Cleaning Up

Lansdale ran down the steps before me so that he could find a Warehouse and get ready any extra parts he needed to install the eyes.  I couldn’t face the stairs right away, even though Lansdale told me that the building was leaning over and I probably shouldn’t stay in the lab too long.  But it had lasted twenty-one years already, and I needed some time to think.

Then when I was alone, I realized that I didn’t want to think, didn’t want to think at all, and so I started putting the office to rights.

It wasn’t very hard—I am a super-powered robotic vacuum, after all.  I pushed the furniture back into place, and I vacuumed the rubble off of the floor.  The vacuum hadn’t been used for its original purpose for months, and it made a whirring noise—I would have to ask Lansdale to look at that, before he dropped me off at Bloomsy.

I was holding Bill’s coffee mug (which had miraculously escaped the general shambles) when I thought that, and when I thought that I dropped it and it broke in two.  Well, of course Lansdale was going to drop me off in Bloomsy.   “I cannot join the world I have created.  And neither can you.”  Lansdale wouldn’t join me in Bloomsy, he had a home of his own, a family and a community that had formed happily and peacefully and they were living in that stupid post-apocalyptic bliss where everyone read books and no one needed computers anymore.

It wouldn’t be so bad.  It would be the same as it had been before.  We would still talk online.

I walked up to  take a last look at Bill’s skeleton.  It must’ve smelled bad in here from him, but that was long past.  One of the windows was broken, and a soft breeze from the outside just barely triggered my surface motion detectors.  I was going home, with great new eyes, eyes that would let me see Bloomsy, let me see Betsy.  Who the hell cared about Betsy now anyway.

“It was fine that you wanted to go,” I said to Bill, “But really, shouldn’t you have taken me with you?”

NEXT TIME: Seeing