Trash

There was a fizz and a bang, followed by the immediate rush of suffocating darkness that completely engulfed the tunnel. Someone swore loudly.
‘Have you got it?’ came a voice from the murk. It was answered by the inevitable tinkling sound of something very small and very important being dropped all over the floor, and Charity directed the beam of her torch toward the slippery ground just in time to see innumerable, tiny screws bouncing away in all directions. She sighed, and crouched awkwardly to gather them up.

‘Don’t bother,’ Harris snapped, throwing down his screwdriver in frustration. ‘Just take a look at this, will you?’
He gestured toward the twisted heap lying upon the pile of debris beside him, but Charity merely wrinkled her nose in disgust. An overwhelmingly acrid stench of burnt plastic rolled off of it in waves, and even with her torch and the syrup-thick light of an orange sunset peeping in through the cracks above, she could barely make out the tangle of wiring within. Picking tenderly at a few of the scorched cables for a moment, she ignored the scuffling from below as Harris scrambled about on all fours to retrieve what he could from the sewer floor.
‘That one,’ she said, prodding inside the machine. ‘The green one.’
Harris emerged for a second, looking incredulous.
‘Can’t be,’ he answered, wiping jet-black oil from his forehead with a ragged scarf. He pointed at a poison-yellow wire, crackling dangerously in a dank corner. ‘What about that?’
Charity shook her head, pulling a half-finished dog-end from her pocket.
‘I doubt it,’ she snorted. ‘That’s for the motors, you don’t want to mess about with them.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Harris said angrily from somewhere about her ankles. ‘That’s the red one. See?’
Charity lit up with a dented, near-empty lighter and examined the circuitry once again. Sourly.
‘Those are for the LEDs,’ she sighed disparagingly. ‘Fairy lights.’
There was another obscenity from around knee height and Harris emerged to shove Charity out of the way.
‘Sod off, alright?’

Charity shrugged, and blew a cloud smoke at him through her smirk. The fag cast a red glow across damp, oozing leaves caking the sodden brick walls, and she used the faint light to read her cracked watch. It was nearly nightfall - they would have to get moving soon.
There was a flash and a yelp from over her shoulder, accompanied by the most disgusting, almighty smell; Charity clapped a hand to her mouth in disgust. It smelt like badly rotten eggs.
’What on earth did you do?’ she demanded in a muffled voice, trying not to retch. Some viscous, pulsating liquid was vomiting up from within the hulk of plastic, bubbling and blistering the rock and debris as it spilt out and onto the floor.
‘Alright, so it wasn’t the red one,’ Harris conceded grudgingly from behind his glove. ‘Give me the wrench, will you? I think I’ve got it this time.’
He eyed the machine bitterly.

Strangely enough, the machine eyed him back.

Harris gave a huge jolt of fright as it tried to get to its mismatched feet amid sparks and a whirring of gears grinding into life; the robot, however, merely toppled backward, rolling down the pile of rubble upon which it had been sitting with a crack and a blast of dust that rose into the air like a great mushroom cloud. Charity dropped her wilted fag to the floor and heeled it out, throwing Harris a scathing look as she shook him off. Pinpricks of light peeped out at them from behind the wreckage.

Crouching down until she was on a level with the robot, Charity swept her long hair back over her shoulder in a business-like manner.
‘You alright there?’ she asked brusquely. ‘How do you feel?’
The little robot blinked, and then slowly disappeared behind the rubble once more.
‘Who are you?’ it demanded in a tinny, crackling voice which kept buzzing in and out of focus, as if it were a scrambled radio signal being picked up on the wrong channel.
Charity and Harris exchanged a look.
‘Well?’ The robot glared at them from behind the bricks and mortar.
‘We’re - we’re friends,’ Charity began slowly. The robot appeared to be coughing and spluttering for a second, but then she realised that it was laughing.
‘Friends, are you? Friends? I don’t have friends,’ it sniggered, but after a few moments of pregnant silence there was an ear-splitting yelp. The robot waddled furiously back into view, shaking an arm that refused to obey as it swung limply by its side upon a few, brittle wires. It stared at them in the utmost horror.

‘What have you done to me?’ it hissed, quaking with barely suppressed rage.
‘We… er… repaired you,’ Harris offered uncertainly.
‘Oh, great job,’ it sneered, waving it’s flaccid, pathetic arm at them in sarcastic imitation of a salute. With a hint of unanticipated respect, Charity noticed that it still managed to raise it’s middle finger at them. Without warning, its expression hardened.
‘Why?’ it demanded. The broken, rusty arm fell uselessly to it’s side. Harris glanced sideways at Charity, and she could see that he was doing some very quick thinking. After a few milliseconds of hard, panicked thought, he threw out his best shot.
‘Erm,’ he said.
The robot looked them up and down, taking in their grimy, frayed overcoats, slipshod, mismatched outfits and the shopping trolley behind them full of scavenged junk all in an instant; then, without further ado, it leapt off into the darkness.

Charity gave out a wordless yell and they both threw themselves after it. Before it had gone three paces, Harris had rugby-tackled the rusty machine to the ground, where it whirred and squawked frantically beneath his heavy bulk.
‘Get off me! Push off!’ it snarled, beating Harris savagely round the head with an arm that had, by now, fallen off.
‘It’s - bloody - mad!’ Harris growled, desperately trying to fend off the attacks that rained down upon him and stop it from slipping away all at the same time. ‘What do we do?’
‘I have no idea! You’re the expert,’ Charity bawled. ‘You said you knew what you were doing!’
‘Oh, and this is really the time to bring that up, is it?’ Harris shouted back. The robot had now started to throw profanities at them in fifty different and surprising languages, just in case they hadn’t got the message.
‘“We can sell it on,” you said! “For parts,” you said! You didn’t say that it’d… it’d…!’ Charity spluttered into silence, wringing her hands. By this stage, the robot was energetically attempting to throttle Harris and the lack of a second arm did not seem to be impeding it one bit.
‘Well, how was I supposed to know?’ Harris wailed as he beat the little fist back. ‘Isn’t there a… a reset button, or anything?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Do I look like a -’
The yowling robot struggled even harder, drowning out Charity’s protests beneath a deafening cascade of ear-piercing white-noise.
‘Alright, alright!’ Harris bellowed over the thunderous cacophony. ‘Alright! Won’t - you - just - OUCH!’

Harris clapped a hand to his eye and the shuddering robot hauled itself out of his slackened grip. Charity, on the other hand, seized the moment and employed the universal tool acknowledged to fix all electronics.
In other words, she kicked it as hard as she possibly could.
The robot crumpled in a heap.

‘Reset button,’ Charity snorted derisively, kicking the robot over with a disdainful toe; she helped a shaken Harris up from off the ground, nursing his aching eye and bruised pride. Despite her infuriating simper he decided to settle for a dignified, stony silence instead of the furious retort clearly bubbling at his lips. Until he had his breath back, anyway.
‘Well,’ she said haggardly, ‘I suppose we could move it on as scra-’

There was a grinding, whirring noise, and both jumped; the robot was getting up. Harris gave a plaintive moan. Charity whipped out the wrench hanging from her belt and held it out before her like a sword, preparing to boot, bite or whack anything that came within reach -
The robot froze, and there was silence as they stared at each other wordlessly for a second. Charity barely had time to register that it’s eyes seemed oddly unfocused before it provided a distraction in the way of popping and smoking like some randy firework.
‘H-h-h-h-h-hello, very nice to me-me-meet you and yours,’ it buzzed, sizzling and twitching. Harris and Charity looked at each other with raised eyebrows. The robot, meanwhile, was not done.

‘I,’ it suggested drunkenly, ‘am the-the-the-the-the 17...98...E-e-e-e-e-e-system-failure but you can call me Ibot. What can I do for y-error-error-error today?’ The robot’s eye ticked wildly as it waited patiently for an answer.
‘Er…’ Harris said, lost for words. ‘What… er… what are you, then?’
‘I am domestic-please-contact-manufacturors-for-support Bot that will clean and cook and help and help and help around the home. I love the things you hateeeeeeerzh…’
The Ibot hummed into silence.

‘Great. You found a dishwasher.’ Charity rolled her eyes and Harris shook his head in disbelief. Before either of them could say any more, however, the Ibot was moving; it seized its fallen arm from the floor.
‘Dishwash?’ it bumbled. ‘Affirmative!’
And then threw the arm as hard as it could into a nearby pool of stagnant water, where it sank with a dull, tragic plop.

Harris threw himself after the plummeting arm and fifty dollars a piece with a yelp, but was too late; the rusty metal vanished with a glimmer into the black belly of water, swallowed whole by something huge, pale and white swimming deep below. A couple of sorrowful bubbles popped up to the surface.
Harris wisely removed his hand from the pool.

With a impatient grunt, Charity stuffed the wrench back into her belt and yanked her companion onto his feet. She had seen enough, with her already thin temper now dangerously close to breaking point.
‘Alright, we need to get a move on,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s well past sunset, and… well, we’ll have some ‘company’ pretty soon if we don’t shift. What do you want to do with… him?’
She jerked her head in the robot’s direction, but Harris didn't answer. Visibly pulling himself together, his pride seemed to win out and he went to scoop up the little robot dejectedly, his blazing scowl daring Charity to say a word. The Ibot stared into his broad, glum and dirty face for the smallest portion of a millisecond, and then cocked it’s head to one side like a puppy.

‘You are - with all due-due-due respect - filthy, master. Lettttttttth me help you with that.’ Without further ado, there was an explosion of talcum powder. Harris emerged a few seconds later, coughing and spluttering and as pale as a ghost.
‘I- what the…?’
Charity giggled harder at the sight of him. Harris threw her a dirty look.
‘Oh, get lost,’ he mumbled.

‘Affirmative!’ The Ibot whirred from somewhere deep within the muggy fog of white.
‘No! Stop! I didn’t mean -’
But it was too late; by the time the fog had cleared, the robot was gone. Harris swore vehemently. There was a thoughtful clicking.
‘With all due-due-due respect, master,’ the Ibot’s voice said from somewhere deep within the shadows, ‘I don’t quite… understand this latest order. You see, now I have no idea where I am.’
There was silence as they all considered this for a moment.
‘You know what?’ Harris muttered, ‘I think you can stay there.’