Ekaterina Sedia: Stories

Glenn rubbed the bridge of his nose and drank his coffee. He heard someone scrabble at the closed shop door but remained seated, confident that he was hidden from view. The customer soon gave up and left, abandoning Glenn to his solitude and quiet grief for the Peugeot. Cats purred.

Glenn hatched a plan. He would set a trap for the perpetrator, using his broken coffeemaker at home as bait. He doubted for a moment whether the dead appliance would attract the murderer but then decided that to ascertain the presence of life the criminal would have to get close to it. And then…

Then what? Glenn's shoulders jerked at the sudden cold draft that snuck under his clothes and ran down his back. He should call the police, call the neighborhood watch. Only then they would arrest the Disemboweler, haul him off, to be judged and probably eviscerated as a punishment. Glenn wanted to know why the disemboweler disemboweled, what possible secret lurked in the shiny machine guts. He decided to watch first and consider how to act later.

Later that night he prepared the sacrificial coffeemaker and left it by the curb, alone in the night. Glenn shivered; even though the thing was devoid of life, he felt bad abandoning it all alone in the night, with a crazy appliance killer lurking about. Cruelty was not easy for him.

Glenn placed the coffeemaker not far from a streetlamp, just on the edge of its halo of light, where he could see it from his first-story room. He settled before the window, his room dark, his head making a barely perceptible silhouette on the windowpane. And he waited.

It didn't take the murderer long-just as Glenn's knees started to ache and his shoulders went stiff, a long lank figure slid through the shadows, skirting around the circular pool of light, and squatted down by the coffeemaker. A long metal rod glinted in the streetlight as the disemboweler brought it down upon the defenseless coffeemaker; its former spirit, secure inside the vacuum cleaner, wailed at the destruction of its first home-a lone, sad note like a breath caught in a flute. In the street, glass and metal and bone shattered and sprayed in the light cast by the streetlamp.

The murderer remained crouched, and contemplated the broken pieces for a time. As Glenn watched him, a suspicion started to form in his mind. This was what the murderer did-he just wanted to see the pattern, like the diviner of old. Glenn grunted with frustration; this morning, he saw a book on fortune-telling, and hadn't thought to bring it home. Now he had to wait until tomorrow.

A shot rang out from the darkness, ricocheted off the lamppost and hit one of the larger pieces, displacing it. The Disemboweler jumped to his feet and rushed away, disappearing in the ink of the alley to the right of the house. Several policemen pooled into the light, and disappeared too, chasing the long silhouette of the Disemboweler.

Glenn rose, his knees popping, and stretched. It was time to go to bed anyway, and he only hoped that he would be able to sleep with all the danger and excitement. But before he reached his bedroom (the size of a handkerchief; apartments were expensive nowadays), he heard a sound coming from the outside. Scratching and dull thuds, directly on the wall of his apartment building. He listened, and the vacuum cleaner wrapped its hose around Glenn's ankle, worried. There were more scratching sounds, and then the shattering of glass from the kitchen.

Glenn disentangled himself from the fearful appliance and walked cautiously toward the kitchen. His slippered feet made no sound, and the apartment was dark. There was more creaking and scratching coming from the kitchen, and Glenn peered through the doorway.

"Halt!" A metallic, awful voice, nothing like the normal cadence of human speech or gentle gurgling of the spirits. "Do not move."

The sound petrified Glenn like the gaze of a basilisk. He felt something dash past his knee in the darkness. It was the vacuum cleaner; its spirit recognized the one who destroyed its former vessel and charged. There was a muffled curse and a massive thud as the vacuum wrapped its hose around the stranger's legs and pulled him down. What awful clanking, Glenn thought, still unable to move.

The stranger shook off the vacuum even as it hissed and spat, and stood. In the struggle, his long coat came unbuttoned, and soft glinting of old metal in the light from the steetlamp outside finally snapped Glenn out of his helpless terror. "You're an appliance," he said, as he took a cautious step into the kitchen.

"No!" The stranger clanked angrily across the kitchen, back and forth. "I'm not an appliance. I am a robot."

It was a good thing that Glenn was well read; he wouldn't have recognized the archaic word otherwise. These were soulless machines, built in the time before people learned to harness the power of nature spirits and infuse their appliances with souls of trees, rocks and small bodies of water. "Revenge then," Glenn said. "You're angry that they're better than you."

"No." The robot stopped. "It's not that, not that at all."

"I didn't know there were any of you still around."

"Just me," the robot said. "Can I hide here for a while? I have survived far too long to be captured because of a coffeemaker."

"Why would I let you?"

The robot stepped closer, its hot oily breath singeing Glenn's face. "Because I am stronger than you. I've never killed a person, but there's a first time for everything, isn't there?"

"I'll scream. They'll hear me and come for you."

"Compassion?" the robot tried.

"Not after you killed my car."

"I'm sorry. Would you like to know what it is that I do?"

"Yes," Glenn said. "Tell me, and then I'll decide." Glenn edged to the kitchen counter and lit a candle. Glenn much preferred candles to incandescent bulbs.

"It is an ancient art," the robot said, its faceted eyes glinting in the candlelight.

The word was haruspex, not disemboweler, the robot told Glenn. From Hittites to Babylonians to Etruscans to Romans to robots it went. The robot's insectoid jaws clicked and its long head glimmered in the buttery, yellow candlelight.

Robots do not have spirits, the robot contined. They are not like microwaves. Neither they have the knowledge of right and wrong, or any other reliable moral compass, like people do. They only have the desire to be ethical.

Haruspicy, the robot told him, unlike many other forms of divination, did not reveal future or any past secrets; it did not concern itself with knowledge. It told you only whether you were right.

The Etruscans and other ancients used it to know the will of gods, whether they supported an undertaking either completed or intended. Robots used haruspicy to know whether they were making a moral choice, a correct choice. There was just no way around it.

Robots never sacrificed animals-flesh being innocent of the mechanical concerns-and only mechanical guts were acceptable to them. The innards of the combustible engines and electronic devices were used to guide the robots' search for excellence.

The robots had disappeared, and the engines and electronics acquired souls and flesh. Still, the robot carried on as before, unsure of what else it could do.

Glenn listened with a dawning sense of sympathy. It all sounded so understandable, and yet… the robot had killed Glenn's Peugeot and threatened violence against Glenn himself.

"Please," the robot said. "Don't give me to the police. They will kill me."

"Probably," Glenn agreed. "But technically, it won't be murder. They'll just take you apart."

The robot's eyes watched him, dull and empty of expression. "You know it is the same thing."

"What choice do I have?" Glenn now paced the room, crossing the yellow circle of candlelight, stepping into corner shadows and pulling his foot back quickly, as if he just stepped into too-cold water. "They've seen you, they know you. It's only a matter of time. You hid for so long… isn't it time?"