G. Wright - Broken Things

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.

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.

Gus took another bowl to the next room. This boy slept on the cot and didn’t budge as he set the bowl down. He didn’t get too close. You could never tell what the children planned. They could fake sleep. The boy’s face seemed permanently touched by sadness that even the peace of sleep couldn’t erase. Some kids responded to their treatment like the first boy, fostering resentment, others responded like this one. Nobody told him the children’s stories, and he didn’t want to know. Robots or not, there were a lot of creepers out there that had their own ideas of what children were good for, and they’d sold to them all. People didn’t need background checks for toys.

The only thing he ever fed the kids was soup. Kidsmith gave him a food budget, and two dollar packets of instant noodles let him tap into the budget to keep up his supply of beer. His last guest wouldn’t need food. They told him it was inoperative.

He rarely got to see adult androids. Kidsmith never manufactured them, but there were plenty of other businesses that did. The problem with adults was that they were designed for labor, taking jobs from real people. Even though it made sense for productivity, those companies were boycotted and put out of business for utilizing them. That’s why there were so few of them around.

As far as he knew, the only places that still used adult androids were the adult sex industry (illegal in Idaho, but not Nevada and Oregon) and the military. Overseas the laws were different. Kidsmith, as a leader in android technology, had stepped up to reclaim them as they wore out or were abandoned. He imagined that they did so for access to the technology of other companies.

They hadn’t locked it up, but dumped it in the workshop. From what he’d been told the thing looked like an antique.

He entered the shop, his eyes instantly finding the thing. It looked more like a desiccated corpse than any android he’d ever seen. As he walked in the smell of rot hit him so hard he gagged. He covered his mouth with his hand as he approached it. The damn thing would make the room stink for weeks.

The android’s skin had shrunk tightly to its bones. Maggot holes were all throughout its flesh and he swore he could see the things moving just beneath. Its clothes were nothing but rags. “I can’t believe they’ve left you out like this,” he said to the thing, “you’re infested.”