A Close Shave
Created | Updated Aug 4, 2019
A Close Shave
X495 faced the mirror or what was left of it as he had for decades. In his hands was the stub of a razor, worn away by years of shaving a plastic and metal face. The sightless eyes lacked even a flicker of awareness as he carried out his programmed tasks. Before the war he was part of an experiment to measure and catalogue events in the average human life. His wife, Y729, had long since given up the ghost. She was incapable of even getting out of bed, to make his mock breakfast and send off the mock children to school. All her automatic responses could do was roll her body round under the torn sheets, writhing like a human being in pain. XPPY7 and XPPY8 also malfunctioned, due to the effects of the blast from the warheads. While 'mother' was almost totally incapacitated, various circuits had fused in their cases, creating jangling automatons who skipped and jerked all over the place, with no hope of exiting the semi-functioning, fake kitchen. Like Tourette sufferers, they could do nothing about their situation but react like puppets on a string.
X495 grabbed the imaginary toast, supped the imaginary coffee in a cup that almost nothing but a handle and talked to his imaginary wife, who was in reality a rusting carcass upstairs. He picked up the skeletal remains of his briefcase and walked out the hole where a door had been, carefully grabbing the non-existent handle and shutting it behind him on the way out.
Ten minutes later, he was at the station waiting for the robotic commuter train, to take him to work. He boarded it with the rest of the robots that had survived so far in the model town – all built for the living world experiment, now defunct.
Most humans had perished in the nuclear attack. Those that survived on the surface had lost all the sophistication that reflected back the civilization they had come from. They had become partial cannibals, as so little plant and animal life had survived in the cities and that which was still alive in the countryside rarely came into town, except predators to carry off the occasional human for lunch or a teatime snack.
The humans threw rocks at the androids as they passed – the only entertainment left to them in this bleak world they had inherited. Robot police tried to control them, either on foot or in their flying patrol vehicles, following their programming. They were more advanced than the X or Y experimental models. They could repair themselves and their craft, but as time went on parts and materials became scarce and their numbers dwindled. Human beings didn't need factories and machines to reproduce but robots did. Sex ensured the continuation of their race, but some strange results were created by the radiation sickness, even if it was being bred out of them as happened with other inherited diseases.
The trouble with human prisoners was that the police were sentient, but not that sentient. All incarcerated prisoners died of thirst before hunger killed them. To the robots, the thought occurred that if they didn't eat or drink, why should humans need to?
When the cells became too full with corpses, the bodies were released on parole. For humans thrown into a cell for the first time after a clear out, the smell was atrocious, but it only troubled them for a couple of days before lack of water troubled them more. However, partially corpse-filled cells freaked out newcomers more. If it wasn't for the dying of thirst, cannibalism might have been more rampant. The cells allowed the prisoners to breathe at least, being designed by humans for humans. Thank God for small mercies...maybe.
X495 sat in his imaginary office, shuffling imaginary papers at the end of another satisfactory day. Where would it all end? In the crumbling of his existence beyond repair I should imagine, when the truth of his empty, meaningless life could no longer be denied – just like the rest of us, really.
