The alarm buzzed at 7:15 a.m. Maxwell pushed the off button on the side of his head and sat up in bed, a stilted movement of just his thick trunk. He’d stayed up too late last evening. His battery was only 68 percent charged, but if he moved slowly to conserve energy, that would get him through the day.
He pushed up off of his lumpy, tattered mattress and took off his yesterday clothes, soiled from the day’s chores. He deposited them in the clothes chute and walked over to the vanity, on which clean shirts and pants were stacked amongst porcelain figurines of a fat friar, a chipped milking maid, a small, rotund girl with twin blond braids falling down her chest, and several Precious Moments babies. He put shirt, pants, and socks over the seamless flesh of his five-foot-seven figure, bulky with hidden compartments. He looked in the cracked mirror and ran a hand through the disheveled fibers of his “hair.”
In the kitchen, he made black coffee and puréed a summer squash, put them on a metal tray, and took them to the den off the unused dining room. Ms. Newmark slept there, in the smallest room in the house. For years now, she’d been unable to make it up the stairs on her own, and she shuddered whenever she touched Maxwell. So he’d been able to claim an upstairs bedroom and sleep in a bed, and hang up pictures like they did in other houses he’d visited during his chores. Dogs played cards in one frame, the human’s Christ was bathed in holy light in another, and little figures sled down a snow-covered hillside, white smoke curling up from the chimney in a distant house, in a third.
Ms. Newmark was asleep when he went in, one of her thin, translucent arms on Mitzy, curled up beside her like a brillo stuffed animal. Maxwell didn’t make an effort to be silent, and the glass bowl jingled as he placed it on the nightstand. Mitzy jumped, eyed Maxwell and the tray, and lay back down. Ms. Newmark’s eyes moved, her sagging, lined lids splitting open to reveal brown irises. “I put the list on the refrigerator,” she said. She sighed to collect her strength, and then huffed as she sat up.
Maxwell didn’t help. His program had been written so he wouldn’t give unsolicited assistance. He waited the sixty-eight seconds it took her to get into a sitting position, and then he bent over to sit beside her on the bed.
“Get moving on your chores. That’s what you’re here for,” Ms. Newmark barked, fiercer then Mitzy could. The dog twitched, and Ms. Newmark stroked her.
Maxwell turned, went to the refrigerator, and plucked the list out from under a fruit-basket magnet. He analyzed the list, mapping his day’s route for maximum efficiency.
He left by the front door, past the neat rows of pansies he’d planted yesterday. He went to the tube station, rode it thirty-three minutes to town, and got off into the bustle on Fifth Street. The sidewalks in front of the homogenous, lithe glass buildings were packed with people, one of the reasons the agoraphobic Ms. Newmark had bought a Maxwell VII. The other was that she didn’t trust humans as servants. “You’re only here because you won’t steal from me,” she’d told Maxwell by way of introduction.
He scooted along among the people, his squat frame squeezing as best as it could between the flesh beings who buzzed by in a hurry. More than occasionally he took an elbow to the soft “flesh” of his chest or a passerby’s shoulder slammed into his own. Like all androids, he had been programmed to go with the shot rather than stand firm and hurt the human. When he slid by another android, he gave it a nod of greeting.
As he stood at a street corner waiting for the light to change and the pack of cars to pause, a man slammed into his side, sending his gyroscope twirling to keep him on his feet. “Watch it, asshole,” the man growled without looking up, giving Maxwell a shove before disappearing into the crowd.
The light changed, and Maxwell crossed the street with exaggerated walking movements. He turned left and went down to Brexter’s Butcher Emporium. “The freshest meat in town,” read painted letters that hung in the air next to the wood-paneled building.
Inside, Maxwell went past the freezers of meat, past the sampling tables with the man in the white coat saying, “Now this one is from a two-year-old Holstein raised on just oats,” past the quiet dining tables where couples ate hamburgers or veal or strip steaks. His odor receptors picked up the sweet scent of melting fat, the coarseness of black pepper, mustards, garlics, and smoking wood, although not enough of that to warrant alarm. He stopped at a window and spoke his order into a speaker, and the woman on the other side of the bullet-proof plastic typed it into a small lined pad. “That’ll be just a few moments,” she said slowly, as though she thought his processor was on the fritz. He stood to the side and waited, listening to the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the scattered bits of information being bantered around. Ms. Newmark had requested he have heightened hearing to supplement her lessened ability, and his microphone now picked up the cry of a bovine being gutted in the slaughterhouse behind the store.
The raw meat of his order came neatly wrapped in a brown paper bag, similar to the ones homeless humans on the street use to conceal their bottles of alcohol. He put it into a compartment in his thigh and processed a command in his head, dropping the temperature in the compartment to 28 degrees.
He left the store and continued about his chores. At the corner of Main and 8th Street, a woman waiting beside him said, “I’m not that retarded,” to the man beside her. She was five-foot-five, weighed 190 pounds, had no chin, was much younger than Ms. Newmark – as was every human he’d encountered – and had full mental capacity, according to his scan.
“Not quite, but close,” the man responded. She gave him a weak smile and put her arm around him, clutching him close. She rubbed his back, and her hand came to rest on his butt.
He blew a loud fart, and she snatched her hand away while he guffawed.
Maxwell crossed the street and went up the block, where he ran into a Gregory he knew quiet well. “Morning,” he called.
“Morning. I saw you coming up the street. You are moving a little slow today. Last night leave you a little decharged?” the Gregory asked.
Maxwell gave a small smile, the corners of his plastic mouth turning up slightly, creasing his face. He thought it was a smile of acquiescence but wasn’t sure if he’d perfected it enough yet.
“Many chores to do today?” Gregory asked.
“Of course. Ms. Newmark does not care to use me for anything else. There are no kids around for me to play with, like there is for you at the Mr. Van Nostran estate.”
“Yes, I get to be the tackling dummy for their professional football fantasies,” Gregory said. “At least you get all the neat compartments.”
Maxwell gave a laugh he thought appropriate.
“I have got to go. The sooner done, the sooner I can rest these weary circuits,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”
“Take care.”
At the department of defense, a guard scanned him before letting him through. When he came to a tiny window between two rigid solders, Maxwell opened a hermetically sealed compartment in his forearm and pulled out a stack of money. He shuffled out $15,000 and placed it in the metal drawer that had opened by his hand. The drawer slid back in, and a man on the other side of the glass pulled the money out. “For the war in Spain,” Maxwell instructed him through a microphone on the ledge.
Maxwell was programmed to analyze what was best for Ms. Newmark. He had explained to her the illogicalness of making these weekly donations supporting creatures killing their own species simply for a possession, whether that was a place, a building, a person, or a mine. But she hadn’t listened.
The man looked over the bills. “Ah, from Mrs. Edith Newmark,” he said. “Loyal patriot. Once again, give her the department’s appreciation. As usual, President Stein will call her when he gets time.”
It took Maxwell a good part of the afternoon to cross town on foot, during which time he greeted more robot friends and his gyroscope was put to work a few more times. Finally he arrived at the Walmart Walgreens on the corner of 177th and MLK streets. A distant cousin of Ms. Newmark’s was the pharmacist here, so it the only drug store she trusted to dispense the proper medication.
Inside, a group of teens sat in the café to the right, some in armless chairs, others on the backs of chairs, one with her rump on the table and long leather legs crossed in front of her. Throbbing hip-hop bled from their ear buds. The only other sounds they made were the slurping of their flavored coffees and the “click-click-click” of their rapid fingers typing messages on their handheld phones.
The rhythm of their typing was hypnotic, and Maxwell went into sleep mode listening to it as he waited for the prescription to be filled. The typing didn’t stop when the lot of them burst out in simultaneous laughter.
“Mrs. Newmark,” a woman called from behind a glass window. The speaker was broken, but Maxwell heard her muffled voice clearly. The prescription dropped down a tube hanging from the ceiling. “Next,” the woman said.
Next for Maxwell was the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, where Father Don gave him a blessing to pass on to Ms. Newmark. His compartments were full, but Maxwell didn’t need to put this item anywhere. It seemed to be nothing, a figment that made Ms. Newmark feel better when he repeated it to her.
“Tell that dear, sweet lady that we look forward to seeing her whenever she can make it this way,” Father Don said.
Maxwell began the long trek back across town to the tube.
He shuffled through the crowds and stopped at the appropriate stops. On 76th Street, a man shunned the busy sidewalk to hoof it in the street. He wore a gray suit the color of his hair and his hands were empty.
Maxwell heard the cars before they appeared. The gears shifting, the pumping of the brakes as they zoomed through traffic, switching lanes and cutting off other vehicles in a two-car race. The cars sped up 76th Street and the first one struck the man, sending him pinwheeling into the air. He landed with a melon-like thud, and the second car veered to the right to avoid him, clipping a parked car and sending bits of metal into the air in a mimic of the man.
No one moved. Maxwell looked around, at the people standing frozen about him, their mouths shut tight and eyes staring. A pump in his left leg started humming. Then, movement began again. People surged forward up and down the street, on their way to their tasks. A group stood and looked at the man in the street, talking quietly amongst themselves. Cars slowed and went cautiously around the body, leaving tracks in the red blood pooling on the asphalt.
A woman, petite and wearing a sundress, slammed into Maxwell, and the momentum carried him backward. He turned and continued that way, toward the tube.
Hours later, with the sun setting and Maxwell’s compartments empty and cleaned and their contents put away, and after he’d cooked and delivered Ms. Newmark’s dinner, he sat next to her and repeated Father Don’s blessing in the Father’s voice. “May almighty God bless you in His mercy and make you always aware of His saving wisdom.”
“Amen!” Ms. Newmark said, her eyes closed tightly.
“May He strengthen your faith with proofs of His love, so that you will persevere in good works.”
“Amen!” In her ecstasy, Ms. Newmark reached out her hand toward Maxwell.
“May He direct your steps to Himself, and show you how to walk in charity and peace.”
“Amen!” Her hand stopped just short of his knee and dangled there gripping air.
“May almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen,” she whispered and then crossed herself. She opened her eyes and her hand shot back as though bitten.
“Go do whatever it is you do in the evenings,” she said with a wave of a wrinkly, veined hand. Mitzy licked tomato sauce off her plate.
Maxwell went into the living room and sat down in the old, drooping recliner. Only he ever entered this room, which he cleaned and dusted on orders twice a week.
The television remote was on the chair’s armrest. He pushed the red power button with a wire-filled finger. The flat screen flickered on, images from a sitcom. He sat back in the chair and put his feet up on the ottoman and chuckled along with the laugh track.
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Dave Schafer is a journalist and public relations writer in Houston, TX. But that’s not enough writing, so he writes short stories in his free time, too. He grew up on science fiction films and fantasy novels and has always been intrigued by how fantasy and science fiction stories can take us somewhere else while so adeptly commenting on the world around us. He has a journalism degree from Kent State University. His interests are anything not quite of this normal world, building a better future for his family, reading, sports, and telling people’s stories.