figure out how to aim the camera at herself in such a way that she was able to focus her beady blue eyes on him and ask him how he was progressing with the gift she and his father had gotten him.
He replied that it was going very well indeed. Fortunately she couldn’t see the detritus of the android laid out on his kitchen floor, or she probably would have had a conniption and booked the soonest flight out of Nebraska to come and help him straighten out his kitchen.
His mother tottered off to bed a few minutes later, stifling a yawn and wishing him pleasant dreams with a strict reminder to remember to drink a warm glass of milk before bed and not to stay up too late. He smiled, waved at his well-meaning mother, and hung up the call before turning back to the pieces of the android littered all over his kitchen floor.
Pulling a freshly-purchased six pack of beer out of the fridge and a packet of salt and vinegar chips from the pantry, Erwin sat back down, his plaid pajama pants loose around his hips as he popped the twist-off cap off a bottle of Blue Moon and squinted at the rather hefty instruction manual again.
Three hours, three beers, and the entire packet of chips later, Erwin sat back to look at what he had accomplished. It was no model airplane, and Erwin was certainly no rocket scientist, but it certainly looked like all the parts were in the right place, the hands attached neatly to the ends of the arms, the head balanced firmly on the slender neckpiece. It was quite a work of art, if he were to say so himself, taking another pull on his Blue Moon and reveling in the effervescent dark bitterness sliding neatly down his throat, leaving a trail of orange in its wake. It seemed almost a shame that it was just meant for cleaning purposes.
Brushing the chip crumbs off his pajama pants, Erwin stood up – a bit woozily, what was the alcohol content in these? – to plug the android’s charger into the wall. He tapped his preset passcode into the control panel on the android’s chest, holding his breath in eager anticipation, and watched in half-drunken amazement as the robot twitched and slowly began to move with a soft whirring of motors, gears clicking away with precise mechanical ticks.
Eyes, glossy black and flat, regarded him with what seemed like a faint amount of distaste.
Its mouth opened, swinging wide and dramatic on its hinges, a screw popping loose. Both Erwin and the android looked at the tiny metallic screw pinging across the floor, before rolling cheerily off underneath the refrigerator, never to be seen again.
The android’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Erwin, reaching up to hold the right side of his jaw up. “You have installed my battery pack backwards,” the robot informed him in a tone that was far too realistic for comfort. Something out of a science fiction movie that Erwin had watched when he was twelve, eyes wide as he took in the staticky image on the television screen. Its eyes narrowed as it scanned his floor, littered with deflated plastic bags and empty beer bottles. “And you have crumbs all over your floor.”
Erwin woke up the next morning, his head aching something fierce, his back in knots from the uncomfortable lumpy cushions and broken springs of the couch the previous tenant had so graciously left behind along with their molding shower curtain and half a square of toilet paper. His mouth felt furry, his lips chapped with the memories of vinegar acidity, and he trudged to the apartment’s pocket of a bathroom, where he stuck his head beneath the leaky faucet and took a mouthful of cold, tinny-tasting water. As he swallowed, the water wriggling cool paths through his belly, he heard a slapping, clanking sort of noise from the general vicinity of the kitchen, and froze, his insides freezing.
Oh, how foolish he’d been, he scolded himself as he hunted about the bathroom for something, anything that he could use to fend off a potential attacker. His mother had expressly warned him about this, hadn’t she? She’d seen far too many Lifetime movies with this exact scenario. But no, Erwin had been stubborn, and he was fairly sure that the baseball bat he’d brought along in the hopes of joining some sort of team here was in his sardine can of a bedroom across the hallway.
The clanking grew louder. Erwin’s knuckles went white from the grip he had on the bathroom counter. His eyes darted around the tiny room, looking for potential weapons. Step, step, step. Oh, dear God. There was no use for it. Erwin would have to try to climb out the window if possible, because he was far too young to die like this.
A knock on the bathroom door. A mechanical, whirring sort of voice. “When user is ready, user is informed that he has been diagnosed with dehydration caused by copious consumption of alcohol and fried potato. Black coffee and sustenance have been prepared. Does user require any assistance?”
Erwin was silent, trying to think of what to say through the pounding in his head, which had turned into a rather nasty throbbing.
“If user does not reply in thirty seconds, emergency actions will be taken as part of security protocol,” the disjointed voice informed him. Blearily, Erwin was jogged into action, flinging open the bathroom door to come face-to-face with his SONY Housekeeper 228, hair neatly coiffed, jaw screwed back in properly. It was wearing one of his old T-shirts and boxer shorts, and would have looked rather human save for the glossiness of his plastic limbs and the almost indiscernible hinges that hooked his limbs together. The android eyed him carefully. Erwin eyed him back, just as carefully, a look that probably lost most of its force by the fact that he couldn’t concentrate on the android’s upturned face for too long – the milky sunlight spilling in through the cracked bathroom window was bouncing straight off the android’s forehead into Erwin’s eyes.
“Emergency actions relaxed,” the android chirped mechanically, turning on its heel and marching stiffly off to the kitchen. “User’s mortality confirmed. Please have your nutrition.”
Too confused to make a coherent reply, Erwin allowed himself to be led to the kitchen, where a plate of perfectly bland scrambled eggs awaited him.