Downfail_A Dystopian Robot Rebellion Adventure

by George Donnelly

  “Did they expel me?” Jack asked.

  Ian closed his eyes. “We’ll fix it.”

  “No, you won’t.” Jack collapsed in place and sobbed.

  Ian turned around and rubbed the boy’s head. “I promise you, we will fix this.” He put on his serious face and showed as much confidence as he could muster. I might not be able to fix this. But he doesn’t need to know that right now. He needs to be strong and believe that things can improve, because if we give in then we’re definitely screwed. The line between success and failure was always thin but it was thinner now than ever. Lose your mental edge and you had nothing.

  “What do you mean, you’re not going to pay us? You promised us that! We kept our side of it! We testified against him. We lied for you, Larry!” Candy screamed into her screen.

  Ian stood at the doorway to his office and listened. If I only had some money to buy popcorn. Then this moment would be perfect.

  “Larry,” Candy said. She took a deep breath. “We placed our trust in you.”

  Ian covered his mouth and snickered. The comeuppance is sweet. Bittersweet but still sweet.

  “You are the father of two of my children. You owe—” she started.

  Ian strained to hear anything of the other side of the conversation as she was using an earbud.

  “I will sue you for child support! I will get a DNA test and you will have to pay back support, too. You’ll owe Ian money!”

  For once, Candy’s working for me. He shook his head in admiration of the ironic reversal.

  “Larry, you will not— Don’t you dare!” Candy screamed her frustrated rage. “You bastard!” Her high heels clacked their way to the kitchen floor and she opened the refrigerator. “And nothing to eat, either!” She slammed the door, opened the freezer and pulled out a bottle. Ian heard the telltale glugs of vodka traversing Candy’s esophagus.

  The doorbell rang. “What now?” Candy mumbled. She replaced the tubular bottle roughly into the freezer and opened the door. “The movers! Already? Jesus Christ!”

  Ian looked at the eviction order on his screen. Twenty years. This was their home. But he didn’t have a family anymore. They’d work out the divorce. Michael and Stacy weren’t his and didn’t value him. Jack. That was all he had left from those twenty years. That was where his focus must now lie.

  Ian rolled up his screen and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He set his backpack on his shoulders. It was heavy and bit into his shoulders. All of his remaining possessions were in it. He was homeless now, at least until he made it to the hotel.

  He pulled the straps on the backpack. It rose higher onto his shoulder blades but his upper back twinged. He took one look back at his office. I planned to do so much work here with not just Maria but also Jack and his robots. That will never happen now, at least not here.

  He took a step towards the kitchen. His gut was a tight weighty mass. He was walking away from his family. It’s a little late in life to start over, Ian. How the hell did you get here?

  Candy appeared in front of him. She stepped unevenly on her heels and almost crashed. “You’d better supervise these moving bots! There’s a lot of valuable stuff here, you know!” She eyed him looking for support. She was sending out a tendril of feeling to see if someone would hold her hand through this.

  “Not my problem,” Ian pushed past her. Jack stood in his way.

  “Can you take my quantum computer? I don’t want the movers to break it.”

  Ian shook his head. “I can’t. I’ll call you once I find a place.”

  A deep crash and the tinkling of little pieces of metal and glass sounded in the living room.

  “What was that?” Jack yelled. He ran past Ian.

  Ian turned and looked over the breakfast bar. Jack’s computer wasn’t there. He leaned over the bar. The computer was in tiny multi-colored pieces all over the living room floor. One of the moving robots stepped on a chunk of computer. The crunch of expensive quantum shards against the hard floor made Ian grit his teeth and tense his neck.

  “Get off my computer!” Jack pushed the robot. It stopped and swatted Jack into the sofa before continuing along.

  Candy came into the kitchen and took another slug of vodka.

  An overweight man with a lazy eye walked in holding a screen. “Uh,” he said, “we’re not responsible for breakage, okay? It says so in the contract, not sure if you noticed that or not. Sorry about that,” he said with sincerity. He shrugged and frowned.

  Candy slammed the freezer. Ian tensed and looked behind him.

  “What? Got something to say?” she asked. She took another long draught of the nearly empty vodka bottle, spilling some on the floor.

  Another robot entered and pulled the fridge out from the corner. Ian scuttled out of its way.

  The robot crouched down, then expanded upwards heaving the refrigerator onto its mobile platform. But it stuck midway into the air and beeped.

  The lazy-eyed supervisor trotted over. “You emptied the fridge and defrosted it per the agreement instructions, right?” He raised an eyebrow at Ian.

  Ian waved his hands in front of him. “No idea.”

  Jack picked himself up and looked at his father, his face slack and near sobbing. “Dad…”

  Ian offered him a hug and the boy accepted, wrapping his little arms tightly around his father’s neck.

  “We’ll figure this out, get you a new one, or rent time on one. Something,” Ian said.

  Candy pushed past the paralyzed robot and stood in the living room, facing Jack. Ian turned to look at her. Her eyes were red and puffy. There was a nervous energy about her.

  She smiled. “No more of that ‘special school’ for Jacky, huh?” She used air quotes and laughed.

  Jack stared at her with a vulnerable hate in his eyes. His mouth started to frown.

  Ian put out a hand to silence her.

  “He’ll just have to go to a normal school, like the rest of the world and give up his delusions of grandeur.” The last word she said in a whiny voice that grated Ian’s already tight nerves.

  “Jack is special,” Ian started.

  “Yeah, special. Just like everyone else!” Candy yelled. She threw the now-empty vodka bottle on top of the quantum computer bits. The unbreakable container bounced then rolled slowly towards the front door.

  Something snapped in the kitchen. “Alright, got it,” the supervisor said. “It triggered a weight limit but I overrode it.” The robot powered up.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Ian told Jack. “Why don’t you go check your room, make sure there’s nothing left behind?” Ian clapped the boy on the back and wiped tears from his cheeks.

  “Yeah,” the supervisor said from the kitchen, “it just has to take a couple steps and then it’ll have that fridge outta here.”

  Ian stood up and nodded to the man. He watched the robot step forward, the fridge almost brushing the ceiling.

  Jack stopped at the intersection of the kitchen, entry hallway and the hallway leading to the bedrooms. “I love you, Dad,” the boy said.

  The moving robot took another step forward. It landed on the unbreakable vodka bottle. The foot rolled and the heavy machine, together with the full refrigerator, fell straight over to the right, catching Jack underneath.

  Raw panic gripped Ian. He threw himself to the floor and dug his hands under the refrigerator. He pulled and jammed his arm under it. Jack lay without moving underneath. His thighs were caught under the mass.

  “Jack, Jack!” Ian turned his head towards the kitchen. “Get the robot up! Get it up!”

  “Oh shit!” the supervisor mumbled. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

  Ian got his arm under the refrigerator up to the shoulder. He wrapped his hand around the unconscious boy’s leg as far down as he could grab it. He then rotated his forearm down and pushed up with his elbow as the fulcrum of the lever.

  Jack’s body squirmed and jittered but his eyes stayed closed.

  “Not a brain i
njury, please. Not a brain injury,” Ian mumbled. “Anything but that.” He pushed harder but the weight was unbearable. He grunted. His palm was soaking wet and kept slipping up the boy’s leg. “Get this fucking robot off my son!”

  Something crashed next to Ian and the weight on his arm lightened.

  “I got the robot off but the fridge is too heavy. You gotta help me,” the supervisor said.

  A wave of irritation engulfed him. Why do I have to do everything myself? And where the hell is his mother? “I can’t! Just pick it up!”

  The supervisor picked the refrigerator up slightly and then pulled it straight towards him, dragging Jack along with it. Jack woke up, still twitching, and screamed, his eyes wide.

  “Stop!” Ian yelled. “You’re just making it worse! You’re dragging him!”

  The supervisor set it down and Ian’s arm slipped. The full weight of the fridge fell once again on Jack and he screamed.

  “Dad, help me! Dad!”

  Ian jammed a large chunk of the broken quantum computer under the fridge next to his son’s chest. He rushed over to the supervisor’s side, bumping him out of the way. He got his fingers below the fridge and heaved it up. “Crawl out, Jack. Crawl out,” he whispered. He motioned to the supervisor. “Help him!”

  The supervisor limped over to where Jack was and pulled the boy out.

  Ian let the fridge crash down. Stupid piece of shit. Why was it so full? Ian looked in the open door. A dozen full vodka bottles greeted him. He rushed to his boy’s side, pushing the supervisor out of his way again.

  Jack was unconscious and still.

  “Candy! Call 911 now!” Ian put his hand on the boy’s neck and felt nothing. “Is this how you do it?” he asked the supervisor.

  The man shrugged.

  Ian stood up. He turned left, then right. “It’s all because of these fucking robots!” He walked over to his Maria, grabbed her head and ripped it off in one clean swipe.

  He dropped the head to the floor. I’m going to kill all of these damned things, every single fucking one!

  10

  Ian and Jack sat at their respective desks on opposite sides of a large picture window in their Center City hotel room. The pair tapped away at their screens.

  Behind them, there was a small bed for each. Beyond the beds, Marias delivered and stacked pink plastic boxes from floor to ceiling.

  “I want to finish this today,” Ian said to Jack.

  Jack muted his music. “Dad, relax already. Geez! I checked over the self-sufficiency module and only found a few mistakes.”

  A look of outraged shock came over Ian’s face. “There were no mistakes in that - unless you introduced them.” He did his best to suppress the grin welling up from inside. He’s so cocky!

  “Ha! As if,” said Jack, “And I’ll have the search-and-destroy update ready for you to check in about another fifteen minutes.”

  “It’s taking too long, Jack. We have a schedule here,” Ian said.

  “Then let me get back to work!” Jack said. He unmuted his music.

  “Wait,” said Ian, “what about the modules we’re actually contracted to deliver? Are they all there?”

  “It’s all in the repository, Dad.” Jack sighed and shook his head. “He’s getting senile!”

  Senile? Am I? He looked around. What was I working on again? “Oh, right,” he muttered. Ian raised his fingers to the keyboard when one of Jack’s robots zipped down and flittered in front of him.

  “Your current project is to hide the search-and-destroy—” the little robot started.

  Ian shushed it.

  “Okay, then,” it said, “Be a good boy now and do your work. You are smart, driven and conscientious. The world is your oyster! You can do anything!” It zipped away to Jack’s desk.

  “The world is your oyster? Where did you dig up that old fossil of a phrase?” said a voice behind Ian.

  Ian turned around. Larry stood in the doorway, blocking the Marias from entering. They beeped in the hallway.

  “So, Divergent felt sorry for you, huh? Threw you a little programming job of a bone?” Larry asked. He stepped into the room and crossed his arms, still blocking the Marias.

  Ian narrowed his eyes. “Just get out, Larry.” Why at this critical moment does he show up? Does he know?

  Larry stepped closer. “We’re going to outlaw that soon. You won’t be able to work for Divergent anymore, at least not without a permit, which the Bureau—” he cleared his throat “—will not approve for you.”

  An ironic smirk crept onto Ian’s face.

  “We know you’re working on something,” Larry said. “Something illicit or unseemly. We’ve got it figured out.”

  A thread of panic crept up Ian’s spine and detoured into his gut. We went over security a dozen times. How did he figure it out? He raised an eyebrow, attempting to keep calm by taking on a superior air.

  One of Jack’s Dadbots flew down from the high ceiling and parked itself in front of Larry’s face. “And who do we have here? A new boy, is it? What do you want to be when you grow up?” the bot said.

  Larry burst out laughing. “That is so cute! Brilliant!” He calmed himself. “You won’t be able to sell this to Divergent now. We stood up a regulation about that after your last stunt.”

  Ian shrugged.

  Larry took several steps towards him and bent forward. “Let me invest in it. Please?”

  How dare he? Ian gritted his teeth. “Pay Candy and the kids first. Then we’ll talk about it.”

  “They won’t authorize that,” Larry said, and shrugged.

  “‘They’?” Ian asked.

  “Look,” Larry said, “we can mass produce these as toys for all the little neglected kids out there who want more time with their dads. And for the dads who don’t want to spend more time with their whiny little brats.”

  Ian rolled his eyes but listened attentively. He was enjoying every moment. He thinks he has the upper hand. Delicious!

  “It’ll teach kids all those lessons you wanted to teach Jack. It’ll be your legacy as a father, Ian! Surely you can get on board with that?”

  Ian grunted a wry smile, his head bobbing up and down. He turned around. “I need to get back to work and you are blocking my Marias.” He tried to remember what he was working on but the nagging presence of Larry left him uneasy.

  Larry came up behind Ian and put his hands on Ian’s shoulders. With a quick flick of a finger, Ian put the screen to sleep, thus hiding what he was working on from Larry’s prying eyes.

  “I can even get you a job,” Larry said.

  “Why would I need a job?” Ian asked. He shrugged his shoulders hard and pushed his chair back into Larry.

  “Ow! You ran over my toe!” Larry said.

  Ian turned around and glared at him. “I told you to get out.”

  “Another lawsuit? Is that what we want?” he asked Ian in a baby voice. “Is that what little Ian-nini wants? Because big old Uncle Larry can certainly oblige him.” His raised his eyebrows and made his eyes clownishly wide.

  “Assuming I was to sell you this tech, that implies money in my hand.” Ian held out his left palm and pointed to it. “Therefore, no job needed.”

  “I would expect more of a profit-sharing agreement. Royalties and such - on profits of course. But this would be more of a non-profit operation.” Larry smiled, high on himself. “It would all be for a good cause,” he continued, with mock sincerity. “Children need loving attention and support in order to grow up right.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Ian said. He looked over at Jack and exchanged a knowing smile.

  “We have a better plan,” Jack said with a mischievous smile.

  Ian shook his head and scowled. Jack rolled his eyes.

  “Over at the Bureau, you know, we’ve had our eyes on you two for awhile. What is all this junk you’re stockpiling?” Larry walked over to the boxes and pulled at one. The ones on top of it swayed above him.

  “Don’t touch
that!” Ian yelled. “Now I want you out and I’m about to call security on you.”

  “Oh, never mind that,” Larry said with a backwards glance at Ian. “Some colleagues of mine are keeping them occupied.” He ran a finger across a row of boxes. “You could have been one of those colleagues. We didn’t have to fight like this.”

  Ian chuckled.

  Larry turned around. “Still able to laugh? That’s good. You’ve always been resilient.” He pulled a box out at random, set it on the ground and popped it open. The boxes that had been on top of it fell away from him towards the wall.

  Ian stood up. “Larry, get your grubby little hands out of my—”

  “Your what? What is all this?” Larry pulled a square-bottomed carton marked water out of the box and looked quizzically at Ian. “Do your faucets not work?”

  “Put it back now!” Ian said. He took another step towards Larry.

  Larry stood up with a flourish. “I have a theory! My theory is that you’re up to something, something serious, something worthy of your oversized brain but not good. It could even be really bad… for me. And the clues are here.” He put his hand to his chin and turned back to the boxes.

  “Larry…” Ian started.

  Larry grabbed two boxes in the middle of a column and pulled them towards Ian. The whole tower crashed down across the floor. One fell on Ian. Another two slammed into his screen and bounced away, cartons of water and packets of food and sundries spilling everywhere.

  Larry picked up a tin can with pictures of carrots on it. “You’ve lost your mind!”

  “We’re going camping, okay Larry? Happy now?” Ian said.

  Larry tossed the can to the floor. He shook his head and wagged his finger at Ian as he walked closer to the man. “You’re not going camping, Ian. No, that’s the old Ian Blake, the meek Ian Blake. The Ian Blake that flowed with the current and did what he was told. That Ian Blake would run and hide in the forest but not this one.”

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” Ian said. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “Convince me,” Larry said.

  “You took my family, my business, my invention… I just don’t want to lose anything else,” Ian said.