The Obsoletes

by Simeon Mills

  The spectators stood with their mouths open, the correct reaction to this situation eluding them. Their eyes were on James Botty and the Ceiling Fan, but they might have been staring at themselves in the mirror, unable to recognize the face looking back.

  “She was just a kid,” said James. “I was a kid. Her arms were warm when I grabbed her. I can still feel her arms . . .”

  “She was a liar,” said the Ceiling Fan. “They trick you that way.”

  “She was warm . . .”

  “These damn robots are so hard to kill. The one everybody says you killed—she killed herself, didn’t she? You just disposed of the body. It ain’t fair how hard they are to kill. Not when they got so many ways to kill us. But don’t you worry, James. We know right where to get them now. You helped me learn how these robots work. These things we’re throwing at them? Just for show.” The Ceiling Fan tossed his toaster to the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was The Directions, the page James ripped from the book—I recognized exactly which page just from seeing a wrinkled eighth of it: from chapter eighty-four, the diagram of our exhaust system. The Ceiling Fan didn’t bother unfolding it; he just wanted James to see it again. “Killing a robot is about getting inside the thing.” The Ceiling Fan returned the page to his pocket. “Snipping it in just the right spot, like we talked about, James. So step aside, and I’ll show you where on Kanga. After all, it’s my turn.”

  The crackle became whisper thin, as if from James Botty’s fluttering eyelashes. He was back in time, on Mrs. Stover’s bus, grabbing Molly Seed by the arms, feeling her warmth . . . the toaster slipped from his hands, clacking the cement, awakening him from the memory. He looked at the Ceiling Fan. “Tell them about Mr. Virgil.”

  “Virgil?” The Ceiling Fan grinned. “The toaster they got working at your school?”

  “Mr. Virgil’s closet.”

  At these words, the basketball team advanced onto the court, stepping over toasters, to stand with James. Even Mr. Belt and Rye wobbled out with them, the coach gripping his center by the shoulder, using the blinded boy for support. I was dumbfounded by the presence of the team, packed into a protective line between us and the Ceiling Fan, as if posing for a team photo. Had they discussed “Mr. Virgil’s closet” beforehand, each of them recounting a similar story, resulting in this consensus? Or had James’s words caught everyone off guard, compelling each of them to walk forward individually, struck—as I was—by an overwhelming sense of guilt for the parts they played? Either way, I was lying on the cement behind them, my brother with me, and I could no longer see the Ceiling Fan, though I could hear his voice clearly:

  “We vandalized the toaster’s closet. It was team building. That was before I knew you boys were a bunch of sympathizers.”

  “That ain’t what happened in Mr. Virgil’s closet. You took us in there one by one and made us help. We didn’t have a choice. You made us watch the door while you climbed into the ceiling. You were going up there to—”

  “Virgil’s a damn toaster! Doesn’t that count for anything with you? A toaster getting paid to sneak around your school all day!”

  “You spied on our teachers going to the bathroom.”

  “Greasy robot-lover.”

  “Our teachers. You got up in the ceiling and watched them.”

  “And you wanted next dibs, James. All of you! I could see it in your faces! Not one of you tried to stop me.”

  I watched the cluster of teachers standing courtside. Mrs. Clinow, Mrs. Galvin, Mrs. Deal, Mrs. Asquith. They were staring at their feet, hiding their chins in the collars of their coats, ashamed—except Mrs. Zweer. She charged toward us. “Come on,” Mrs. Zweer urged her colleagues. Soon they were all standing with the basketball team. What followed was a chain reaction. Young children ran onto the court from all angles, seemingly cognizant there was a choice to be made and that Kanga, the robot who had sunk all those toaster shots, was one of the options. Their parents looked on in panic as the kids filled in tiny gaps between the players and teachers. A handful of men and women trickled in too, adding human bodies to the barrier between us and the Ceiling Fan. But most of the people remained where they stood, off the court, watching.

  “I did it for you boys.” The Ceiling Fan’s voice had an edge of desperation. “Everything I did was to bring you together. Like a team. Like my old teams. Being a Hectorville Bird was the best years of my life. We had traditions. And yeah, we raised hell. We were teenage boys! What are you, James? Or any of you? What kind of teammate goes blabbing secrets for the whole town to hear? Team secrets. That’s what brings boys together. I was just passing the traditions on, like the ones before me did. But I misjudged this team. That Bird uniform used to mean something when I wore—”

  “You never wore that uniform,” said Mrs. Zweer. “You never played a game, Jason. I looked you up in the yearbook after seeing you in the hall again. Jason Simms, freshman team manager.”

  There was an uneasy pause, as if the Ceiling Fan were silently paging through an old yearbook himself, until he whispered: “But I practiced with the guys.”

  “Most persistent manager I ever had,” said Mr. Belt. “They say Ceiling Fan Simms never lost a ball. But what’s all this about a ladies’ room?”

  Mrs. Zweer clarified: “If you ever show your face at our school again, Jason, we’ll call the police.”

  “This is our team now,” said James Botty. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Yeah!”

  “Leave, Ceiling Fan!”

  “Go!”

  “We’re done with you!”

  The crackle was done too. Its absence left the remaining spectators exhausted and confused. Their faces betrayed a multitude of individual thoughts, but no one appeared certain of anything; they were silent, tilting an ear toward the court, waiting for the Ceiling Fan to get into his car and drive off, waiting for a new, unifying voice to tell them what to do next.

  The Ceiling Fan was utterly defeated. He’d been exposed. Disgraced. If he ever wanted another job, he’d have to travel far away, at least to Ohio and maybe even Kentucky, where people’s views on robots and team-building exercises were more aligned with his own. My fan clicked on as I waited for the sound of his car engine. But it was the Ceiling Fan’s voice I heard next, and it was nowhere near his car. The man might have even been smiling: “Thanks for the advice, friends, but I didn’t come here to talk about me.”

  Screams. Shouts. Shoes. Legs. The human wall began collapsing backward onto me and Kanga. “Knife!” someone shouted. “He’s got a knife!” The basketball players used their athleticism to leap to safety. The children crouched into small protective balls. The teachers, eyes always open to the unexpected, stood their ground. Mrs. Zweer faced the Ceiling Fan—and the enormous knife in his hand. Where had the knife come from? Under his INVISIBLE SYSTEMS sweatshirt? A secret compartment on his body?

  “Stop, Jason,” said Mrs. Zweer. “Listen—”

  The Ceiling Fan slashed her arm. Blood sprayed up through the slit in her coat. Mrs. Zweer simply watched herself leak, allowing the Ceiling Fan to walk past her, through the ruined wall of people. Straight to Kanga.

  I had a front-row seat for the altercation. Kanga and the Ceiling Fan were giants from my worm’s-eye view, a comic book cover: hero and villain crouched, teeth gritted, staring into each other’s eyes. The Ceiling Fan was supposed to have a clever speech bubble: “How do you say obsolete in binary code?” Kanga’s response would be humorless: “I’ve got a different lesson for you, scoundrel!” Their battle would be an undulating graph of who had the upper hand, requiring an entire issue to play out. But ultimately Kanga would win, with the final image being a bird’s-eye view of my brother standing over the fallen Ceiling Fan.

  Reality was much quicker. The Ceiling Fan thrust his knife into Kanga’s abdomen, the exact spot my brother had identified last night while explaining to me how to kill a robot, the exact point of insertion, as described in The
Directions, if one wanted to pinch—or in this case sever—the exhaust tube running up the right side of a robot’s body from his processor. The Ceiling Fan twisted the knife in Kanga’s guts, expanding the range of damage. Pink lubricant gushed against my brother’s white basketball uniform. He fell to the ground, the knife sticking out of him. He began to buzz like a bee . . .

  Who was I in this comic book? The fainting damsel? The bug-eyed reporter? Or just a face in the background, a featureless yellow smudge? With options like these, no wonder my processor decided to redraw me from scratch.

  The crackle. It was back and stronger than ever, vibrating my entire head. All I could think about was the sound. My eyes only registered a blurred sketch of my actions, the shape of my hands performing a function in front of my face. I was dimly aware that I was no longer lying on the ground, but rather on top of something. Or someone. My body felt like a clenched fist. My processor issued a report that my objective (which was unknown to me) was being achieved with no resistance. Whatever I was doing, nothing could stop me. I was sure of that. Success was a matter of maintaining my current trajectory. Holding my current position. Blocking everything else out . . . Except I couldn’t. The crackle. It was a physical force pounding outward from inside my skull casing. How I wished it would rupture my auditory sensors; I would be free of the awful sound! Instead, the crackle was my whole world. When my eyes refocused, I finally knew the source.

  I had him by the throat. The pointer finger and thumb on my rubber hand were pinched together, crushing the Ceiling Fan’s larynx between them. I was on top of him. My left hand covered his eyes. I was killing him.

  I pressed my rubber hand down against his neck until my finger and thumb met with a satisfying click behind his esophagus, as if I were gripping my bike handle. Dad’s hands were useless for most things but perfectly suited to clutching a man’s windpipe. The skin on the Ceiling Fan’s neck was taut now, white and bloodless, but not yet broken. Then my two fingers began to pull upward on the thick cord of his throat, drawing it away from his cervical spine. The crackle raged at me: End him.

  But it wasn’t the Ceiling Fan’s crackle.

  It was mine.

  The crackle was coming from me.

  My anger. My fear. My hatred. Every injustice I had ever faced. The Ceiling Fan would pay for them all. Every time hearing the word toaster, every panic at possibly being discovered, every guilty memory of my parents, every sentence in The Directions, every inch I never grew, every time calling myself obsolete, every knife sticking out of my brother.

  Kanga.

  I felt his warm fingers on my shoulder, but I knew better. This wasn’t my brother’s loving touch, but a trick of my processor. My brother was dead. I had seen the Ceiling Fan butcher him. Kanga’s phantom fingers were a reminder of everything I’d lost. They were the reason to finish the deed quickly . . .

  Instead, my rubber fingers opened. As if by some hidden muscle inside the rubber core, my hand released the Ceiling Fan’s neck. I’m not a killer. The words jolted through my processor, awakening me, and the world became clear again. I’m not a—I fell away from the inert man, sprawling back into a bed of broken toasters.

  The crackle was gone. My crackle. I could hear the calm Michigan night, a thousand humans gasping for air. My Incredible Hulk strength had been extinguished. I felt shrunken now, smaller than the day I called Detroit on my parents. I felt like a human emerging from the grip of a nightmare, one in which I’d witnessed myself doing the unfathomable. But I wasn’t human. I wouldn’t get to keep this dream a secret; it wouldn’t be forgotten within the hour. Hundreds had just watched my nightmare. I could barely bring myself to look at them. I’m not a killer! I wanted to scream, but my actions had just screamed the opposite. I was that kind of robot. Not the kind that kept his thoughts to himself, blended in, and prayed for survival. I was the other kind. The robot of nightmares. The murderous, rubber-handed kind. The obsolete kind.

  Except they weren’t staring at me.

  The spectators’ jaws hung open with disbelief. It turned out there was a third kind of robot in this world, one that neither killed its enemies nor hid from them. With a knife sticking out of his guts, Kanga stood above the Ceiling Fan, offering his hand to the huge man to help him off the ground. “Wŏmen huí jiā ba.”

  Let’s go home.

  The Ceiling Fan rejected Kanga’s hand, wheezing and wheeling onto his feet of his own power, then sprinted to his car, which sat waiting at center court. Even I could understand the Ceiling Fan’s distress. Twice he had killed a robot tonight, and twice we had risen from the dead. And if my nightmare had lasted one moment longer—

  His car squealed off the court, causing spectators to dart aside to keep from getting run over. Yet nobody dared to take their eyes off us robots. They continued to watch Kanga in awe as my brother pulled the knife out of himself, wiped it clean on his basketball shorts, and tossed it to the ground. “Wŏ huì méishì er de.”

  I’ll be fine.

  Of course he would. Kanga’s insides were modeled on Ma’s: my brother’s exhaust tube was on the other side of his body.

  But would they be fine? The humans of Hectorville had a decision to make about robots. Kanga’s hand was offered to them too. Would they accept it? Would they accept us? Could they see in my eyes that I never wanted to hear that crackle again? The crackle . . . Just thinking about it flooded my processor with fear, and it roared back to life, a hundred Bobby Knights barking in my ear: Look at these humans. So fragile. So weak. You almost destroyed the biggest and strongest of them, and you could do it again. These humans—it’s like they’re built to break on purpose. They’re the obsolete ones. It’s your turn to take over the—

  I’m not a killer.

  I repeated the phrase until the crackle disappeared again, easier this time, with a pop that echoed in my skull casing. I lifted myself from the cement and stood beside my brother. I’m not a killer. It was the truth, and it relieved me. I looked my fellow townspeople in the eyes. None of us has to be a killer tonight.

  James Botty was first to approach Kanga. He snarled at my brother the way a Fab Five freshman might do to another. “You lied to me,” he said. “But there are worse things. I forgive you.”

  Kanga nodded. “Wŏ yĕ yuánliàng nĭ.”

  I forgive you too.

  Next the children gave my brother their support. “Shoot!” they sang, clinging to their parents’ legs. “Keep shooting!”

  Kanga bent down to select a toaster from the debris on the court. He walked to the free-throw line, squinted his eyes at the hoop, making a deliberate show of giving it his best aim. He released the toaster and watched it explode against the front of the rim. A miss.

  Before the children’s groans trailed away, another voice rang out: “Thank you, Kanga.” It was Mrs. Zweer, who sat stoically on the cement as her fellow teachers tended to her arm. She then looked at me. “And thanks . . . What was your name again?”

  “Darryl,” I croaked, and it wasn’t until I heard my own voice that I remembered Brooke. Had she seen everything too? I scanned the crowd, hoping for one final glimpse of her, even just a flash of her pink backpack as she snuck away. But she was already gone. Pastor and Mrs. Noon remained, which meant that the girls had escaped their parents once and for all. They had probably missed the 8:15 bus, but another one would be along shortly. The idea of Memphis deflated in my processor until it was the size of any other random city. They’ll start a new adventure together. Elecsandra will have Brooke to look after her. They’ll be fine, I told myself. Without me.

  Kanga held his palm up to quiet the crowd, just as the Ceiling Fan had done. This could only mean one thing. My brother was about to address them.

  I couldn’t let this happen. These humans were searching their hearts for reasons to accept us, reasons we were just like them. If I let Kanga open his mouth, all that would come out was Mandarin, and no matter what he said, no matter how profound, that would be another reaso
n we were different. Just this once I would have to upstage my brother. A speech of my own. I allowed my processor the necessary three-tenths of a second to arrange a perfect persuasive paragraph. Ladies and gentlemen, I would begin, addressing the humans with respect. You can see that our body parts have come from China, but Hectorville is the only place we’ve ever lived. Yes. A powerful, if general, first line. I would have to support this assertion by offering specific details: Shimmering Terraces is our apartment building. Maybe you’ve seen us riding our bikes. Or me with my video camera. Or Kanga dribbling his basketball. He comes to this very court to practice. If you were at the Cave this afternoon, you know he was going to win that game for you. Solid gold. But what about the knock-out punch? How about this: He’ll win you a hundred more games, if you just give him another chance. But that’s for next season. Tonight, let’s all just go—

  “Jiā,” Kanga said before I could utter a word.

  Home.

  And they understood it. Jiā overrode any remaining crackle in their brains, replacing it with a thousand unique maps of Hectorville, each with a different route home. The humans slowly drifted from the court, parents herding their children down the sidewalk, senior citizens looking at their watches, amazed by the hour, teenagers ducking off in clusters. Among the last to leave were Mr. Belt and Rye, arm in arm, helping each other down the street. I heard the coach laugh and whisper to his big man: “Helluva game face on that kid.”

  That left me and Kanga standing alone with the broken toasters. Indeed, it was time to go home. But I couldn’t yet. I had to do something first. Although I had let Kanga hug me with reckless abandon whenever he felt the urge, it had been nearly five years since I initiated one between us. Without warning, I wrapped my arms around my twin brother and squeezed as hard as I could.

  Unlike the last day of fourth grade, Kanga didn’t try to squirm away. “Gē,” he sobbed, “nĭ jiùle wŏ.”

  Brother, you saved me.

  “Not this time,” I corrected him. “Tonight it was all you.”