She smelled like an electrical fire – melting plastic and burning insulation. Without looking up she asked, “What can I do for you?”
Zack coughed, “My robot is in need of repair.”
She looked up. “Well, this is a robot repair shop, so I kinda guessed that. What specifically is wrong with him?”
Zack sighed. “I’m not sure how to explain this…” The look of pure impatience made him rush ahead “…but it seems to have developed an appreciation of beauty.”
That made her pause.
“What?”
“Well, it stopped and commented on the ‘lovely sunset’ the other day. And it’s been trying to write poetry, among other things.”
She stared at him for a full minute. He cleared his throat, but she spoke up before he could start babbling nervously. “First: stop referring to him as ‘it’. Second: why would you want to change something like that? That would be breaking, not fixing him.”
Zack couldn’t meet her glare, so he looked away. “I need a butler, not a poet, so…”
She interrupted, “Bring him over here.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Then I turned to the robot to gesture it over, and that’s the last thing I remember. When I woke up, the shop was empty – no girl, no tools, no nothing. And my robot was gone, too. I’d like to file charges for assault and theft.”
The robot cop said to Zack, “We have your statement, and we will contact you once we have any further information. Thank you.”
The copbot had an idea who the suspect was – he’d been tuned up at that location just a couple of months ago. After Zack left he stared into space and thought, “I could be a poet, too, or maybe a painter…” as he deleted Zack’s statement.
