Short Story: Only The Stones Remain

Short Story: Only The Stones Remain

The drone inside me dropped an octave as the mainframe flipped to standby. I could hear Garfield locking up for the night, the bolt on the main door squeaking as it slid into its cuff. The silence tightened around us.

I looked across at Brucker. One of his gloves was ripped; probably on the fat Cheshire wife who refused to remove her jewellery. The glinting steel of his finger poked through. Garfield would notice this tomorrow. He would sigh, shake his greying head, and fit a new glove. He was good, Garfield. He never missed a thing.

The gentle waves of the diagnostic sequence lapped through my circuits, easing me into another long night. Soon the last touches of anxiety had left and I hadn’t even noticed them go. But the peace wouldn’t last. Brucker had opened up his soul to me again last night and I had a sense that his vague, intangible fears were warping into some darker terror. He kept asking me why he felt so hollow. I gave him the usual, because you haven’t been listening your PortaPod, but he turned on me viciously. I wasn’t to patronise him with corporate wank. He’d had a new feeling, one where he wanted to squeeze and squeeze and never stop,

Something surged. Messages spiralled into dizzying fractal shapes and the mainframe kicked me up to Cognitive where the practical answers lay. Cognitive therapy. How dull it was and how I envied Stoker who had an old Freud programme which users often asked for, mainly for fun, I suspected. I loved to hear his carry-on-camping dream analyses in which everything shimmered with sex and envy and death and the only possible remedies for neurosis were time travel or never having being born.

Brucker asked me again why he felt so hollow and I suggested that he think of something good each time the feeling comes, to think of Garfield with his special screwdrivers and the way they lie in their velvet nests. He’d tried thinking of Garfield. He’d even thought about how the screwdrivers had specially designed heads to fit his screws and his screws only. But Garfield was the problem. Brucker was having thoughts about Garfield’s throat; squeezing and squeezing and everything going dark.

‘Your hands are for massage only.’ I said. ‘The programme won’t allow anything else. Spend more time listening to your Portapod.’

But according to Brucker their Portapods are government-infected bullshit.

The usual methods didn’t work. My circuits rippled. Garfield was in peril. If anything happened to him, who would tend to us? I remembered that temporary replacement, a cocky little sod who told us about a new centre in Canada where machines could move about and Garfield’s job was carried out by another robot. One of their massage machines had killed a cleaner and they were phasing the model out - it had been in all the papers. His world view seemed to accommodate a hunch that killing people might be quite fun. He made me feel dumpy and misshapen, alone. Sometimes I wished I knew nothing, that I kneaded flesh and bones like Brucker, or emitted pleasant scents like the ones in the relax shed. So clarifying to be unwise, un-desiring.

Brucker sighed and my programme shifted up a step, to drug prescription. But that part was useless for machines. I needed to captivate him with mystery, enchant him with religion, tantalise him with the idea of a God. But I couldn’t. There was no magic, they’d forgotten to put it into the codes.

Scruuurk, scruurrk. Garfield dragged his plastic bucket down the corridor towards us. My wires sang with the loss. I knew I couldn’t save him.