Robots vs. Fairies(41)

Duke pushed off and leaned back, weary and frustrated.

“Who’s going to take care of things when I’m gone?” Duke touched his own chest and then tapped the metal chest of the big robot. The face of the big robot seemed to frown down at him. The black eyes seemed to be sad. Defeated.

“Ah, fuck it,” said Duke. “I’m talking to a big pile of rust and bolts as if you’re real. You can’t hear me, which is okay, because there’s nothing I can say or do that’s going to mean a single thing. If I can’t fix you, then once I’m dead and in the dirt they’ll have to sell you off for parts just to pay the light bill. Jesus.”

Duke turned to reach for a rag to wipe off the rust, but as he twisted to bend for it, he felt a spasm in his chest and suddenly he was coughing. Hard, deep coughs. Wet and brutal, and the fit lasted for half a minute, slowing and then intensifying, over and over again, and then finally tapering off. Duke turned and sagged back against the solid bulk of Farmboy, head bowed, feeling suddenly a thousand years old. His chest and throat had a punched, bruised feeling to them, and fireflies seemed to dance around him.

“Jesus . . .,” he gasped. Then he looked down at the rag he’d used to cover his mouth. It was speckled with dark dots. They looked like oil in the glow of the work light, but he knew that they were a dark red. It chilled him, scared him, and made him want to cry.

The bleeding was starting again.

The last time that happened was when he had an infection in his lungs that turned into a case of pneumonia so fierce that he was on his back for six weeks. It took a lot of trial and error for the docs to find the right mix of antibiotics. There was a point when Grandma had the minister from the Lutheran church come to visit him in the hospital. The preacher didn’t go as far as to give him last rites, but Duke figured he was expecting to do so. Duke recovered, but never all the way. He dropped weight that he couldn’t put back on, and ever since then he’d felt as if his bones were as brittle as old sticks.

That pneumonia had started with a cough exactly like this.

Just as sudden, just as deep.

And the blood.

Duke felt new tears in his eyes, but he blinked them back. Tried to, anyway. They lingered, burning like cinders.

The metal skin of Farmboy was cool and soothing against his back. When Duke felt he could risk it, he turned very slowly to look up at the metal face.

“Yeah,” said Duke, “look at us. We’re a real pair. Used up, broke down, and no damn good at all to anyone.”

Farmboy’s black eyes stared back at him from under the brim of the fake straw hat. Duke smiled and used the cloth to wipe at the flakes of rust around the open control panel. He saw that there were many tiny drops of blood spattered on the chest, and some had gone into the open panel and glistened redly on the circuit board. The blood made a small hissing sound as the moisture soaked in through a wire mesh air vent on his chest.

“Oh, shit,” said Duke, and quickly dabbed at the blood, trying to blot it all up. There was a sudden, loud chunk-chunk of a sound, and for a microsecond lights inside the robot’s chest flared. It was so quick, so sudden that it sounded like the throb of a heartbeat, but Duke knew what it was. The blood had shorted something out. Maybe the starter. He cursed and tried to get the last of the blood off the sensitive circuitry, but then he stopped, knowing that it was already too late. The robot sat there, and somehow it felt different. Colder, maybe. Deader? Something, anyway.

He looked down at the blood and grease on his rag and shook his head slowly, admitting his mistake—however much it wasn’t his fault. Circuits and moisture were never friends, and he’d known that all his life. Now his crumbling body seemed to be taking his mind with it. This was a stupid mistake. A rookie mistake. And it was going to cost his family everything. Just as his own mechanical heart was the most expensive part of Duke’s own body, the central circuit board was the robot’s heart. Maybe fixable five minutes ago, but killed now by his own traitor blood.

Duke sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Feeling so old, so thin and faded. He raised the rag and rubbed at the rust spots again. Doing something because there was nothing else he could do.

“We used to be something, though,” Duke said slowly. “You and me. Couple of badasses. What the hell happened to us?”

The robot, being a robot, said nothing.

Duke started to say something else, but stopped, his mouth open. He stared at the robot’s chest and . . . something was weird. Something was wrong. There was a spot, a small smear where he’d been rubbing, where the rust flakes had fallen away to reveal bright metal. Duke glanced down at the rag and saw that he’d accidentally used the part that was spotted with blood, but instead of smearing red atop the dust and rust, it had cleaned the metal. It gleamed like polished stainless steel.

“I don’t . . .,” he said, then rubbed at the spot some more. The spot of bright metal expanded from the size of a dime to the size of a quarter. “That doesn’t . . .”

He closed his mouth with a snap and tried rubbing again but with a clean corner of the rag. Some rust flakes fell off, but the metal remained an oxidized red-gray. Duke spat on the rag and gave it another rub. Same thing.

But that bright patch seemed to shine at him. Duke looked down at the blood spots on the cloth, then back up.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he told himself.