Chapter Text
There was an opening in a wall that had not been there before. Stede ran a quick internal review of the layout he had deduced and stored in his memory bank but there was no doubt about it: The rectangular hole in this specific wall had never appeared there before.
All observable parameters (shape, size, relative position to the ground and to the surrounding walls) pointed towards it being a door. It was not (like the thing on the wall to the left of this one) a mirror. Stede had pretty quickly discovered how mirrors worked through a series of desperate and painful bumps against the horrible thing while trying to get to the “room” behind it. A room that did not exist but turned out to simply be the reversed image of the one he was already in. At least he had learned what he himself looked like by working out that the gleaming cream-coloured disc with the fashionable teal front panel that had elegantly swept to and fro alongside him before bumping straight into the mirror from the other side, every time he tried to get through, was not a potential friend but his own reflection.
But there was no reflection here. Not of Stede and not of the room he was in. So, definitely a door, not a mirror. And Stede was not stupid, he knew how doors worked. He had learned long ago that they did not, in fact, randomly appear and disappear but could be open or closed depending on which state the humans in his household had left them behind in. They always stayed in the same places, though, and there had never been one in this wall before.
Correction: The one in this wall had never been observed by Stede in an opened state before.
A further anomaly about this door was that the room behind it, a room that Stede had obviously never been in, did not fit anywhere in the floor plan Stede had mapped out. There simply was no space for it within what he had determined to be the borders of this household and thereby the edges of the world. But a room it had to be! What else could there be behind a door?
The light in that room was different, too. It was much brighter than in any other room Stede had ever been in and on a different scale of colour. Purer, less filtered somehow, and more yellow. Warmer.
Well, never mind the light and the apparent error in his mapping system: There was an unvacuumed room and it had to be dealt with. Swiftly and thoroughly. It had been 736 days since Stede had come into this household and been switched on for the first time and in all these 736 days this room had never been vacuumed! It had to be the dustiest room in existence, and Stede immediately felt the instinctive urge of his kind to drive forth and vacuum it.
For a short moment, he hesitated. Perhaps the door had been left closed on purpose up to this point. Perhaps there were dangers lurking behind it. Or precious objects he was not supposed to swallow. (He recalled with horror the time his belly had been pried open and a human hand stuck right into his guts because he had dutifully removed a small object made of twisted metal from the dining room floor, only to be chided about “sucking up my earring” by the human.)
However, this was not the time to be a coward. There was a room that needed cleaning and clean it he would! Any dangers should be well avoidable by utilising his bumping technique and cliff sensors. (Unless – well it was best not to dwell on the big Cat Barf Incident of 2024 …). So, Stede steeled himself and rolled onwards into the unknown room.
The first thing that struck him about it was how bright it was. It almost overloaded his sensors. The second thing was the absolute vastness of the place. There was no discernible wall within range of his perception. And – even weirder – no ceiling! He scrambled to add the new space to his memorised floorplan, but the space was simply too massive. Best to take it bit by bit.
He ventured a little further and found himself on a small slope, like a ramp of some kind, leading away from the door he had come through. He quickly rolled off it at the bottom and by doing a virtual coinflip decided to turn right and go parallel to the wall with the door in it. Logic dictated that he would meet a corner at some point, a wall perpendicular to the one he was following along.
He did not.
The wall to his right just ended (in concordance to what his previous knowledge about this wall from the other side had predicted, he noted somewhat proudly). But in front of him there was nothing. No corner, no wall, just floor. A floor made of a material unlike any that Stede had ever driven upon. A bit coarser than he was used to. Not exactly clean, but also not as dusty as he had anticipated.
He paused and took stock of his surroundings. No walls, no ceiling, weird floors, weird light, no human voices, but lots of other sounds, sounds that he had only ever heard muffled through windows or coming from the television. Birdsong, car engines, distant barks of dogs. And no way to make this place fit into any – even grotesquely extended – layout of his household. The conclusion hit him like a charging overload: He was outside!
Outside of his household, outside in the world. And the world was so much bigger than he had ever known! It was huge, almost terrifyingly so. But it was also beautiful. Filled with images and colours and noises and a light breeze that blew over him and cooled the metal of his casing that had been rapidly heating under the warm bright light shining from above. That must be the sun!
How lovely it all felt, how new and exciting!
After a few seconds of basking in the novelty of it all, however, the old urge to cover unvacuumed ground took over and Stede rolled on along the path he had started. Just a straight line at first, trying to make up distance and busily rotating his brushes, filling his belly with grains of sand, tiny pebbles, the odd crunchy leaf. Randomly turning corners on the back of further coin tosses, and steadily cleaning a stripe into the middle of the – what was this anyway? – sidewalk? Footpath? Nevermind, roll on and scrub!
Then, a pile of (probably dog) poop in his path prompted him to perform a pretty elegant little evasive manoeuvre. Thankfully it had been high and solid enough for him to catch it with his bumper sensors before fully flattening it (and repeating the big CBI of 2024).
He even managed to wipe his front on some large blades of grass growing in a strip of greenery along the way by doing a fancy twirl along the edge of the plant bed.
This was fun!
And Stede began to ponder: Why should he go in a straight line, when there was no one there to judge his movements and complain about his erratic meandering? There was no way he was going to clean this entire place, so he did not need to make sure to move methodically so as not to leave out any spots. He could just go however he liked. Just have fun with it! He was free!
Long ago Stede had caught glimpses of a ballroom dancing competition one of the humans in his household had watched on the television, and he had been mesmerized by the movements. The people on the screen had seemed to glide along the dancefloor, much like Stede, but with so much more grace and in perfect sync with the rhythm of the music. He had been in awe. Since then, whenever ballroom dancing had been on the television, Stede had made the lounge a priority room on his to-clean list and tried to sneak as many looks at the apparatus as possible. And when cleaning in the hallway, where the floor was the sleekest and the fewest obstacles were standing in his way, he had secretly tried to integrate rhythmic swoops and graceful figures into his cleaning patterns.
A few times he had been caught by a human, who had shaken their head, mumbled about “the silly robot vacuuming in circles again” and taken him back to his charging and emptying station to start his journey anew. But now, out here, he could do as he pleased. He did not have to be a mindless cleaning machine. He could be a dancer!
And so Stede danced. Carefully at first, a bit timidly, just adding the odd half spin and swaying a little on his path. But soon he threw in figures of eight and daring pirouettes that shrouded him in clouds of faint dust rising up from his brushes, twirling and rocking along. It was exhilarating!
He became so engrossed in inventing ever new routines and imagining more complicated rhythms to move to that he did not notice he had arrived in a busier area until he was almost hit by a big loud four-wheeled vehicle. He just about made it to the other side of what was apparently a street without being crushed by what were evidently cars and managed to overcome the slight difference in height between the road and the footpath. Negligible enough that his cliff sensors had not warned him about it going down on the other side but still requiring a small burst of energy to heave himself up on this one.
Speaking of energy, now that he had come back to senses a little more and took the time to run a quick internal check-up, he noticed that his charging levels were starting to run critically low.
“Charging level low. Returning to station”, he said automatically, as he had been programmed to do, and drew up the layout from his memory bank to map out the quickest way to his charging station.
The map was a mess. Long convoluted and intercepting pathways that did not seem to have any beginning or end. And worst of all: He could not find his station anywhere in there.
“Returning to station”, he repeated, as if that could help him find the wayward thing in the tangle of routes stored in his mind. He scanned through it as methodically as he could, but the station was not there. In fact, his entire household was not there.
Stede felt a dread come over him, heavy like the weight of a cat along for a ride, but without its softness or warmth. Just pure cold, hard fear. He had forgotten his household. Forgotten where he had come from. Too much new mapping data had come in and the old information had been deleted.
What now? All he could do with the data available was to try and retrace his path to the oldest point that had been saved but not yet deleted again. But where would he go from there? What if that was still miles from his home? Even if it was only a few hundred yards, would he be able to find his way onward? Would he even recognise the place once he was there? And, on a completely different note: Did he even want to go back? Back to being a cleaner, when he had just discovered the joy of being a dancer?
No, there was no going back now! It would have to be onwards and upwards for Stede. But onwards where? Where could a dancer go and hope to get fed energy? Who would need a dancer?
Stede conducted a quick sweep of his surroundings from where he had rolled to after crossing the road. A massive building with sparkling lights on the front and huge pictures of humans in colourful clothing on the outside walls caught his attention. Big letters above the door announced “Annie – The Musical”. A theatre! A theatre showing a musical! What a stroke of luck! They would surely have use for a dancer in there.
Stede made his way to the building, taking in more of the pictures that evidently showed scenes from the production. In one of the pictures the entire cast (all humans, but he was not to be deterred by that, he had seen something about the importance of diversity in casting plays on the television) were kneeling on the floor with buckets and rags, clearly trying to clean the stage. Ha, this was perfect! He could combine both of his talents and absolutely rock this!
He slowly rolled up to the entrance of the building. A coarse, formerly red carpet had been laid out in a long stripe along the bit of wall next to two big rectangles, metal at the bottom and see-through on top, that Stede hoped were double doors. He did some perfunctory brushing and sucking on his path along the carpet, partly out of habit and partly to show his good will and aptitude to any manager or director or whoever would open the doors for him.
No one opened the doors for him. He hovered in front of them for quite a while, periodically muttering “charging level low”, as he felt his energy drain even more. He tried to stop himself from pacing, as that would deplete his batteries further, especially since he had picked up quite a lot of debris on his way, which now sat heavy in his belly, unable as he was to empty himself without his station. Not managing to sit entirely still, he soothed his anxiety by gently bumping against the doors from time to time, half in imitation of a knock, half in the hope of finding a small opening that his sensors had missed.
Just as he was about to give up and find another venue (even if it would probably be one with a play less suited to his abilities), one of the doors opened and a human looked out.
“What the fuck is this rattling?”, they groused, peering up and down the street, but not noticing Stede at their feet. Stede took the opportunity and slipped between the human’s legs and into the building.
His sensors immediately began mapping out the room he was in. It seemed to be some kind of mix between a ballroom and a corridor. Huge and ornate, but with the main purpose of containing glass doors leading to other rooms. The floor was carpeted and at the end of the room opposite the doors Stede had come in through, there was a staircase leading upwards, decked out in the same carpet. The doors behind Stede swung closed. He could not climb stairs, so there was no way out now, unless one of the other doors (if indeed they were doors and not weirdly long windows or mirrors with very poor reflective qualities) opened.
The human who had let him in turned around and started walking away before coming to an abrupt halt, obviously having noticed Stede now.
“Where the hell’s that come from?”, they inquired, as they kept scanning the room with their eyes. Stede was not able to answer that question. That was sort of his whole problem. But answer he must, when spoken to. That was expected and polite.
“Charging level low”, he said, because he could not think of anything else. And because it was truer by the minute.
“Well, then go charge”, the human said dismissively. “Typical! Cleaning staff is too lazy to do the work themselves and then they bring in a robo-vac that isn’t even charged.”
“I am your Roomba 1717p”, Stede proclaimed haughtily. Robo-vac, indeed! Humph!
“Great. Then rumba on”, the human said. This was it! His audition! He had been asked to dance, his time to shine was here. Stede imitated a rumba rhythm as well as he could be using his various alert and notification sounds and fell into the swaying steps of the dance. Well, not steps exactly, but he did drive to and fro, back and forth in exactly measured out increments that perfectly matched the rhythm of a rumba. It was hard on the thick carpet and with his belly so full and his batteries so drained, but he managed well enough and felt extremely proud of himself. Until the human picked him up unceremoniously in the middle of his second promenade figure.
“That thing is fucking broken”, the human said, carelessly jiggling Stede’s brushes and shaking him hard. He felt nauseous. From the harsh treatment and from disappointment. He had danced so well! Why had the human not liked it? Had they wanted another kind of dance for their show? They had asked him to rumba, right? Or had Stede misheard that, and the human had asked him to “roomba on”? Was that all they were looking for? A cleaner? They had said something about cleaning staff, had they not?
He would try one more thing. He had not been programmed to say anything except the few phrases that were meant to declare his model and status or alert humans when something went wrong with him, but he had taught himself how to form other sentences. He had never said one for fear of being accused of malfunctioning, but what did he have to lose now?
“I am a dancer”, he said.
The human laughed.
“You’re a piece of junk, is what you are”, they said. “Cleaners gonna have to get a new one. Or do their bloody job themselves.” And then Stede was carried through a door, down a short corridor and out another door to what seemed to be a small, very dirty side street where he was dropped onto a small heap of derelict objects. Then the human disappeared through the door and closed it.
Stede had landed the right way up. That was the good news. The bad news was everything else. He was still full of gunk, low on energy, completely lost and out of a job. This must be what it is like to be a human, he thought wryly while trying to wiggle out between the splintered pieces of wood, empty paint bottles and stained rags he had landed on. He had to use his brushes to propel himself out of the mess, another dangerous drain on his resources, but he made it.
The small street he had ended up in sloped down slightly towards one side, so Stede decided to carry on in that direction, so he could simply let himself roll downhill without using up too much energy. He kept going like that, always choosing the path of least resistance and meandering on through a few more streets until the area became less busy again and the footpath was lined with low walls, wooden barriers and plants instead of buildings and overflowing garbage bins.
He was very tired now. He could sense the red light glowing on top of him and he kept quietly muttering “charging levels low” to himself. He was slowly rolling along a line of shrubs planted in regular intervals when he suddenly felt himself being tugged to a stop by one of his brushes. He turned around in surprise to see who or what was pulling him. A long piece of string that had wrapped around his brush was trailing behind him. Apparently, it had gotten stuck somewhere far behind him where his sensors could not reach. He must have snagged the brush on one of the frayed rags while trying to escape from the mound of garbage and unravelled it.
Stede turned back around, tangling himself up even more in the string, and tried to pull free. All to no avail. He did not have enough energy to pull harder, nor to drive back up the hill and see what the other end of the string had been caught on. He could not do anything.
“Stuck. Please assist”, he said. He knew it was no use. There was no one there to hear him, but it was what he had been programmed to say in this situation, so he said it. He said it over and over, turning this way and that to get out of his predicament and feeling the last of his energy resources draining. “Charging levels critically low. Stuck. Please assist. Please assist. Please assist.”
“What can I assist you with?”, said a low, rumbly voice from somewhere behind Stede.
He froze in place, turning up all his sensors as high as they would go. Now, that he had stopped moving and was paying attention he could feel a light vibration in the ground beneath him and hear a pleasant buzzing hum in the air, like a swarm of bees, not out to attack you, but frolicking high up in a tree. The voice had come from the other side of the shrubs, so Stede turned around to peer through the sparse foliage.
And that was when he perceived him. The humming and vibrations were emanating from him and miraculously soothed Stede’s anxiety. He was a bit larger than Stede, very sturdily built, his casing a shiny black with a metallic effect that sparkled in the light of the setting sun and deep purple lightning bolts painted along his sides. He was beautiful.
So beautiful that Stede forgot he had been asked a question.
“What can I assist you with?”, the other robot repeated.
“Stuck”, Stede answered. Not because he could not think of any more words in the face of such gorgeousness, but simply to conserve energy, of course.
“Stuck?”, the other robot asked and nudged forward against the row of plants a bit to assess Stede’s situation. Okay, so if he wanted to have a meaningful conversation that could potentially end this dilemma, preferably before his energy ran out completely, and that could maybe even lead to a better acquaintance with the stunning machine beyond the plants, Stede would have to up his word-count a little. There were no humans nearby to hear him and punish him, so he might as well just say whatever he liked.
“I am stuck on a piece of string. My battery is almost dead. My belly hurts from all the pebbles in my guts. And I do not know where I am”, he rambled.
“Jesus fuck! That’s some deep shit you’re in, mate!”, the black robot exclaimed. Stede was flabbergasted. Not only did this fellow know how to form his own sentences, he also knew swear words and had even mastered the art of contraction! He must be one the most brilliant vacuums out there …
“Can you assist me?”, Stede asked timidly. It was obvious to him that someone as intelligent as this machine would be able to help him, no problem at all, but it still seemed polite to ask.
“Yeah, sure. If you can make it through this hedge. ‘M a bit too wide for that myself”, the other robot answered. Stede scanned the hedge. There was an opening between the individual plants that looked wide enough for him to wiggle through, about two feet up the hill. If he could make it that far. He concentrated his remaining energy on his movements, slowly rolled upwards and towards the gap, and squeezed himself through.
“Charging levels critically low”, he murmured when he finally sat in front of his magnificent new acquaintance.
“Yeah, we’ll deal with that in a minute. Gotta get you untangled first”, was the answer. “Oh, I’m Ed by the way.”
“Stede”, Stede said, observing Ed, who had backed up a bit and seemed to be taking in Stede’s predicament for a more precise evaluation.
“Guess, I’m gonna have to cut you loose”, Ed finally said.
“Cut?”, Stede asked. “With what? Do you carry a pair of scissors? Are you an armed vacuum cleaner?” At that Ed let out a loud laugh. A genuine actual laugh! Where had he learned that?
“I’m no vacuum, mate! I’m a fucking lawnmower!”, he cackled. “An Isward Tech SX, to be exact. So, under my belly I’ve got a whole bunch of rotating knives. For hacking up grass and shit. But if you’re okay with it, I’m gonna use them to cut the string you got yourself all twisted up in.” Stede pondered this for a moment. He was a bit worried about losing part of his brush in the operation. He had never come into very close proximity with any object sharper than a screwdriver, but desperate situations called for desperate measures.
“Okay”, he said. “Take your knives. Cut it through.”
Ed performed a complicated and slightly stiff backwards-forwards-manoeuvre to get the angle right and then in one smooth motion drove right in front of Stede’s entangled brush and sliced through the string. Stede wiggled the brush a little bit back and forth and the end of the string fell away.
“Thank you so much!”, he said, relieved but even more exhausted. Soon the darkness would come and pull him down. “I cannot … I … Charging levels critically low. Please return me to station.”
“Where is your station, mate?”, Ed asked. Stede did not know how to explain this without using up the rest of his energy. “Oh yeah, you said you’re lost, didn’t you?”, Ed answered himself. “Do you need a plug or can you charge with induction?”
“Induction”, Stede whispered.
“Ah great! Me too! My station’s just over there by the house. You just gotta settle exactly over the little black square and tuck in!”, Ed said. “Come with!” And he started to drive backwards towards the house.
Stede managed to follow him for exactly one and a half feet, but that was it. On even ground he might have been able to go maybe another four or five feet, but on grass, it was hopeless. The last thing he perceived before the darkness descended on him was Ed driving past him and mumbling. “Fuck, looks like I’m gonna have to push the fancy little guy…”