Obsolescence

By Rose Maxwell

Oliver found the robot in the wilds of his backyard. It was slumped over in the weed-filled herb garden, leaning against the fence. All the animating force was sapped from its body, its small circle eyes just black pinpricks. The whole thing had the composure of a pile of tin cans. Oliver probably would not have noticed it, if it were not for the stray cat sniffing at it, which he then shooed away. He was in an eternal war with the feral cat population on the side of his local songbirds.

Oliver stared at the pathetic thing, which must have been living only a few hours earlier before it ran out of fuel or batteries or sunlight. A splintered hole in the fence showed where it had burst into his yard before collapsing on a bed of scraggly mint.

Robots were not so strange in his area, especially dying robots, remnants of a world with more access to lithium and cobalt, and university engineering departments. But it was still an unsettling sight. Bile crept to the top of Oliver’s throat as he looked at the corpse, the same as when he had seen dead bodies during the war of his youth, splayed out and pathetic. At least with robots, there were no guts.

Deciding that, if nothing else, Oliver had to give the thing a proper funeral, he leaned over with all the speed and dexterity his creaking old body could muster and grabbed it from the ground. It was light, hanging in his arms like a pile of laundry. The lightness and the sheen of the metal suggested that the robot was made of that high-grade titanium that had been discovered right before the war, and, looking at the scratches that covered its body, Oliver had the nasty feeling that this robot had been a soldier. Decades ago, he had watched these same war robots on a tiny screen in his boyfriend Elijah’s hand, watched them shoot down civilians in a crowd and snipe protestors from the top of a football stadium. They had never made it to his coast, the war ending shortly after they were created, but holding the robot reminded Oliver of past violence he had been trying not to think about for decades now.

Looking down at the limp metal body, Oliver considered several dramatic options. He could throw the robot out of his yard, into the tangle of forest behind his fence, yelling something self-important about how he would have no more war in his life. He could take it to the local recycling plant and watch in glee as its limbs were screwed off its body and melted into blades for wind turbines. Or he could take it inside and smash it against the floor of its house, hoping to do some damage to its sleek, homicidal form. 

By the time Oliver felt ready to decide, he was already in his house, and his arms and knees were aching. Deep inside him, his internal prosthetics chirped in gentle warning.

Tired, Oliver laid the broken war machine on the couch and promised to take care of it in the morning. He spent the rest of the evening watering his houseplants, listening to the radio, and trying not to think of a young man with a phone cupped between his thin fingers.

That night, Oliver woke up to the sound of steps in his house. Not remembering anything of the previous day, Oliver pushed himself out of bed and crept toward the noise, toward his living room. There, in the strange green light of his algae lamps, he saw what looked like a walking junkyard stumbling about the room, crashing into chairs and breaking clay pots. It was the robot, of course, apparently alive but dragging itself like something drunk or dying. Alarmed by the amount of plant carnage that had already taken place, Oliver walked into the living room as fast as his legs could manage and grabbed the thrashing assemblage of metal. In the half-light of the algae, he saw a glowing solar panel on the back of its neck, showing a pitiful amount of stored energy, apparently gathered over the day. Next to it was a power switch.

The robot, much more powerful than an old man made of quickly deteriorating flesh, had wrestled Oliver to the ground in the time it took for him to notice these two vital facts on the back of its neck. The only other part of the machine that glowed were his eyes, killer red. The protective casings of the android’s fingers came apart, revealing a thin, sharp piece of metal that was quickly coming towards Oliver’s throat.

Oliver had imagined his death many times, in the throbbing years of the war and the unsteady ones afterward, when no one knew if tanks were going to roll through once again, exposing their peace as a naïve illusion. He had imagined bombs whistling down, crushing him under rubble, bullets cracking his ribcage, and floods dragging him away. He had imagined the robots too, after Elijah had shown him the video, their cold hands around his throat, their boot-like feet on his chest. But when he had imagined these deaths, he had imagined himself young, and defiant, and not nearly so alone.

Now faced with cool steel against the soft skin of his neck, Oliver’s animal instincts took over. He grabbed the robot’s neck and felt the switch underneath his fingers. He flicked it, adrenaline overpowering age and exhaustion, and the android collapsed upon him, once again a lifeless collection of metal. 

In the absence of adrenaline, the memories and exhaustion poured back into Oliver’s body, and he fell asleep right there on the floor, crying, the robot’s body splayed on top of him like a lover. His body rang with the chirps of concerned medical prosthetics, and as he drifted off to sleep, Oliver indulged in his common fantasy that the internal sounds of his body were the murmur of human voices.

Oliver woke early, as he always did, and his body moved even slower for the lack of sleep. He tossed the robot off of him with some difficulty and waited an hour before he had the energy to stand up. Then, checking to make sure the android’s switch was still in the “off” position, he enacted his morning rituals, turning on the radio to listen to community news as he cut up fruit and watered his plants.

At noon, when his energy was at its peak, Oliver hoisted the robot into his arms and hailed the local bus. The android sagged on the seat next to him as Oliver watched the city go by. This area had been a manufacturing center once, and now the old brick factories were covered in solar panels and grape vines, children peering out their windows. Moss and ferns grew over the remains of munitions factories destroyed in the war. Looking at families playing on the grass-covered foundation of a bombed-out church, Oliver wondered what it would be like to live without the war in his bones.

He was headed for the mechanical shop, where his prosthetics were tuned up every year. It was in one of the old mills, windows filled with multicolored solar glass and a roof covered with kale and collards. The first floor was huge and open, full of young people who crouched over piles of solar panels and around 3-D printers, the room whirring with the sounds of machines and excited chatter. Staring at a directory written in sidewalk chalk, Oliver headed to the back corner, for “robotics.”

One mechanic stood in the robotics section, a young woman in a patched-up jumpsuit, microbraids piled up at the top of her head, and an aquacultural hand prosthetic peeking out from one oversized sleeve. She held a birdlike animatronic in her other hand, its glass wings beating faintly against her arm.

After some pleasantries, Oliver laid the robot out in front of her, explaining how it had come into his backyard and his suspicions about its origins. The mechanic ran her hands over its metal body, checking its neck and joints like a doctor. She nodded along with Oliver’s story, her face never revealing any surprise.

“These are pretty rare. They’re old, and only a few were produced. You know, relative to other androids,” she said, her voice full of a collector’s fascination. “The good news is it should be easy to disable the weaponry. Lots of war machines on this era ran on digital commands, so once you get rid of that receptor, they’re no longer a danger. This one must have been running on some old order that’s still hanging out on the Wi-Fi.”

Oliver nodded along to this, the light from the windows burning a hole in his neck. He had known all about digital technology and Wi-Fi in his youth, but since the powerlines had fallen and the magnets had switched directions, that knowledge had become less and less useful, until it had all curled in on itself and crumpled, an old leaf in the autumn wind.

“Do you think there’s any reason why there would be an old kill order for you floating around out there?” the mechanic asked. The question grabbed him by the back of the head, and pulled him back into a basement full of protest signs and cigarette stubs.

“They’re going to come get you anyway,” Elijah was saying, his skin glowing orange in the harsh fluorescent lights. A cigarette hung between his thin fingers. His skin was youth-smooth in a way that made Oliver hurt. “Just for hanging around us. So we might as well go out with a bang, you know?” And Oliver had said nothing; he had just held out his arms until Elijah relented and climbed onto the couch with him. Oliver had ignored the feeling of ammunition in the other boy’s pockets.

He left the mechanic with a promise that the robot would be rendered harmless and with a whole new set of memories to avoid. He spent that night how he spent every night, with his plants and his radio and the comforting chirp of his heart monitor.

The following days blended into each other the way they had for the last sixty years. The plants continued their slow conquest of the walls, the house developed more grime in the ever-increasing number of places that Oliver could not reach. He said hello and thank you to a milk delivery boy who looked at the old man at the end of the road as a confusing curiosity.

“Hey,” the milk boy said as Oliver traded a number of home-grown jalapeños for a quart of goat’s milk. “Do you know what that android’s doing all the way out here?” He pointed down the road, where the war robot was making its way to Oliver’s house. The chirp in Oliver’s chest increased.

For a second, he wondered if he should grab the boy and pull him into the house, yell to the neighbors to go inside, to get down. But actions like that belonged to an earlier, more jagged time, and Oliver reminded himself that this robot was here to kill only him. So, he shooed the boy away, locked his front door, and waited in the kitchen for the explosion of splinters and bolts that would signal his demise.

Death didn’t come, and when Oliver opened the door the next morning, he found the robot seated politely on his stoop, a letter slid between the door and the doorframe. The letter was composed of cut-out words from discolored old books, like a ransom note from an old movie.

Oliver shut the door on the robot, but could not stop himself from reading the letter.

Sorry, it began. I understand if you do not want to take me in, but I have no place to stay. Thank you. 

It was not signed with a name.

Oliver did not let the robot in, but he didn’t chase him away either. He decided, seemingly without thinking, that without any attention, the robot would disappear, like an alley cat, or someone else’s young child. But the robot did not go away. Oliver would wake to see the machine in his backyard, patching up the fence, pulling weeds from the soil, remaking the beds of his herb garden. As Oliver stared out his window, the robot would look back, and Oliver did not know if their locked eye contact was an expression of mutual understanding, or rather a challenge to see who would look away first. Either way, he was losing.

The neighbors began to notice the robot, and Oliver would catch glimpses of adults waving at it as it recharged in the sunlight and children picking flowers to make wreaths that hung across its metal neck. In response to this human attention, the robot would bow its head in an anthropomorphic expression of humility and grateful embarrassment. There was something so familiar in the self-conscious curve of that metal neck, that Oliver unlocked his door and called the android in.

“Just remember that your staying with me is contingent on you not killing me,” he said, and the robot shook its head with a puppylike enthusiasm. For the hundredth time in his life, and perhaps the fifth in the last week, Oliver prepared himself to die as he went to bed. But he woke up alive, sun winking at him from the windows and his kitchen fully cleaned.

“Thank you,” Oliver said, because it only seemed polite. Then, not knowing what else to say, he asked if the robot wanted to listen to the radio. It nodded and so Oliver turned on the morning programming, which was mostly snippets of rediscovered music. The android bobbed its head in tune with the music, a satisfied buzz coming from its metal body. Seeing that the robot was content, Oliver went to make his breakfast and prune his plants. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the android get up and grab another watering can. Man and robot watered together, the sound of long-dead guitarists filling the humid air of the house.

They began to share chores like that: the watering and the weeding and the harvesting, as well as cleaning and home repairs. Oliver wouldn’t let the android help with cooking though, since he was the only one who ate food, and so it felt only fair that he would prepare and clean up after meals. While he ate, the android would sit outside, recharging itself in the warmth of the sun. 

The two of them had developed a strange but functional method of communication. The android could hear and read, but it could not speak, lacking a mouth or any other facial features besides its two glowing eyes. It tried to write a few times on blackboards Oliver picked up from community tag sales, but its fingers were not built for such things, and so the results were sloppy and unreadable. Oliver now searched every tool library and rummage store for a typewriter, but until that happened, the android communicated by flipping through Oliver’s old paperbacks and picking out individual words until they spelled out a sentence. It was a painstaking process, but Oliver had nothing else but time. Through this method of patchwork communication, the robot asked about the neighborhood, and Oliver answered as much as he could. In truth, he felt as if the city had grown up around him without him helping or even noticing, as if it were a tree and he was a lost and patient traveler in a forest. All he knew was that he had lived in this house since the heat of the war, with his plants and an ever-decreasing number of young idealists, and that the world had changed around him. He asked the robot questions, as well, but he could tell it was cagey about its past, and Oliver did not pry, heavy enough with his own memories of war.

There was a peace between them and a comfort. Sometimes, as they sat next to one another at the dining table, their arms would brush, skin against metal, and Oliver would find himself longing for the touch of someone warm and pliable, someone with lithe arms and strong fingers, who would touch him like he was young and still could become someone brave. But as those longings became more acute, the gentle pangs of loneliness that he had grown so comfortable with became less frequent. He now had someone to accompany him to the weekend markets, to help him in the garden, to share memories with. There was still a guilt that gnawed at him when he was alone in his bed, that he had become even more of a traitor than he had always been, keeping a neutered war machine in his house, finding comfort in the companionship of a weapon. The android kept him company in the day, but it was Elijah who lay with him in bed at night, a reminder of the beautiful martyr he could have been and the aging coward he had become instead.

Elijah came to him in the sunshine, too, in the form of a knock on the door and a woman with a large, dirt-stained bag. She shook his hand, and told him in a brusque tone that she was from a historical recuperation society. Her people worked beyond the mountains, she explained, in the vast pile of debris that still riddled the middle of the continent. A pack of backpacks had been found in the bombed-out remains of a tent city. The one she pulled out of her sack was olive green and more patch than bag, its thick, solar-enforced fabrics rotting away and riddled with fungus. Oliver recognized it, of course, with a taste like copper in his mouth. There was a journal inside, she explained, and his name and address were listed on the inside cover “in case anything happens.”

“Good thing you still live in the same place,” the woman said, a half-smile on her sun-wrinkled face. Oliver could only nod back, his own face frozen. The woman seemed to notice his uneasiness and asked if he would like some comfort. Oliver was glad she had given him the option to say no.

Nowhere in his house seemed like a sacred enough space for Elijah’s backpack, and so Oliver kept it clutched in his hands as he moved into the garden. The robot was not there, and Oliver breathed a sigh of relief as he moved himself into a moss-covered old garden chair. The sky was turning a bruising blue as the evening grew upon him, but Oliver strained his eyes to read every last line of Elijah’s spidery handwriting. He recognized it so well, the loops and the flourishes and he could imagine Elijah making those same hand motions against his skin, writing on his chest words of hope and revolution.

Oliver already knew most of the contents of the journal and had already imagined what had happened to his boyfriend from the moment Elijah had left their house with pockets full of weapons and seeds. So many had already gone before, had been cut down like beautiful golden wheat, and after a while, the aid packages and solidarity publications that Oliver and their housemates had been sending out felt inadequate. They had all left, his friends glittering with piercings and idealism, all knowing they were heading off to die. Elijah had been the last, waiting for Oliver to gather up his courage in the resounding silence of their now-empty house. And when he had realized that Oliver would never become a hero, Elijah had folded him in his arms and kissed him on the forehead and headed out to the battlefields beyond their city.

Everything else was contained in this journal: all the friends Elijah had seen die, the taste of weapon-poisoned water, the mines he was sent to and worked in until he escaped and was hunted once again. The pages were littered with drawings as well, endearingly crude. They showed the small gardens Elijah had been able to grow before they found him, the makeshift weapons his companions had forged out of military waste, and the rolling mountains in the distance. And there were horrors too: tanks and uniformed guards and fighter robots, their eyes swirling pools of black ink. The journal didn’t end with a manifesto, or a profession of his everlasting love for Oliver, or anything that would have offered a sense of conclusion. Instead, Elijah wrote that he was in a camp of activist nomads, and that he was hoping to hit a watershed the next day. Then the journal ended, half the pages still unfilled.

The garden was dark now, bugs circling Oliver’s head. He sat, options swirling around in his head, his body stuck to the chair with the force of decades of contained grief. He could break down and cry. He could go to the West, and try to find more about his lost lover. He could kill himself. His body ached with exhaustion.

In the house, the robot bustled around the kitchen, watering plants, always watering plants. As Oliver walked in, it raised its head in friendly greeting and Oliver punched it right between its glowing red eyes. It was not a strong punch, as Oliver’s strength had gone past the point that no prosthetics could help him. Instead, his fist bounced across the face of the android, bones cracking. Oliver wanted to yell, to fight, to wrestle the robot to the ground once again and feel the knife in its fingers cut through him for real this time, his blood spilling across the floor of this stupid, bourgeois house. But his fist was a ball of pain, and Oliver doubled over. The robot went to him, and wrapped its metal arms around the man’s old body, trying to help, but Oliver waved the machine away.

“Leave,” he said, and the robot did, taking half of Oliver’s books with him, not turning to wave goodbye.

Oliver went to the hospital the next day, where his hand was wrapped in linen, and he was given herbs to chew. His house was silent again, no longer filled with mechanical footsteps or the sounds of water falling from a metal spout. Oliver turned the radio up louder and more frequently. His garden began to fill with weeds again. The edges of his houseplant’s leaves began to turn brittle and brown.

Every night, Oliver slept with Elijah’s backpack, the damp fungus in its fabric tickling his arms. He thought that the visions of Elijah would stop, that he would stop being haunted by his old boyfriend’s noble face and beautiful death. But still, long fingers played across his back, and the silence of his house whispered complicity into his ears.

“But you,” he said, into the silence of his house, into the leaves of his potted plants. “Didn’t die for anything noble either.” And though he didn’t know whether it was true, didn’t know whether Elijah had met his end from a glorious firefight or because of radiation poison, the fingers on his back grew loving and then disappeared.

After his check-up at the hospital, a scrappy old mansion with its walls painted various shades of pastel, Oliver walked to the mechanic shop. The mechanic he had met before was still in her corner, surrounded by robotic parts.

“Is there,” he asked, without saying hello, “a way to discover where my android had gone?”

There was no way to track him now that the grid was down and the satellites shot. But she knew where he had come from, from the numbers on the back of his neck. He grabbed an area map at the city council office and made his way home.

He had to get on three different connecting buses the next day, lugging with him a bag full of food and a terrible paperback detective novel he had long been intending to read. The buses took him through soft, rolling hills and cities that were suspended on long metal stilts. Other passengers were dressed in colorful outfits, striped and studded with solar fabric and jewelry. They laughed and shared dried fruit with each other, and Oliver let himself bask in their joy instead of massaging his own loneliness.

The last stop was an abandoned military base, barely reclaimed. The streets were newly paved, some of the brick buildings left to rot, others repurposed into communal homes and workshops. The old robotics factory was up on a hill, and it was one of the rotting ones, sticking up out of the ground like a decaying tooth. By the time Oliver had dragged his body up the path to the building, his heart was chirping frantically.

The building was empty, sun spinning through the broken ceiling, weeds growing up to Oliver’s knees. Old desks and sets of drawers had long become a part of the ground, their metal corners sticking up from the dirt. The only things that seemed new about the building were the papers scattered across the floor. They were covered with cut-out words, strewn throughout the floor, and stuck to the walls with rusty nails. Some just said, I’m Sorry. Others read like poetry, describing rich green leaves and soft old hands. Still, others described war crimes, the robot shooting at point blank, wading through ruins and bodies. Those read so much like confessions that Oliver felt uncomfortably like a priest.

Letting the letters drift onto the ground, Oliver gave himself permission not to read any more accounts of the war.

Another door lay at the end of the building, peering out onto the hills beyond. Outside the door, the android sat, bathed in sunlight, cut-up books fanning around him. He did not look up as Oliver sat next to him, but when the old man laid his head on the robot’s shoulder, the metal seemed to relax and soften, almost as if it were muscle. They sat like that, man and robot, head on top of head, and Oliver let himself cry in the sunlight.