The Olds rolled into the empty grocery store parking lot, followed by a light contrail of smoke. Ida knew the Oldsmobile wasn’t running right. She’d have to take it back into the shop, but no matter how many times she brought it to those robotic technicians, they couldn’t get the old girl running like the old days. But then again, Ida thought, they were stupid machines, like every other. Trying to have the toaster fix the washing machine or the refrigerator fixing the dishwasher was just about the silliest goddamn thing she had ever heard.
Ida wondered where the hell people were. Her old haunts seemed so empty nowadays. Sure, people were running around the universe in spaceships, or the ones still left around had their brains plugged into those damned VR machines, but the overall absence of humankind was unsettling. Finding anyone to do anything was difficult. She wasn’t quite sure when the world got so lonely.
The city had sent her one of those passes that gave her the right to pull up next to the building, but the day she couldn’t walk fifty feet, she thought, was the day she’d be sleeping underground. She pulled neatly into a parking space, although it didn’t matter how many spots she took as plenty were available.
She fished her cane from the floor of the passenger side and headed towards the automatic doors of the grocery store. Ida didn’t bother locking it because she knew no one around knew how to operate the damned thing. The doors opened with a swoosh as they brushed aside. That was the beginning of the fall of society as far as she was concerned. It marked civilization’s downturn when humanity was relieved of the courtesy of opening the door for another human being.
Ida chose her cart with care. She wanted just the right one for her weekly shopping adventure; it was a highlight of her trip. To her joy, she found one with the left front wheel that squeaked like a rubber duck being strangled and set off.
Instantly, a little robot shot out of a dark cubby hole and attempted to place lubricant on the wheel. A well-placed nine-iron swot with Ida’s cane sent the robot careening off the kick plates of the nearby display for Wheaty-O’s.
“Get the hell out of here, you little shit.” She used blue language when the occasion called for it, and this was just such an occasion.
She headed to her first aisle, which was baking goods. She could never understand the logic behind the grocery store setup; this aisle here, that one there. She thought that maybe some machine told another machine after watching some rats in a maze.
Entering the aisle, she saw all the robots, each one compelled by some downloaded grocery list collecting food for their owners while making buzzing and whirring noises that maddeningly built to crescendos and then subsided inexplicably, like night croakers on a warm summer night. But as quickly as she entered the aisle, all the machines saw her and, in a frantic rush, gathered what they needed and promptly left.
They knew her and knew she preferred to have the aisle to herself when she shopped, but quite honestly, they knew she didn’t want them there. The Muzak they piped over the speakers seemed to be some Led Zeppelin. She wondered if they buttoned Robert Plant’s shirt when they buried him.
She was looking for coconut milk. “Where the hell did they hide it?” she muttered. When she found it, the cans were on the top shelf, “Typical,” she said. “Are they thinking that monkeys will buy it?” she grumbled. She used her cane and poked at the shelf, positioning the cart to catch it as the can fell.
She knocked off the first, which hit her cart with a clang, and the second bounced off the handle and rolled to the end of the aisle, making a thumping noise as it rotated. It stopped when it hit the toe of a young woman at the end.
It wasn’t a young woman but a model GX23A/PHN house assistant. This unit was fitted with a neuronic-tech cortical mass spectrum to produce an artificial neural network capable of performing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. She was doing her family’s weekly shopping.
The unit was a slight thing, tall and light of facial features with a pert upturned nose and brunette hair.
She picked up the can and held it out. “I believe you dropped this, Mum.”
Ida brought up her vision from the floor and adjusted her glasses to the end of her nose. “Well, ain’t you a pretty.”
“I’m sorry, Mum.” The unit smiled ever so slightly.
“Yes, it’s mine, but I don’t want a dented one like that.”
“Oh, I can get you another?”. Model GX23A/PHN returned the dented one and grabbed a fresh one from the top.
“Thank you, Missy.”
“I can help you with shopping if you’d like?”.
“I don’t need any bucket of bolts helping me with my shopping!”
“Only with the tall things, I promise not to intrude.”
“Well, why they design these stores for people eight feet tall, I’ll never know, but if you want to tag along and grab the tall things, I guess that would be alright. Call me Ida.”
“My assigned designation is GX23A/PHN,” response 0009.
“What do your people call you?”
“Usually just ‘Unit.’”
“Well, that’s just goddamn silly. I’ll call you Gwen.”
***
The following Saturday, the slender robot met the woman at the supermarket’s front door and grabbed the “tall” things, and they’d talk while collecting the ingredients for this or that.
“Do you have any familial units?” Gwen asked.
“What the hell is that? Some appliance you new ones keep at the house?”
“No, family. I guess,” Gwen said.
“Well, I had a husband who cheated me and died a few years back. And a daughter who is somewhere, I guess.”
Gwen stopped and computed the 10 to the 4th permutations of that meaning.
“Your husband cheated on you?” Gwen asked.
“No, you bat-shit stupid Erector set, he cheated me,” said Ida.
“I’m sorry. How did your husband cheat you, Ida?”
Ida became quiet. She tightened both hands around the shopping cart handle and released them with an audible exhale.
“He made me promise to stay alive, and then he just up and died. A person shouldn’t do that. If you make a promise, it works both ways.”
“Was there a decision involved?” Gwen asked.
“Gwen, don’t pull that crap on me.” The other robots in the store scattered to the furthest aisles when her voice raised, fearing the wrath of the cane. “My daughter tried that, and I told her she was full of shit. He kept driving those shuttles even though I told him to retire and give it up, but he said he ‘loved it.’ He didn’t love me enough to give it up.”
“An accident then?”
Ida huffed. “Maybe he was tired and made a mistake like they said. I don’t believe any of them. Get me a bottle of those olives from the top.”
Gwen grabbed a bottle from the top shelf and placed it gently in the carriage.
“I don’t understand the promise. I’m sorry.” Gwen said.
Ida put her head down, pretended to look at the shopping list, and hoped the question would disappear. Ida wasn’t good at talking to anyone and hadn’t been for years. She looked up and saw Gwen smiling the stilted smile.
“I swear your engineers dropped you on your head, girl! I had a miscarriage, and I was in a bad way. I was drinking and popping everything until I hit the bottom of the well. Lou was suffering too, but he got me straightened up after a bad binge and told me he always wanted to be together.” The hand with the shopping list lowered a bit at a time. “He promised never to leave me if I put it aside.”
“And then you had a daughter?” asked Gwen.
“Yup. She reminds me of you, you know.”
“I’m sorry, Ida?”
“She looks like you. It’s like someone took a picture of her and cut it out of cardboard.”
“You should see her.”
“It’s been so long, Gwen. I’m a pretty rotten person, y’know. People grow apart and stop talking to each other. And then, after a time, it just gets easier that way.”
“I think she doesn’t care. You’re her mother. I don’t have one, but I’m sure she loves you,” said Gwen.
“Enough of that. Get me one of those Blueberry cupcake mixes, please.”
***
A few Saturdays later, Gwen was waiting by the supermarket door.
As Ida walked up, she said, “I had lunch with my daughter the other day.”
“Oh, Ida! That’s wonderful!”
“I figured I also owed her a promise to be there for her.”
“How was lunch?”
They walked into the store and got a less irritating cart than usual.
“She’s a navigator on one of those big cruisers for the Navy and was only on the planet for a few days. She’s got more of her dad in her than I realized. We got along pretty well.”
“That’s great,” said Gwen and became quiet. “I have to ask you a favor.” She looked Ida right in the eyes.
“What’s that?”
“Please don’t get mad, but is that what it’s like to have a family? The family I live with is much the same, always fighting, always angry at each other.”
Ida took both of Gwen’s hands and held them in hers. She pulled her close and spoke gently.
“No, dear, not at all. There’s laughter and love and a million memories. People tend to dwell on the bad. People argue when they love one another. Your kind never feels emotions like we do. My kind does, but we only get a short time here, so it all comes out when we know we’ll lose each other eventually. I treasure every moment I have with my daughter, good or bad. Thank you for that, Gwen. Thank you for helping me to remember the good times, dear.”
“My pleasure, Ida.”
**************
Many months later, a cleaning crew was dispatched to 233 Grove Avenue to empty a house. When the workers opened the door to the pantry, they found it stuffed to the gills. The family had already taken the keepsakes, the remainder to be donated.
“What do you think this lady was doing with fifty-three cans of coconut milk and forty-nine jars of olives?”
“I don’t know, Jerry. Just put it in the boxes with the rest.”
**************
When the manager opened the store on Monday morning, a GX23A/PHN stood frozen by the front door. She was always unnerved seeing the robots stand so unblinkingly rigid. She found the overnight manager just inside.
“What is that GX doing out there by the front door?”
“I dunno, Boss. She’s been there for two days.”
“Well, call General Robotics and tell them they’ve got a down unit.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter J Carter writes short stories and has published with Ray Gun Revival, BSFA- Fission, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Sci-Fi Lampoon, Mad Scientist’s Journal, Battered Suitcase, Radon Journal, Perihelion and others.
While working on a degree in Biochemistry, he dropped out of school and entered the automotive field; amazed that the two occupations were startlingly similar. He lives on Cape Cod.
He is currently building a robotic overlord with parts found in the trash.