Broken Things by G. S. Wright

power button?”
    “Please,” he said, “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I
promise.”
    The man studied him for a second, and then motioned back
into the room. “Go sit down. Let’s talk for a minute.”
    Finally he’d found someone that could help him. Josh nodded,
and allowed himself to be led back to the table and sat down. The man took the
other seat across from him, resting his arms on the table. He wore a name tag
that read Michael Hoskins. “Do you even know where you are? Do you know who you
are?”
    He nodded. “My name is Josh Norton. I’m at Kidsmith.”
    “And do you know what we do here?”
    “You make and sell kids.”
    “Yes, we do sell kids, but we don’t make them here anymore.
We refurbish models that can be fixed, and we scrap those that we can’t.”
    Josh sat up. “You can fix me?”
    “Perhaps. Tomorrow we have you scheduled for an exam. If we
can fix you, we’ll replace what we can, wipe your memory, and resell you. If we
can’t, well, hopefully we can recover a few usable parts, and dispose of the
rest.”
     “But if you can fix me, why not just let me go home?”
    “Your parents… I mean, your owners, were contacted. They
aren’t interested in fixing you, and you’re out of warranty. You’re
malfunctioning badly. Everything is shutting down, and now it looks like it’s
affecting your motor skills, or the programs that allow you to control your
movements. If it’s the program, you could have bad sectors in your drive. The
bottom line is it may not be worth our time to even try to fix you. You’re so
scarred up that I doubt we could give you away. I don’t know if we could even
recoup our costs. You’re just too badly broken.
    “Besides, if your parents could have you fixed, don’t you
think they would’ve?” he continued, “And furthermore, they probably were the
ones that did this to you, am I right?”
    “No, they never hurt me. I was in an accident.”
    “Nine times out of ten a machine in your condition has
suffered heavy abuse at the hands of its owner. Maybe you don’t remember or
maybe you don’t want to tell me about it. That’s okay, I don’t care.
Regardless, your damage is severe enough that I’m hoping we can recover a few
good parts from you.”
    “Please let me just talk to them,” Josh begged.
    Michael Hoskins laughed dryly. “Not going to happen. You’re
just another abandoned kid. We help people that have problems with machines,
every day. Sometimes we get our hands on defective ones, just like you, and
sometimes we fix them for owners that want their machines fixed. Your parents
are not interested. Nobody wants an old mistreated kid that crashes every ten
minutes.
    “Your Ram is probably still good,” he went on, “You’re not
that old of a machine, maybe only five years, I’m guessing. Your motherboard
and circuitry are probably okay. Your memories are garbage. There’s nothing
there to save, nor any reason to.”
    The kid shook his head, feeling tears run down his cheeks.
“I don’t want to die!”
    “Is this not getting through to you? You don’t die. You’re a
machine. You are soulless. There’s no Heaven or Hell waiting for you. When I
unplug your power supply it’s lights out, and as far as you’re concerned, it’ll
be as though you never existed.” He let out a deep sigh and leaned back. “Look
kid, this day’s about over, I’m tired, hungry, and want to go home myself. I’ll
see you tomorrow.”
    With that he stood up and walked out the door.
    Josh sat there for a while, thinking. His odds of getting
fixed sounded slim, and even if he did, they would take away his identity. His
only hope rested with his parents. He had to contact them somehow. He walked
over and flopped down on the cot, covering his eyes with his arms.
    He had nothing to do but think, think about his parents, how
he’d been treated, and if they were robots too. He had plenty to think about,
but no definite answers. He would die never