I’m a gadget guy. It’s just who I am. That’s why I was the first one on my block to part with some considerable cash when Cyberdine Systems came out with their Model 101 Cyborg.
The marketers at CS had me salivating for months before the cyborg’s official release. They said in the commercials that it was “the embodiment of Austrian precision.” In one scene he was playing in a field with a little girl and her puppy. The next showed him gardening while his suburbanite owner kicked back in a lounge chair. Then came the scene that sold me: Some punks tried to break into a home while cherubic children slumbered in their beds. As they climbed through the broken window, the advertisement flash-cut to an image of the cyborg’s eye opening, and then cut again to a scene of him handing the bad guys off to the cops, the cherubic children hugging his legs.
At first I was pleased with my purchase. It was like having a new best friend. We’d go for morning jogs together. He kept track of our speed and distance, always encouraging me to push a little harder. And as we’d finish our run with a sprint to the driveway, he’d let me win. He was a great jokester too, once hiding under my car and bench-pressing it when I tried to back out of the garage. I couldn’t figure out why the car wasn’t going anywhere when I stepped on the gas. Then I heard that infectious Austrian giggle tinkling up over the roar of the engine.
It was a few months before things started to change. First I noticed he was paying what seemed an inappropriate amount of attention to my wife. She was always going to him for advice on her outfits and things like that. He knew exactly what she wanted to hear; the smooth lines were programmed to show up on his internal display. Then he started wearing all these tight shirts around her to show off his chiselled physique. I don’t think he realized how ridiculous he looked. It wasn’t like he exercised to get that body — he came off the assembly line like that.
I couldn’t believe such hubris could come from a machine.
Then came the prank calls. One time he used his voice mimicry technology and called me, pretending to be my boss. He spent a good fifteen minutes berating me for some offence I hadn’t even committed. When I protested, he fired me and told me to never set foot in the office again. You can imagine the confusion when my real boss called the next day to find out why I wasn’t at work. That damn robot nearly cost me my job.
Then there were the little things. Like the time he mowed a single letter each week in the backyard to protest his landscaping chores. Five weeks in, I’d documented A-S-S-H-O. He didn’t have to get to L for me to catch on. Then there was the time an angry mob of neighbourhood parents pounded on my door to threaten me with legal action. As it turned out, my cyborg had been buying beer for their underage kids in exchange for cash. And when I confronted him about it, he had the nerve to deny the whole thing. Then from out of nowhere, he started sporting a pricey black leather jacket. Those things don’t just buy themselves. I let him know that I wasn’t falling for his ruse.
Soon his behaviour left me with no choice but to shut him down for long periods of time. And when I would eventually reboot him, he always tried to act really sweet, like nothing had happened between us. I think he sensed that I’d had it with his antics. It was then I started searching for a buyer to take him away from me.
I’d never seen a machine cry until the night I told him he was leaving. He was in the La-Z-Boy, tears welling up in his bionic eyes, as I explained that he was going to live with a new owner. I tried telling him that he was going to be happier. That he would be living with some army muckety-muck. That he’d get to see the world. That he deserved better than I could offer. But there was no consoling him.
Even though he had an endoskeleton of space-age materials, he looked like a fragile human as synthetic snot bubbled from his nose and silver tears rolled down his cheeks. It pained me to see him so vulnerable, so I turned to walk away. That’s when I caught sight of his reflection in the window. His demeanour had quickly changed; his eyes had turned red.
Then I heard the words that haunt me to this day.
“I’ll be back.”
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