The Obsoletes

by Simeon Mills

  Mom had us buckled into our safety seats, her own seat belt buckled too, by the time Dad emerged from the surf. He drove us back to Hectorville, the water slowly draining out of him, puddling on the van’s metal floor. Mom sat with a look on her face as though she still had sand strung through her insides, but Dad’s body was loose and tranquil. From my baby seat, I asked him, “What was down there, Dad?”

  “I won’t spoil it for you.”

  • • •

  The Hectorville bus station was the size of a bus, narrow, with just a handful of benches, most of its space consumed by the ticket booth.

  “What happened to you?” the station agent asked. “Firecracker get you?”

  “One round-trip ticket for Detroit, please.” I handed him the fifty.

  “Don’t get blood on the seats.”

  “Okay.”

  I used the tiny bus station bathroom to wring out the sopping black sock and add a wad of toilet paper to my wound. I should have brought more duct tape.

  The bus arrived at 11:30 p.m., filled nearly to capacity. Before boarding, I had to wedge my suitcase into a chamber that had opened in the bus’s belly. This was fortunate, as the severed hand inside the suitcase had begun to thump, blindly searching for an escape.

  I’d never sat on a bus with anyone other than Kanga (1,337 times) and Brooke (once). I found an open seat on the aisle. My new bus partner, a young woman, was violently eating a bag of chips. Nacho cheese. One of her cheesy fingers smeared against me as we went over a bump.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did your dad do it?”

  “No.”

  At stops, passengers boarded and exited. The bus itself occasionally rested in a dark corner of a parking lot for fifteen or twenty minutes, then abruptly drove off again. How many suitcases, backpacks, cardboard boxes, and coolers had I seen get loaded and unloaded into the chamber beneath the bus? I imagined each piece of luggage was filled with robot parts: knees, foreheads, feet, elbows, breasts, penises, chins . . .

  As the morning wore on, the bus emptied out, and I was able to stretch across two seats. We crossed the Detroit city limits. The sky grew ominous. It was pouring rain now, and gray human figures appeared on the sidewalks, risen like worms, inching to destinations unknown.

  “Starline Avenue,” announced the driver.

  I retrieved my suitcase from beneath the bus and headed into the rain.

  I had the route memorized from the tiny map of Detroit on the last page of The Directions. It was just a few centimeters on the map, but the walk took forty-five minutes, not counting the eleven minutes I dried out beneath a highway overpass. The gray walls were covered by a mural that had been divided into window-size squares, each painted by a different artist (the talent level fluctuated wildly), who were probably all teenagers. I stared at the paintings, feeling a desperate longing for my classmates back in Hectorville, or even for these kids I would never meet, kids who were no longer kids, as I noticed one of them had time-stamped the mural with 1977, the year Kanga and I were created. I saw a portrait of Elvis Presley. Surely the King had played a concert in Detroit sometime before his death, which I knew also happed in 1977. I imagined Mom as a young robot—before Dad, before us kids—taking a bus to Detroit for an adventure by herself. I imagined her sitting in the darkness of the concert hall, the first row of seats. Elvis Presley in a single spotlight, kneeling at the front of the stage. Their eyes connecting . . . It was pure fantasy. Mom had always been married to Dad. She had always had me and Kanga to take care of. Our entire family had been created in 1977. Mom had been alive only ten years before turning obsolete, and Elvis had been dead for all of them.

  I headed back into the rain. The closer I got, the more I wanted to run in the opposite direction, toward the five skyscrapers bunched together like fingers on a hand, or farther still, all the way across the state, so I could sink my feet in the mud at the bottom of Lake Michigan, or even—

  GRAVY ROBOTICS, the sign on the door said. I’d always fantasized I was built in a laboratory on the top floor of a skyscraper. This was no skyscraper. It was a simple brown building, two stories tall. The door was unlocked.

  GRAVY ROBOTICS, an arrow pointed me down a gritty hallway, to an elevator sitting with the door open. There was only one button in the elevator (I dared to push it with a wet finger), and I would have cut off my left hand to share this moment with Kanga, as we had done on a different elevator in second grade, on a field trip to a cereal factory, trying to balance in the middle of the car without touching the walls, holding each other’s elbows when the elevator lurched us thrillingly upward. This elevator took me down.

  The door opened to a basement hallway, whose only purpose, it seemed, was to house five trash cans, each overflowing with black bags. A tiny potted plant sat beside a glass door reading GRAVY ROBOTICS, INC. There were no windows. The plant must have been plastic.

  Inside, I stood at a receptionist’s desk. I waited a full minute before she glanced up from a textbook.

  “Can I help you?”

  She looked like a high schooler, but she had the squinting eyes of a person who had read The Directions thirty times, cover to cover.

  “Yo. Buddy. Do you have a name? Are you lost? Help me out.”

  “Darryl Livery.”

  “Wait.” She straightened up. “You’re one of them.”

  I raised my stub. “The Directions said—”

  “Yes!” She did a little dance in her swivel chair. “I figured you were the janitor’s kid, but you’re—” She widened her eyes. “You’re like six years old. How did you even get here?”

  “The bus. I’m fourteen.”

  “You’re just adorable. Why didn’t I bring my camera?”

  I stood there while she undressed me with her eyes.

  “Look,” she finally said. “I’m not supposed to ‘interact’ with you guys without clearance from my dad, but you don’t mind if I just, like—” She stood up and floated toward me. “Okay, your hair.” Her teeth chattered. “Can I just touch it?”

  My hair was wet from the rain. “Um—”

  She was running her fingers through it, like she was shampooing my head for a commercial. I turned my odor receptors to maximum power to smell her shampoo, which came through faintly, just enough to tell me she hadn’t showered today. I was staring down at her black-socked feet; her shoes must have been hiding under her desk. A red toenail gleamed through a hole in her sock. She stepped back.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It’s not as real as he’s always bragging about. Just stand over there. My dad, Dr. Murphio”—she rolled her eyes as she said it—“gets here at six o’clock.”

  “Six tonight?”

  “You got somewhere else to be?”

  I went and stood next to another fake plant.

  • • •

  At noon, the receptionist was relieved of her position by a new receptionist, who was definitely her older sister.

  “How’s the hair on this kid, Betsy?” the older sister asked.

  Betsy shook her head.

  “Okay.” The older sister grabbed my suitcase and set it on a desk. She popped it open and started rifling through Dad’s sweatshirts until she found my duct tape–wrapped hand. I was hoping she would remark on the thorough job I’d done preserving it. Instead, she carried it to a wall receptacle marked INCINERATOR and tossed it in. My body shuddered, but I had the wherewithal to swipe my Chinese parts catalog from the open suitcase and hide it down the front of my pants. The older sister grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me through a door labeled REPAIR. “Hand replacement. Bad weave, but we won’t touch it. Anything besides that hand? Do you have uneasy thoughts about X-ray vision? Do you have X-ray vision?”

  “Sometimes I daydream I have X-ray vision at school.”

  “What color is my tattoo?”

  “Your tattoo?”

  “You don’t have X-ray vision.”


  She pushed me down a hallway. On the wall was a photograph of yet another sister, older or younger it was impossible to tell, on a basketball court, gripping a basketball as if playing ballslappers, her mouth shrieking in rage. The new receptionist deposited me into another room with another plastic plant. I went and stood by it. “Dr. Murphio gets here at six o’clock,” she said before locking the door.

  I was their prisoner, it seemed, yet I was relieved to be alone. The walls surrounding me were made of white bricks, bare except for a framed photograph of an open window. There wasn’t even an outlet where I could recharge.

  Gravy Robotics, I’d always imagined, would be like another family to me. Instead I felt like a broken TV stuck in a corner. That was how Brooke and Kanga made me feel too. Just thinking about them caused my processor to conjure their bodies in the room with me. There they were, their backs to me, huddled together, looking down at something. “Oh my god! Another simile,” imaginary Brooke said to imaginary Kanga. “ ‘The tacos fit together on her plate like a row of brown batteries.’ I mean, what?” She was reading “Buford’s Dilemma.”

  My imaginary brother laughed. “I knew Darryl was a bad writer, but jeez . . .”

  Imaginary Brooke suddenly turned around, noticing me. She had a cast on her arm—the arm she broke in eighth grade. “There he is. He’s probably staring at my shoes. Look at your own shoes, Darryl!”

  “I wasn’t looking at your shoes, Brooke.” But once she’d said it, all I could stare at were her pink shoes.

  “The lady said to quit staring at her shoes,” said imaginary Kanga. “So go stare in that corner if you can’t follow directions.”

  I tried to stammer out an apology, but imaginary Brooke charged me, grabbed a fistful of my hair—“Look away!”—and slammed my face into a corner until my temples were each grinding a different wall. “I bet you like this, pervert,” she said, letting my head relax a moment. “But this time it’s gonna hurt.” I felt her fingers tighten on the back of my head. I tried to brace myself with a hand on each wall—but I only had one hand—and she smothered me again. Then I heard a man’s voice—

  “Something smell good in that corner?”

  It was Dr. Murphio.

  He was slightly older than Mom and Dad’s fixed age, and he was completely bald, but otherwise he was a flawless human specimen. His sweater sleeves were rolled up, exposing tan, muscular forearms. He wore a carpenter’s tool pouch.

  “Darryl,” he said. “You poor, frightened thing. I’m Dr. Murphio.” He offered his outstretched left hand. I had no choice but to shake it. “I’m thrilled to see you again, my son. Hope the girls treated you first-class. Sweet girls. They’re my girls.”

  I nodded.

  “I have to be frank. I designed your brother, not you. My assistant at the time, my oldest daughter, she built you. That said, I consider you my son, as I do every unit produced in this laboratory. I did some spelunking around the storage room, and I believe I found a perfect fit for the boo-boo on your wrist.” He leveled a strange smile at me.

  “Why did—” I began to ask, when Dr. Murphio cut me off.

  “I know you’re just brimming with questions, Darryl. As you should be. Now let me give you the answers. Here at Gravy we do things the right way. Other companies have ulterior motives for creating robots, but not us. I am not seeking to replace my fellow humans with a dominant race of overlords”—Dr. Murphio chuckled, then frowned—“or to create an army of slaves to do my bidding. No, my goal is to one day become happily obsolete myself while you robots continue my work, rebuilding and improving yourselves into eternity while also improving the lives of your human brothers and sisters. Coexistence, Darryl. That is the purpose of Gravy Robotics. Which begs the question of you, my son: What will your children be like?” Before I could answer, Dr. Murphio gazed into the distance, continuing, “Or the children of your brother? Kanga! My goodness, that boy’s having one hell of a basketball season. I know people gush about his points, assists, and rebounds, but did you know Kanga averages less than one turnover per game? As point guard?”

  Of course I did. But how did Dr. Murphio know it? I’d never seen his face in the stands. What else did Dr. Murphio know? And who was this “oldest daughter” who had created me?

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Darryl, but I never imagined you’d live past your first year—never mind fourteen years, nine months, and twenty-four days. I make a point of remembering all my units’ birthdays. Well then. Let’s have a look at you.”

  He stepped toward me with easy familiarity. I could smell his laundry detergent—it was the same brand Mom had always used. He touched my hair and parted it with his fingers; Dr. Murphio’s other hand reached into his tool pouch and pulled out a box cutter. I felt a line being drawn through my hair. As his fingers entered my head, a new awareness tickled my plastic frame. Hunger. The sensation was unbearable. My instinct was to bite Dr. Murphio’s sweater, which hung inches from my lips. I snapped my teeth, unable to reach it. Oh, to suck the color from that fluffy yarn! I could smell the purple. The orange. I reached with my tongue . . . I felt Dr. Murphio’s palm pressing down on my skull to smear the wound closed. I heard a click in my head, and the hunger disappeared. Whatever had just happened to me, it wasn’t in The Directions. Dr. Murphio, it seemed, knew me better than I even knew myself. He was wiping his hands on a stained rag.

  “I hate to be the one to break this to you. You’re probably going to stay this exact height for the rest of your life. Let’s take a look at that wrist, shall we?” He gently pulled off the black sock, now greasy and pink from lubricant. He ripped off the duct tape and slapped away the remaining pieces of kitty litter. He studied my wound for two seconds. “Betsy can handle this. She’s currently studying robotic sexuality, but everybody has to get their hands dirty in mechanics eventually. Your new hand will make a fine pretest for her. She’s my baby. My youngest—well, besides all of you sons. Betsy gets here at four a.m.”

  My processor sputtered and coughed, overloaded with existential input. My life was a doomed side project of Dr. Murphio’s oldest daughter, whose name I didn’t know. I would never grow another inch. My hand’s replacement would be entrusted to a girl with no mechanical experience. So why did I feel nothing but defiant optimism? I’m going to prove you wrong, I thought, with no plan to make it happen. Just you watch.

  “Doctor?” I said, removing the Chinese catalog from my pants. “I brought this so I could show you the kind of hand I want.”

  Dr. Murphio snatched the catalog and looked at the cover, laughing. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. They closed—how long ago now? I’ll incinerate this for you.”

  “Wait!” I said. “Don’t burn it. I—” I didn’t dare explain why I wanted the catalog back, but it was suddenly more important than anything. “Can I keep it? Please?”

  But Dr. Murphio seemed to understand. He winked at me. “Naughty boy.” He handed the catalog back. Dr. Murphio then flicked off the light. Luckily, he kept the door open a crack. As he worked through the night, I twice heard him urinate in the bathroom. At two thirty he flicked off the lights to the entire office suite, then the front door clicked shut. He didn’t say good-bye.

  19

  “HELLO? ANYBODY?” I called through the crack in the door, checking to make sure Gravy Robotics was empty of human life. “Is there an outlet where I can charge up?”

  No answer.

  “Okay. I’m coming out because my battery’s almost empty. If somebody’s here, please don’t shoot me.”

  I stepped from the room. I waited. I didn’t get shot. Right outside the door was an outlet. KNEEL DOWN! RECHARGE! ordered the rational half of my processor. KNEEL DOWN! RECHARGE! But there was another half of my processor too. Explore? it wondered. Down the hallway? Dr. Murphio’s office? I knew where his office was because I’d heard him tapping his pencil against his forehead and scribbling on a piece of paper. I’d heard him breathing through his nose, flipping the pencil up i
n the air and catching it. I’d heard sheets of paper being wadded into tiny balls and then flung toward a trash can. I touched the handle of his office door. It swung open. I flicked on the lights, and that’s when I saw it:

  The Game.

  That’s what the sign read: THE GAME. It hung above a magnetized whiteboard, an entire wall of Dr. Murphio’s office. On the whiteboard were names—each one was a rectangular magnet. The names were arranged vertically, and beside each name was a series of tally marks. Those with the most marks were at the top, those with the fewest at the bottom. They were all boys’ names.

  And there at the very top was “Kanga,” with eighty-seven tally marks, just three tallies ahead of a robot named “Julius.” “Darryl,” with my seven tally marks, was good enough for last place. Or was it? On the floor below sat a haphazard pile of names. These names, it seemed, had fallen off in an earthquake, and no one had bothered to put them up again. I sifted through the names, looking for “Tanya” and “Mark,” Mom and Dad, or even “Molly.” All I found was a “Mark,” though there was no telling if it was Dad or just another boy with the same name.

  Seven. I had seven tally marks. My processor was crunching the numbers: Throughout my lifetime, what had I done exactly seven times that was so much better than the other billions of things I’d accomplished? The results were inconclusive. I’d jammed my right index finger seven times while grabbing my basketball in the triple-threat position. I’d written the number 1,489 seven times on homework assignments. I’d heard several songs exactly seven times, including “Dancing on the Ceiling,” by Lionel Richie, a song I felt like I’d heard a hundred times more than “Hold on Loosely,” by 38 Special, which I’d also heard exactly seven times. I’d put on my pants left leg first seven times, though why I’d done that even once was a mystery. I’d made seven paper airplanes in Mrs. Springfield’s class, six of them in one day, one on another.