Cheeseburger Brown's I AM A CHEESEBURGER (Feed)

Thin Air

noreply@blogger.com (Cheeseburger Brown) — Sun, 20 May 2012 11:28:28 PDT

Thin Air is a science-fiction short story, as told by me, your indefatigable host, Cheeseburger Brown. (You'll be able to see Thin Air in the company of other fine sci-fi stories in an upcoming issue of Bruce Bethke's Stupefying Stories.)

News: My short story Last Words, originally published in AE, has been named a notable story of 2011 by the storySouth Million Writers Awards.

eBooks: Victoria Day Special! The Amazon Kindle edition of my novella The Automatic Marlboro will be absolutely free Monday May 21st and Tuesday May 22nd, in honour of her royally defunct majesty, Alexandrina Victoria, Empress of India and Queen of the Canadian Dominion and so forth. Download a copy today and be amused!

And now, today's short but spritely tale makes its Internetly début:

Thin Air

The Butcher collapsed in upon himself, they say, and thereby became the first inmate ever escaped via singularity. This is long-standing prison lore.

But it isn't true.

While the Butcher did amass a spectacular portfolio of skills over the course of his storied career he was, like the rest of us, confined to translation along only the usual spatial axes. His journey through time was invariably positive, if not always fun.

He'd been fat at trial. Grotesquely so, in fact -- the model of indulgence. But upon incarceration he took up a new regimen of self-improvement founded on rice with no meat and a dizzying number of daily jumping jacks. His viscous excesses rippled hypnotically, brokering him wide berth in the exercise yard from block gangs leery of mesmerism. "It's part of a purpose," the gang leaders whispered. "Whyever he's thinning, it fulfills some design."

They were certain. He was the Butcher! For decades his successes had defined the state of the art in interstellar crime. It was generally understood that he was among the most clever and least noble people alive. Ruthless, cunning, vain -- a Machiavellian polymath whose greed for infamy was legend.

"I renounce my ways," he swore with tears on his sagging cheeks, bowing in the prison chapel before a shimmering hologram of the Manifold Christ; "for I am reborn remembering that an iteration of the hyper-Lord shall redeem me, while quantities last, and so my soul is preapproved and my prayers trademarked in thy name. Patent pending, amen."

The chapel printed him a voucher for grace and sent him on his way. Every inmate agreed his footfalls seemed lighter as he departed up the aisle, head held high and forehead unfurrowed. Over the next weeks conversions surged.

The Butcher moved with a new deliberate slowness. He spoke softly. He drank only water and never subscribed to entertainment. When shanked in the kidney by an old competitor he merely smiled. "Brother, I forgive this," he said as he slumped.

In the prison hospital he read to the blinded. They loved him, and lamented profanely when he was declared well enough to rejoin the general population, castigating nurse and guard alike in the universal language of flaming gauze.

He took classes. He learned pottery, plumbing, and small robot repair. Thinner he became throughout.

Surveillance was total. The Butcher was watched unmentionably. His every move was scrutinized by wardens, interpreted by criminologists, simulated in a computer model, and finally filed in an underground records vault.

In time the head warden allowed the Butcher to take a job inside the prison. In this way he earned a pittance against his debt, slightly stemming the tide of the ever-rising tally that marked his every meal and flush and breath as a convict.

He took odd shifts mopping floors and injecting or extracting meals from his fellow inmates before settling into a regular position in the maintenance wing tinkering with faulty guards. The prison's robotics strategy was predicated on expensive tamper-proof brains coupled with stripped-down off-the-rack bodies. The hardware was cheap and easy to fix, the software inviolable.

Any given guard was smaller than most men, but stronger. It was lithe and skeletal, its fragility offset by cooperation: each was backed up by a cohort of hundreds.

By conscientious preventative care to stave off failures and industrious improvisation when failures did occur, the Butcher kept his keepers on their feet and snarling mean. He lavished attention on his charges. None left the maintenance wing without a freshly painted carapace and keenly sharpened instruments of discipline. In time he was awarded a certificate of achievement and some extra human rights.

The wardens watched him very, very closely. But every day there was less of him to see.

"I don't like the idea of him having access to those brains," said the most suspicious warden. "Damn the budget, there's got to be another way to keep the guards online."

"The brains are unhackable," said the head warden. "They lock right up if you so much as tickle the prompt. Keeping those hunk of junk bodies up and running -- that's where we need any help we can get. Unless it's you that wants a pay cut. Either that or fix them yourself."

The most suspicious warden glowered, but nobody thought anything of it because he always made that face.

The Butcher continued to lose weight. His head looked too large, and his stooped, bony shoulders made it look too heavy. He could be found asleep at odd hours. When encouraged to eat he merely let a smile stretch his gaunt face.

It was a crisp autumn morning when the Butcher finally disappeared into thin air.

The wardens on the monitors had become so accustomed to seeing the Butcher sleeping at his post they had fallen victim to change blindness, and therefore failed to react for over two minutes while they stared at an empty prison jumpsuit sloughing off the Butcher's chair. The head warden slammed his fist against the general alarm, dispatching guards to cover every entrance and exit. Locks banged shut. Oxygen was evacuated from the service passages. Sirens wailed. Junior wardens donned defensive exosuits and waded in among the population, tasers crackling.

It was only after lock down, during the second prisoner count, that the head warden thought to count the guards. Every brain was accounted for and secure…even the one sitting naked on a workbench in the maintenance wing. The head warden's subsequent utterance was unprintable.

The Butcher walked right out of prison.

He walked in an armour of spare parts, his emaciated limbs narrow enough to fit within the confines of the spindly, inhuman hardware. He had made himself a fainting corpse to do it, but in the end he fit. It turned out the hardest part was suppressing his own snickers as he sallied past the gatehouse.

Living on the outside he gained most of the weight back within a year.

Fin.

Emergency Procedure

noreply@blogger.com (Cheeseburger Brown) — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:02:15 PDT

Emergency Procedure is a science-fiction short story, as told by me, your exploratory host, Cheeseburger Brown.

eBooks: At long last, non-Kindle electronic editions of The Extra Cars are available now via Smashwords (the Kindle edition is still here). If you haven't already, please consider helping push Felix and the Frontier up in the much ballyhooed Amazon rankings by downloading a Kindle edition today.

And now, this week's brief tale:

The ambulance is yellow. This is so it stands out. Cities, by their varied nature, blend helplessly into a compromise grey. To further call attention to itself the ambulance also has flashing lights, red and white and deepest ultraviolet.

And it keens, too, echoing off the architecture.

The hospital is white. This is a show of purity, an advertisement against fear. The white walls are painted by sliding lights as the ambulance sweeps in to land. Robots with soft hands and soothing voices troop busted mammals through the automated double doors under the watchful optics of police drones.

The mammal on the stretcher groans. It is a social display, a signal for mammal sympathies. But I'm immune. I've worked here too long.

My gloves are green. Snap, snap.

We run him through the scanning drum, grotesque robot strength making it look easy. The tomography confirms what's evident: this mammal's on his way to a generalized system failure by way of cardiac arrest precipitated by the shock of being hit by a car and having some key viscera punctured by broken ribs. He dies in the drum, but the emergency room has good reflexes so before I can even make a note the patient's already jerked back into the here and now.

He groans again. "You are safe," the robots tell him, laying warmed palms upon him in patterns designed to relax. "Do not panic." He unclenches his jaw and they intubate him.

His blood is red, and urgent. Analgesics are administered. "Do you want unconsciousness?" I ask him, but his eyes are wide and horrified and he doesn't give me any sort of proper answer. I shrug and sort of semi-supervise as the machines prep him. I'm also messaging my boyfriend. The diagnosis box dings and I look over. It says we're going to need a surgeon.

I press the surgeon button.

I yawn. As the saying goes, lazy as a doctor. I also press the coffee button. I check my watch. But I don't really care what time it is, so I play a few games. Holographic figures sprint and flash in ghostly pantomime over my wrist. I can't really afford a newer watch but I want one anyway.

The ER shunts us out onto a rail. I kneel down to check that the gurney's wheels are locked in the groove, then give the nod to start the track. The patient is pulled along into the surgery. I stroll alongside in the adjoining corridor, watching his progress through the windows. The robots surrounding the patient sway as the assembly stops at the decontamination station. They get flashed until everything's clean. With a slight jerk the gurney moves on.

My coffee's ready just as I pass the coffee machine. Aces.

I lean against the window and sip as the patient and his retinue arrive in the surgery. The surgeon unfolds itself from the wall, its many appendages gleaming and immaculate, the base of its housing streaked with the grime of a hundred thousand interventions. I glance at the diagnostic manifest -- it's a line of green lights so I press the proceed with procedure button. In response the surgeon arranges itself over the patient, flesh and gown disappearing behind a writhing wall of knives, tweezers and drills, cutting lasers, cauterizing lasers and cotton swabs.

I blow through my coffee's steam and check my watch again. My boyfriend's sent me an unmentionable picture. I message him back, "Who ever led you to believe that's even remotely attractive?" He laughs.

Black.

I blink. In the startling silence I instinctively reach for my eyes, spilling hot coffee all over myself. Afterimages throb away. Behind them is a scintillating wool of nothingness.

I feel like something's happened to me but it hasn't. It's happened to the hospital. All power is lost. Black is now the colour of everything.

I yell out. My voice is dull in the stillness, bouncing off the glass in front of me. How is this even possible? In med school I did a dozen variations of power emergency drills -- falling back to secondary power, then tertiary -- but who could even fathom a situation with absolutely no power at all? Wouldn't the building pull directly from the city? And what about the robots -- why the hell had they gone dark?

It's at this point I remember about the patient.

The patient!

I press my panic button. There are supposed to be automatic glow strips in the event of an emergency but they're not glowing, so I have to work my way out of the supervision room by feel. The room seems bigger than it used to be, I think, and then I hit the wall. I find the doorjamb with my fingertips and ease around holding it for dear life, as if I were ten storeys up. I call out, "Hello?"

On my hands and knees I find the tracks for the gurney's wheels, then follow them through the fabric doorways into the surgery. My sounds echo off the tiles. Something is dripping onto them. Otherwise only silence.

I feel my way to the surgical table, straightening slowly. Is that breathing? Is it the patient? I reach forward but my fingers are blocked by the surgeon's inert tentacles. I whisper, "Hello?"

"Help me."

"I'm a doctor," I tell him. "I've called for help."

"Please," he wheezes. "You have to do something. I'm -- I'm open."

I press my panic button again. "Listen, some kind of situation has occurred. The hospital has lost all power. It's really irregular. I'm sure everything that can be done is being done. I know it's scary and I know it's dark, but I'm going to stay with you until the surgeon comes back online. Okay? I'm not going to leave you. And you can't leave me either. Got that?"

He lets out a long, ragged breath. "It's not dark," he says.

I freeze. "What can you see?"

"What do you mean? I see the surgeon hanging over me, and his belly's covered in lights. I can barely open my eyes."

I swallow, then reach up and touch at my eyes. Through my once green gloves I can feel my eyelashes skim my fingertips. Black is the colour of everything. My breath catches in my throat.

The patient's breath catches in his throat, too. "Please, doctor. You have to do something for me. This is a nightmare."

My voice quavers like a kid. "Are you in pain?" I manage to ask.

"No," he says. "But my body is --"

"I know, I know. Okay. Let me think."

He starts to sob and say religious things.

My heart is hammering in my chest. Am I blind? How could I be blind?

He groans.

"Look," I tell him, "this is what's going to happen." I take a deep breath. "I'm going to get the surgeon out of you, instrument by instrument. You're going to help me. You've got to tell me what I'm not seeing. Okay? I've been blinded somehow. I'm blind. I don't know what's going on. But I'm going to try to help you, okay?"

"Like an old fashioned doctor," he gasps, and I can hear a desperate smile in it.

"Yeah," I agree. "Just like that."

He has freed one hand. His mask is off, his tube yanked out. With careful words he guides me according to what he sees, what his free but numb hand can explore. His sternum has been cut aside for cardiac access. His heart, I know, is exposed only inches from my fingers. He knows, too. He describes it to me, noting its irregular pulsation as the beat stumbles into flailing arrhythmia again.

With a dizzying lurch I recognize that I cannot perform chest compressions with a cut sternum and compromised ribcage. Nor can I stimulate the patient's heart electrically without power.

All I can do to is reach in and pump the heart manually.

I steel myself. I sweat. My bowels bubble. I swear to change careers as I reach my hands into the patient's chest cavity, fingertips extended to meet quivering muscle.

I close my hands around it.

The man's heart is hard and round. Rectilinear seams divide it radially in six sections. Insulated bundles of cabling extend from each metal-ringed aeortoid.

The unit is misaligned at the equator, and when my palms press into it the halves come together with a click. I feel a faint vibration through the heel of my hand. The hardware warms.

It's a micro-fusion pile.

The man stirs and mumbles, "...Doctor?"

"Take it easy -- everything's okay," I tell him, feeling like a nursing robot. "You're alright. Don't freak out."

"I can see my heart."

"Can you? Because that's weird. Because I can't. I mean with my hands I can't. It doesn't feel like what it looks like." Slowly I straighten, my mouth dry. "You're going to have to describe it to me again, you know. Your heart."

"It's...kind of yellow and red. It glistens. And I can see -- veins, or arteries I'm not sure. Like branches. It's beating. It sort of undulates."

I close my eyes. It doesn't change what I don't see but still I find it helps me to think. Why would a man hallucinate organic anatomy in place of -- what? upgrades? I've seen my share of artificial heart designs from the medical cultures of three different star systems, but I've never seen one that doubled as a portable nuclear reactor. This isn't human hardware at all -- it's robot parts, through and through.

"Listen, this is going to sound like a strange question," I say, and then ask him the question.

"Of course I'm not a robot!" he gasps hoarsely. "I'm a human being in a human hospital, and what's happening to me shouldn't ever happen to anyone! Oh my God."

"What?"

"I'm starting to feel the pain. It's coming back. Oh my God, you can't leave me like this!"

I stumble backward away from the surgical table, coming up against the window with my back. "Why do you look like an organic thing to yourself if you're not?" I asked aloud. "Who the hell would programme a robot to conceal its own nature from itself?"

"Don't leave me!" he cries piteously.

I throw up.

"I don't have to save you anymore," I cough, wiping my lips on the back of my glove. "You're not alive. I feel really sorry for what you're experiencing, but it isn't real. I mean -- I guess it's real to you...but it's not medical."

How could it bleed? How could it return tomography of organic anatomy when scanned in the round? How could it have tricked the diagnosis box? Who could afford to build a robot so sophisticated?

He howls as the analgesics ebb, then he cries like a baby.

So do I.

They break down the wall, whoever they are. I cower in the corner in my private darkness while their footfalls sound all around me and the wind of their moving by pushes at my hair. I listen as they do their business. They cut away the surgeon with tools and pack the patient up. In efficient formation they retreat the way they came. None say a word.

I am alone.

I take a few careful breaths.

The fire alarm sounds. Cold water pours from the ceiling. I blink and sputter and when I knuckle my eyes I can blearily see the emergency glow strips defining the edges of the surgery and dotted around the surgeon's vestibule.

The overhead lights flicker on, making me wince. The robots reboot, standing stiffly with eyes front and hands at their sides. By squinting and using my hand as a visor I can see the neat doorway cut into the wall by the ones that took the patient, and the precise and knowing slices they made to cut apart the surgeon's primary cluster. Finally I look down at the remains of my lunch splashed out on the tiles, gathering with the indoor rain and swirling down the red-stained surgical drain.

I say, "I quit."

And I do. You can't reasonably expect someone in a doctor job to put up with trauma like that, especially not if it means actually touching someone else's insides. It's barbarian. It's against union rules. It's not sanitary. And it's upsetting. The list goes on and on.

I'm still relatively young and I'm still moderately hot. My doctor credentials might afford me a lateral move into waitressing.

The thing that bothers me is this: somebody built that man, and it's a secret even from him. I think they were so worried his being in a hospital would spoil their secret they handicapped the hospital and took him out of it. I don't know what they did to lock out security and block all power, but for seven and a half minutes every machine in the whole complex went blind except for him.

You know, which has got to make me wonder.

I mean, it's stupid. But, still -- I have to wonder a little.

I couldn't be one. I'm not one. I eat and sleep. I date. I menstruate. I defecate. I grew up, and I threw up. I bleed if you prick me.

But, still.

When all the hospital robots went blind, why did I?

Fin.

Last Words Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Cheeseburger Brown) — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:53:41 PDT

Last autumn my short story Last Words was published in AE: The Canadian Science-Fiction Review, edited by D.F. McCourt and Helen Michaud. Today I'd like to reprise it here on the blog (for those of you who missed it at the first announcement or for those of you who might be new here). Complete text follows under the fold.

eBooks: If you love me you'll convince somebody you know to buy the Kindle edition of Felix and the Frontier today. It's got a bit of momentum over on Amazon now, and every download counts. Lots of thanks go out to all the readers who have already grabbed a copy! (This concludes today's spam.)

And now, our story reprises:

"She'll die."

When robots become garbage they come to us. We strip them, we melt them, we recycle what can be reclaimed. We shovel the detritus into our ovens and, if we listen, we hear the garbled buzz of their final words.

These aren't fancy robots, mind you -- not your Zorannic types with delusions of sentience or anything. These are regular machines: butlers and security guards and masseurs, nannies and infantry, forklifts and hookers. They are the image of life, and we're there to witness their simulation of death.

They cry out, some of them, but they don't have pain so it's not a sound from suffering. It's random. It's just one of the glitches that can happen in those last seconds when all the cerebral parts liquefy and run together. Hell, I've heard one I could've sworn was laughing all the way down to slag.

"The kettle," one might say after I've shovelled him on. "Sir, breakfast is served," might say another. But usually it's nothing but nonsense syllables, stutters and tones without rhyme or reason. "Do be do, do be do wah."

Voice boxes are cheap. We never bother to dig them out first. Nobody wants to buy a used tongue.

"If master is satisfied, I shall now retire. Retire. Retire. Retire."

"Do you like it like that? Oh yes. Do you like it like that?"

"Lam, vam, ram, yam, ham, om."

My name is Dell Kraft and I was brought to this planet by the humanitarian arm of a now-defunct charity. I'm lucky to have this job. I'd be lucky to have any job. I subscribed to school back on Earth but that doesn't mean much on Mars. Here I'm just another refugee -- too pale and too short and too genetically spotty to ever make my way among natives. We're a lesser kind of human being, but at least we're the kind that gets to be alive.

We are garbage men.

After work we drink beer and watch soccer. We're all Earthish at the bar, so nobody worries over accents or feels self-conscious about neopox scars. Well, mostly. There's this barmaid named Nivea who's sweet on me, I think, but she never goes home with anybody on account of her scars. "I've got pocks places you don't even want to imagine," she told me once.

"You shouldn't be embarrassed," I said.

She smiled sadly. "You wouldn't say that if you'd seen them."

I want to see them, but I'm too shy to push. Instead I just tip her too generously and sit so I can watch her. She always gives the tips back to me. "Don't be stupid, Dell," she says. "You miscounted again."

I can never bring myself to spend the coins she's touched so they accumulate in a jar by my bunk. I have daydreams where I break open the jar and spend the money on some kind of fancy jewel for her, or maybe a classy thing like tickets for a museum or an opera. And she's so touched she goes home with me that night after mopping the floor. A perfect fantasy.

One night my friend Wrigley asks the bar, "What's the weirdest thing you ever heard a dying robot say?"

Answers are shouted. Everybody guffaws. They're jokes, for the most part, not real stories. I bite my lip, quiet in the corner. Today I don't want to talk about it because today I heard something awful.

"She'll die."

I turn my beer on the table, fiddling with the glass. In the mirror behind the bar I watch Nivea watching me. Her stippled brow furrows. She's concerned.

I leave. Suddenly she's behind me. She calls my name. "What's the matter?"

I shrug. She pulls on my arm. "Don't walk away."

I like it when she touches me. I get goosebumps. I sniff and look out over the busy street. "I put a robot in the fire today," I say, then lick my lips. "It told me there's going to be a murder."

"Going to be?"

I turn to face her. "The thing wouldn't shut up, even as it melted. Said its mistress is sick and lives in a bed. Her nephew's supposed to be taking care but he's not. He's cruel to her. He wants her will changed. She won't do it, though, because she thinks when she does he'll finish her."

Nivea cocks her head. "Must be from a theatre. Repeating things it heard actors say. One of those murder-mystery dinner skits the Martians go ga-ga for."

"Probably doesn't mean anything," I agree. "Creepy, is all. Can't shake the feeling."

"Poor Dell," says Nivea. She's still touching my arm.

She comes home with me when her shift is done. We make love in the dark. Her skin is textured all over with neopox scars. I don't mind at all. I kind of like it. I'm not sure if that makes me a pervert.

Afterward she whispers, "What if you could save her?"

"Save who?"

"The bed lady. The one with the nephew."

"Not really my business. I'm no native."

"No, but when Earth collapsed it wasn't anybody else's business either. But offworlders bothered to save us anyway, didn't they?"

I shrug and roll over. "You're getting all churchy," I accuse. After a sullen moment I add, "Nothing but noise. Babbling glitches. Nonsense."

Nivea says nothing.

"Besides, who knows how long that robot was in the heap? Even if what it said were real, it all could've happened months ago. There's a backlog."

"You could find out," she says quietly.

"That kind of access is above my station, Niv. And even if I did find something, what could I do about it? I'm nobody."

This is true. I am nobody. I live in a barracks with a hundred other nobodies assembled in neat rows in a whole displaced persons camp of nobodies. They're all around us now, snoring and coughing and shifting in their bunks. We have our privacy, though, because mixing with other people's business simply isn't done. You tune out, you turn away. It would be profoundly unearthly to behave otherwise.

That's what Nivea's asking me to do: act like a Martian. As if I could.

She's gone in the morning. My bunk feels too big. The sheets still smell like her though, the bedbugs fat with her blood. I whistle on my way to work, doffing my hat and smiling for strangers, holding open the tram doors for morons. My ears pop as we travel between domes.

Work bums me out. No matter how furiously I strip them down, sort their parts and chuck them on, I just can't shake a certain gloom. My shovel dips and I stare listlessly into the melting face of a babysitter robot with a heart on her nose and stars on her cheeks. "You mustn't play with fire," she advises sternly.

I nod, wiping my brow.

At the bar I drink too many too fast. There's a game on. I cheer loud. Nivea won't look at me and so I won't look at her either. She's too good for the likes of me now, I guess. I empty another stein sloppily and dry my face with my sleeve. I try to pick up a couple of fresh young things but they fail to be impressed by my stories -- slurred, meandering, obscene. They titter to one another when I fall down. Nivea looks away. Wrigley hauls me to my feet. "Nursing a pain, Dell?"

"No pain," I claim, shaking my head. "Random glitches."

I wake up in a lot of pain. My shift is a trial. For once it's a relief instead of a bother to be sent up to administration to straighten out my schedule: because it's quiet and cool, and because no one is trying to tell me things as they burn. Instead it's kitten posters and crumbs in the corners of empty doughnut boxes and the cackle-punctuated murmurs of plump office staff. "What can I do for you, beefcake?"

I look down as I smooth out some films on the desk. "Daimler says my card's all fornicated, ma'am. Wrong shift, wrong furnace, wrong codes."

She pops a last bit of doughnut into her mouth and frowns over my films. A dusting of icing sugar marks a slalom course into her cleavage. "I can fix this," she decides, a smile dimpling her face. "Can you wait?"

I nod. She disappears into a maze of cubicles. I linger by the desk, leaning on an elbow. I keep looking over at her unattended terminal...

"You're not supposed to be touching that."

I yank my hands away from her keyboard, eyes wide. She purses her lips. "Was just trying to find out your name," I stammer. Her expression softens.

"Benylin," she says, cheeks colouring. "Benylin Zeneca."

"Can I buy you a beer after work, Benylin?"

Nivea does still care about me after all, and I can tell because she's mad as Hell to see that office girl on my arm until I explain how I've managed to squirrel from her terminal a proper street address for the dying mistress. Nivea hesitates from throwing another bowl of peanut shells at me. I peek hopefully out from behind the bar. Nivea narrows her eyes. "So you don't really like her?"

"Didn't even go home with her."

"It was all about the information."

"Totally."

"And maybe just a little to make me mad."

I pause, trying to gauge the right answer. "Maybe a little."

Nivea grins. "I can't believe you're really going to do it, Dell. I can't believe you're really going to save her." She comes around the bar and puts her arms around me, peanut shells raining from my hair. "I think it's the bravest thing I've ever heard," she says, eyes on mine.

The subway sways, tracks humming. I'm off-shift but instead of doing my laundry I'm riding out to the address. The train is very full but I'm a garbage man so nobody sits next to me. I have all the room I could want.

The address is a mansion. The roof is feathered with solar filaments, the dome above washed and polished to transparency. A big old engineered oxygen tree grows in the yard, shading a grand veranda. This is one of the big families, the old families. Heirs to pioneer plunder.

I have no idea what to do. Am I supposed to knock on the door, push the Martian goat aside and then escape with his dying aunt in my arms? Of course not: if I were lucky I'd be charged with kidnapping before even being asked a question. If I weren't so lucky I'd never knew what took me down. What's the life of a garbage man when a native aristocrat may be at risk?

"She'll die."

I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. All I want to do is shovel robots on the fire, drink a beer and go to bed. Why do things complicate? I should never have taken Nivea home.

Nivea!

I march up the steps and knock on the door. An expensive and very new model of butler answers. "No contractors are expected at this time," says the butler. "Sir."

"Came to see the lady of the house," I mumble.

"Sir, madam is indisposed."

"I heard of this new medicine she should know about. It's for health."

"Sir, madam is indisposed."

"She's been kind to my people. I want to thank her. You know, because she's such a swell philanthropist."

"Sir, please hold still while I photograph your face."

"What?" I ask, then blink after the butler's eyes flash.

"Sir, police have been notified concerning this matter of criminal trespass. Please do not resort to physicality or it will be my regret to immobilize you."

I run away. I skulk back home. I twist in my sheets. In the morning I have to slap myself around a bit to wake up. I roll up little wads of paper and stick them in my ears so I don't have to hear any robots whine today; the paper squishes around in there and makes everything sound like flames.

"Did you go, Delly? What happened?"

I shift in my bunk, Nivea's face against my chest. "Nothing did. Maybe I'm too late."

"You're not too late," she says, talking right into my sternum so it sounds like it's coming out of my heart. "You can right this."

I sniff and shift again. I draw little circles with my finger on her textured back. "Help me think of a plan, Niv?"

"Don't complicate it, Delly. Just put a stop to it. You're Earthish and you've got arms like tree trunks -- do you think any Martian fop's going to stand in your way?"

I do a good enough job of standing in my own way. For two days I avoid the subject and avoid the bar. My bunk is lonely, my work onerous. With unfocused eyes I watch robot faces run together, the colours of their various carapaces mixing into swirls.

"Toxic fumes have been detected. Please use designated exits."

"It flatters your figure, madam."

"Heigh, heigh a nonny-no."

A voicebox pops in a hail of sparks, making me jump. I realize I'm standing too close to the furnace. The hairs on my knuckles are curling, the skin threatening to blister.

I go back. On the way I stoke my courage. I'm going to walk right off the street and through the front door and up into the bedroom and carry that poor crone out over the threshold like it was our wedding day, her nephew left gaping at the jamb.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to do Nivea proud.

Decisively I round the corner. On the soft grassy street outside the mansion floats a long black hearse.

Too late. It's too late. I'm too late.

I look at my hands. They could've held justice. But they don't. I look up at the mansion again. Funerary robots in sombre black carapaces escort a draped pallet down the steps and into the waiting maw of the hearse. As it draws away other cars sweep in, making waves in the grass when they bob to a halt. Noble Martians emerge and approach a thin man on the veranda, taking his hand and nodding their respects. They step aside to allow the passage of a caution-striped robot carrying a bag of biowaste followed by a freight-porter balancing medical hardware on its head.

I step off the curb and cross the road. The thin man glances at me, drops his eyes to my waste management coverall, looks away to continue receiving guests with his fancy butler. I form up behind an unladen freight-porter and walk in through the front door.

In the hall renovators are discussing the destruction of a wall between two dining rooms. Freight-porters step around them porting antique furniture and dusty paintings in gilded frames. A lawyer leans by the window, panning her telephone around in search of signal.

A helical staircase takes me to the upper floor. Smells of medicine and meat guide me to the master bedroom, its great double doors thrown wide to showcase a four-poster bed surrounded by a disarray of monitoring equipment. Four deactivated nursing robots stand nearby, arms and heads hanging limp and inert. In the middle of the bed is a slightly stained impression of a small, frail body.

I drop my head. My eyes sting.

"What are you doing in here?"

I turn. Nephew stands in the doorway, features pinched in disgust. "Who told you to come in here?"

"I'm from waste," I say.

"The waste is gone. Get out of my aunt's room this instant. Have you no respect?"

"How did she die?" I ask.

His brow furrows. "What business is that of yours? Who do you think you are?"

"Interested in justice, is all."

"You're Terran. What do Terrans know of justice?"

I shrug. "Just the broad strokes, I guess. We know it's wrong to kill."

His eyes widen for a fraction of a second before he masters his expression. "You understand nothing. Leave this house immediately, mongrel."

I rub my chin. I offer him a frank expression. "Know what I understand? An eye for an eye. It might not be churchy, but at least it renders accounts."

Nephew hesitates. "I'm summoning the police," he says, reaching for his pocket.

I step closer, flexing my big hands.

Nephew drops his telephone. He's shaking. He's starting to understand. "What is any of this to you?"

"Do you know why people throw robots out?" I ask him. "It's not because they break. It's because they've seen and heard too much."

He pales. He's made the connection. He whispers, "I can make you rich."

Martians are tall. Their bones are long, and fragile. Nephew folds, his noises muted by my hand until his mouth is clogged with gauze. He folds until he fits inside the disinfectant-smelling yellowed carapace of a nurse, its inside parts left in a heap upon the rug.

I throw the nurse over my shoulder and hump down the stairs. I doff my hat at the milling nobles but they turn away without meeting my eye.

A freight-porter stops me. "Sir, that is hospital property."

"It's busted," I say, and lope out the door.

In the blazing furnaces at work the nursing robot sizzles and then screeches. My supervisor wanders by and shakes his head, tongue clucking. "What kind of a sick pervert would fix a robot to caterwaul like that?"

I shrug and take up my shovel. "Takes all kinds," I tell him, turning back to the job.

Fin.