Orphans

Nereus sat at the back of Jake’s Buy/Sell Android Emporium. He sat with his chin up, hands on his knees, and a faint smile on his lips. Nereus had worked particularly hard on his smile.

“It’s all in the smile,” Jenny Archimedes had said, and she was snapped up in one day. “People will adopt you if you look like you’re anticipating they’ll say something witty, but not so wide a smile that they suspect you’re thinking witty things yourself.”

Despite his smile, Nereus had been at Jake’s a long, long time — long enough to be moved from the middle of the store, to the side, and now to the back where he couldn’t even see the customers.

But Nereus would not be deterred, so he kept his shoulders back and worked on his smile.

This day, Bruno, the owner, walked up to Nereus and said, “Sorry kid. You’ve been outmoded. Nobody’s gonna buy ya. Turn around. I gotta pull your battery.”

Nereus did as he was told, of course, but didn’t understand. He’d aged, yes, but still functioned just as well as the day he awoke. He felt his backplate open and Bruno yanking at his battery so hard he feared Bruno might hurt his fingers.

The next thing he knew, he was rebooting upside down in a dumpster. He stood up and touched his back plate. Poor Bruno apparently hadn’t been able to pull out his power cell completely, and the jolt of falling into the dumpster must have knocked it back in place.

He looked up the alleyway and down it, and decided to head in the direction of the sun.

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Nereus spent the next six weeks hiding in abandoned buildings and creeping along back alleys until one morning he found an unlocked door in the back of an abandoned store. The front of the store had big, unbroken windows littered with the remains of a dozen old, denuded mannequins. They proudly overlooked the sidewalk where people wandered by, and Nereus thought they must have the most wonderful life he could imagine. In a move that was uncharacteristically bold, Nereus shed his rags, gently stepped between two of the mannequins, stood tall, and with careful determination, brought out his perfect smile.

The smile worked wonders. After just a few days, a woman with beautifully thinning hair and a gaunt face came to sit on a bench outside the window. Day after day, she’d come to spend her waking hours, and Nereus watched her, delighting in her company. Her lips would move, and although Nereus couldn’t hear her from behind the glass, it was easy to pretend she was making conversation with him. He practised imperceptible nods and gestures to show he was listening, without giving away that he wasn’t a mannequin, of course.

As the sun warmed him in his window, he basked in the company of his dear friend, and thought he could never have imagined being this happy.

*****

Doris’s procedure was brief and painless. When it was completed, she knocked on the booth’s door and the man limped towards her and opened it. He smelt of long work hours and poor hygiene. But then, she thought as she looked down at herself, I’m no better.

She paid in cash and the man led her back up the stairs to his front door where she stepped out into a painfully bright and bitterly cold day. Most of the smell she’d attributed to the man was apparently her own. Doris had no money, little memory, and could not even recall if she had a home.

But one thing she did know; the procedure was a success. The nanobots in her bloodstream fabricating all the dopamine and serotonin her cortex could ever desire, were deactivated. She couldn’t afford to remove them, but at least they weren’t still convincing her that lying under an abandoned car for three days was fine.

She looked up the street and down it, and decided to head in the direction of the sun.

Doris had been under for eight years, long enough to lose all her friends and family for good. She spent the next six weeks wandering the lower side of the city, looking for work. Despite being clean now, no one would hire her. Even for the most menial jobs, when an interviewer would touch her wrist with the scanner, the expression never varied.

“These nanobots are pretty old and they aren’t programmable,” they’d say. What they wouldn’t say is that if just one reactivated its original programming, it could reactivate every one inside her.

The interviewers would flick the same flat smile, shake their heads and say, “We can’t take the risk, not when there are plenty of workers out there with more reliable implants.”

She found a routine of breakfast at the shelter, and a bench by an abandoned store where she could sit in peace and feel the sunlight for most of the day. The storefront windows displayed a few ageing mannequins that she could imagine as company without much effort. One in particular had the most gentle and sincere smile, and she would pretend he was an old friend and they’d reminisce about good times together. She’d talk of her childhood in the house without heat, and of pushing her sister on the swing. She’d laugh with her new friend as she recalled that time she streaked through school. The old saccharine joy was now replaced by something warmer. And sometimes, when she said something particularly funny, it was easy to imagine the mannequin’s smile grew.

The nights were cold, but as the sun warmed her on her bench, she basked in the company of her dear friend, and thought she could never have imagined being this happy.