Robot Proletariat: Season Two by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant & Realm & Sands

Author:Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant & Realm & Sands
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2015-09-18T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

MIRI PASSED THE SOUTH PARLOR completely before stopping to take a few steps backward and peer inside again. She’d seen humans do this same thing. It always seemed like some sort of mental lag — a person seeing a thing in a literal sense a few seconds before registering it as a stimulus worth noting. For robots, the delayed reaction was due simply to momentum. If Miri had stopped the very second her eyes had registered the man in the parlor, she’d have overbalanced and spilled onto her face, possibly splintering the hardwood floor.

She backed up. Miri should get about her lap of the house, trying in vain to locate Sofia for the ensuing brunch before Naomi erupted in panic, but a strange man in the south parlor was something worth investigating no matter what might be happening.

Miri entered. The man was large, mostly bald, and improperly dressed. He was wearing blue jeans and a clean but rather pedestrian shirt. He smelled vaguely of tobacco, but not the fine variety that Montgomery had sometimes smoked in this room. He was also sitting in Montgomery’s chair. It wasn’t the former lord’s favorite chair (that one was in the other parlor, where the robots and humans had gathered earlier) but it was his favorite within this room, or possibly even this end of the manor. Miri felt an instinctual desire to question the strange man’s presence in Montgomery’s chair, even before his presence in the house, but that was just more of her new internal turmoil raising its head.

She shuffled forward. The man looked up, then scanned her from bottom to top. Miri wore sensible maid shoes (she had pads on her feet, but the family preferred the entire foot covered), a black-and-white dress with an apron, and displayed metal only below the knees, her lower arms, and head. Still, the man’s gaze lingered almost as if assessing her skin itself.

“Can I help you?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied. “Can you?”

“No,” said Miri.

He waited, watching her.

“So why are you here?” he said.

“I’ve come to play the flute.”

The man’s head cocked. Miri decided to start over.

“Is the lady aware of your visit?”

It was a tricky question. The way the man had made himself at home (legs propped on an ottoman, one of Sofia’s old paper magazines in his hands), it was unlikely he’d broken in, and yet Miri had no record of his presence. It might have something to do with the intermittently disrupted state of communications or a failure of the home’s network. Both seemed possible. Yet he didn’t look like someone whom anyone in the family would invite, despite his air of having been asked to sit exactly where he was.

“That one young lady, yes,” said the man.

“Sofia?” Miri wondered if this was where the other daughter had gone: off galavanting with overweight older men, having trysts.

“Allison or something.”

“Alexa?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Miri stood for a moment, still unsure of what to do. Normally, the wireless network was a quiet presence inside

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