Jesus christ greta

It is a Monday morning, it is seven o’clock, and it is the designated time for Shigeru Yamaguchi’s Reaper to wake its owner for work. Activated by the first light as it shines through the open window, the Reaper sits up and turns its head so that its face is pointed at Shigeru. Its facial muscles move in the way that he has decreed they move; it smiles.

“It’s seven o’clock,” it says. Reaching out, it grasps his shoulder and gently pushes at him, just once. “It’s time to get up, Shigeru.”

Shigeru doesn’t, but his Reaper has been programmed not to disturb him more than once. Keeping its facial muscles arranged in the way that he likes, it stands up and walks toward the door. There is a track in the carpet, worn down almost to the floorboards, leading from the bedside to the staircase, and from the staircase to the kitchen. It follows the track. One foot ahead of the other; step, step, step, its movements so precise that the marks of its bare feet in the carpet are almost as distinct as footprints in sand. It sways while it walks. Its steps, though precise, are effortful.

The Reaper has diagnosed itself as suffering from malnutrition. It does not know how to feed itself; Shigeru will give it breakfast before he leaves for work at eight-thirty, directly before it smiles and says, “Goodbye, Shigeru” as it has been programmed to do at thirty minutes past eight o’clock every morning. This will fix the problem, and it will correct the Reaper’s fading vision, its failing co-ordination, and its newly developed tendency to fall over without direct stimulus. Until then, it will ignore the unpleasant feeling of hunger.

It hasn’t been programmed to ignore pain like the others. The nervous receptors in its face are stimulated by the unnatural way the muscles are twisted. Knowledge of its own anatomy has been drilled into it, so that it may fix itself when it malfunctions; into its awareness comes the word atrophy. But it is unable to find a solution to the problem that wouldn’t necessitate overriding Shigeru’s preferences. It can’t stop smiling. So it recognises that the pain of atrophy doesn’t interfere with its vital function, and it allows the error to exist without attempting to fix it.

Shigeru has not put shoes on his Reaper’s feet for a long time, and the soles are like leather. Although the nervous receptors pang slightly as it crosses the shards of broken glass in the hallway, it is able to categorise this pain, too, as being unimportant. It recognises that the carpet is meant to be white, and is now stained. It has scrubbed the carpet for exactly sixty-eight hours and fifty-two minutes, although not for more than twenty-five minutes at a time to avoid injuring its fragile and over-stretched spine, and it is still stained with blood and black ashes.

It staggers. The receptors in its abdomen are being stimulated. Hunger, thinks the Reaper, but it will not eat until Shigeru feeds it. It cannot eat by itself; that ability has not been re-taught to it, and he needs to feed it with a spoon.

Having turned the tap and placed its hands underneath the faucet for twenty seconds, although it detects an error within the plumbing because nothing came out except for a small rain of rust, it boils udon noodles without water and stir-fries a bowl of bok choy without heat. The bok choy disintegrates in its hands and the leaves are like black paper, but it slices and folds it into the bowl of noodles, before placing the bowl in the heating unit. Shigeru will eat it when he gets out of bed.

The heating unit is almost full now and the interior is at least thirty degrees Celsius lower than the recommended safe heat, but the ability to fix it has not been installed in the Reaper. Smiling, it forces the door closed and two of the bowls crack.

Now it is time for the Reaper to drink. It drinks once every hour. It takes a glass, puts it under the tap, and makes the motion of drinking. There is nothing in the glass but air. Then it opens the dishwasher, and a wave of glasses spills out to shatter on the tiles.

The tap has not worked for two days now, but the Reaper does not know how to fix it. It will wait. The plumbing will soon be fixed by a trained professional, and then the Reaper will be able to drink.

It goes back upstairs, where it brushes its hair. Its hair, which contains more grey every day, touches the back of its knees now, and only the combing of the first metre is part of its routine; below that metre, where it doesn’t touch, is a filthy, unbrushed, heavy tangle.

It is Monday. On Monday, the Reaper buys food and the ingredients for food from the IGA Supermarket on the corner. It is to buy one loaf of plain white bread; one three-litre bottle of soy milk in a container with a blue label; one one-kilogram plastic bag of carrots; two capsicums of a good size, one red and the other one green; one punnet of strawberries; one small bag of shrimp pellets, which it will feed to the turtles when it comes back to the house; one large onion; one tin of bamboo shoots in water; one vacuum-packed orange plastic bag with hokkien noodles inside; one paper bag filled with shiitake mushrooms; five tins of green curry paste. It is to respond to the following sentences with “Hello”: “[Greeting],” “[Greeting], Khiêm,” “[Greeting], Kaen.” It recognises a large number of greetings.

After it has bought the food and the ingredients for food, at five minutes to eight o’clock, it must go to a house and visit a woman named Mother. The woman named Mother will talk to it and touch it and smile and provide pleasant stimuli. It will smile too. The visit will last for ten minutes. Then it will walk home in time to say, “Goodbye, Shigeru” when its owner leaves to go to work.

The elevator is malfunctioning and cannot be ridden. The Reaper descends using the staircase. Its feet have worn a shiny path on the concrete. Now the pain receptors are being stimulated in every joint of its legs, but it has not been taught the solution to this problem, so it chooses to ignore it. The pain receptors are being stimulated in its stomach, in the soles of its feet, and in its head. The adverse stimuli is affecting its performance; it staggers and almost falls, which it knows would cause fractures of its skeleton and intense nervous stimulation, and as it walks to the IGA supermarket on the corner, where it is to buy food because it is a Monday, it experiences problems with walking in a straight line.

Still it walks, ignoring the lacerations caused to the soles of its feet by the broken glass, the torn shreds of tin, and the pencil-thin bones of a human hand. One foot in front of the other; step, step, step, every step sinking the Reaper up to its ankles in the grey dust that buries the street.

It keeps its facial muscles twisted in a smile. It reaches the IGA supermarket at twenty minutes past seven o’clock.

Ducking its head so that it will not damage its expensively modified brain on the doorframe, the Reaper steps into the building. It is dark, and the Reaper can’t distinguish objects well in the dark because its eyes have never been enhanced. When it tries to walk toward the aisle in which the dairy products are kept under refrigeration, it trips over an unidentified object and falls. Instinct makes it reach out to stop itself. Its metal right arm does not buckle; the bone of its left wrist fractures, and it experiences acute nervous stimulation. No appropriate reaction for acute nervous stimulation of this degree has been loaded into it. Standing up, it smiles and keeps walking.

When it tries to pick up a tin of green curry paste, it instead grasps a fully skeletonised foot that its grip crushes to powder. This event has been prepared for. It observes and records that there is no curry paste in this supermarket; when it returns to its home, it will report this to Shigeru, just as it did yesterday, just as it did the day before. It will report it to him indefinitely until it is reprogrammed, for it is its duty to make its owner happy.

The Reaper grasps a bottle of milk in its right hand. As it lifts the bottle, its fractured right wrist gives way; the bottle slips and breaks on the floor, spilling a greenish sludge that smells like the street outside. The Reaper looks at the sludge. The smell creates an instinctual reaction that clashes with its programming and causes the unpleasant stimulus in its stomach to become stronger. But it cannot override its programming; it can’t eat the clotted, rotten milk that is now smeared across the charred and blackened tiles, because it doesn’t know how.

Smiling, it gathers what it can and returns to the counter. On the way, it sways and staggers sideways, suddenly unable to keep itself balanced; it regains control of its muscles, steps over a charred heap of ash from which curved ribs protrude, and catches a glimpse of itself in the reflective strip above the meat refrigerator. The sight of a human face catches its interest, and it looks.

The Reaper sees a thing that it only hesitantly identifies as being human. It becomes aware that it is showing the physical signs of advanced malnutrition and emaciation; its cheeks are hollow, its stomach is sharply concave beneath the remains of a shirt that was once grey but is now black and rotted, and its golden eyes are sunken deep into dark orbits of flesh beneath heavily greyed hair.

The Reaper looks at itself. The withered reflection means nothing to it. It records what it sees in its memory, and then it walks away.

For fifteen minutes, it waits at the counter for the cashier to accept its money and give it food. Before the cashier takes the money, the cashier will smile and say, “[Greeting] Kaen.” And the Reaper will smile, and it will say “Hello.” Then it will go back to its home, and Shigeru will cook, and he will feed it with a spoon; and that will fix the error.

No cashier smiles and greets the Reaper today.

It waits until twenty minutes to eight o’clock in the morning. At fifteen minutes to eight o’clock in the morning, it will begin walking so that it reaches Mother at five minutes to eight o’clock in the morning. At thirty minutes past eight o’clock in the morning, it must be back in the apartment so that it can say, “Goodbye, Shigeru” as its owner leaves for work. So, at twenty minutes to eight o’clock in the morning, it leaves its groceries on the counter, because taking them without paying for them is a crime, and leaves the dark supermarket.

The Reaper walks across the ankle-deep ash. It detects that it is experiencing an error; its vision is not as clear as it should be. But it does not know how to fix this error, so it ignores it. In the ash is a human’s skeletal structure, lying with its face against the buried bitumen; the Reaper has deviated from its safe path, and it puts its foot into the ribcage of the human’s skeletal structure, falls, and shatters the only unbroken window in the block.

Its nerves are stimulated as blood spurts from beneath its slashed clothes and trickles along the lines of its barely-covered bones. The blood is warm. The Reaper has not felt a warm object for three weeks and six days. That was the day that Shigeru stopped getting up in the morning, and his body ceased to provide the stimulus of warmth.

Smiling, it ignores the new problem with its vision, at least until instinct again takes over; then it blinks to clear the blood from its eyes. This leaves only its malfunctioning light reception, which has dimmed the sunlight and is causing the illusion that the Reaper’s vision is slowly darkening. It cannot see in the dark. Standing up with difficulty, becoming aware that its muscular co-ordination is significantly inhibited, it spasms suddenly. As soon as the spasm stops, it begins to walk again.

It walks for ten minutes until it reaches an apartment block that should be twenty-seven storeys high but is only sixteen. Above the apartment block, it can see a blue star-burst pattern in the sky where the glass dome has been broken. The glass dome has been broken for three weeks and three days. The radioactive smog that was in the desert is now in the city. This is an error in the structure of the city, but the Reaper does not know how to fix this error, so it ignores it.

The Reaper is unaffected by the radioactive smog; it has been modified to resist the effects of being radiated and poisoned simultaneously. All of the Reapers are. That is why it has seen Reapers, all of them gradually growing thinner as the days go on, walking in the ruins of the city at times during the last three weeks and three days. But it only sees Reapers; no unmodified humans come outside anymore. Perhaps they will come out tomorrow.

The elevator is malfunctioning in this apartment block, so the Reaper uses the staircase to reach the fourteenth floor where Mother is located. There is a hole in the wall, which it avoids. If it falls from the fourteenth floor, its vital processes will become irreparably disrupted and it will cease to function as it should; it is already undergoing a lack of proper functioning due to lack of nutrition, and its pain receptors are being universally stimulated by the act of movement.

Mother is located in the room at the end of the hall in apartment 62. The Reaper walks across a carpet that is not stained, and past something that moves in a random way but is not alive: curtains disturbed by the wind blowing through a shattered window. As it walks, running into walls on either side because its vision is malfunctioning severely now, the blood continues to trickle across its skin, signifying a level of damage that is reparable but undesirable.

In the room at the end of the hall in apartment 62, Mother is on the bed. She is curled into a ball. There is a machine playing voices in the corner and the Reaper, which has not heard a voice for three weeks and six days, stops to listen. Smiling, it uses its vocal recognition to identify a voice as that of a small girl it remembers, with black hair and yellow eyes. Another voice comes from the machine, and this is of a larger girl, also with black hair and yellow eyes. Another voice comes from the machine, and this is the Reaper’s own. One of Mother’s hands is outstretched, and the fingers point toward the machine.

“…had an accident,” says the voice of the little girl with black hair and yellow eyes, speaking one of the three languages that the Reaper understands. “Mrs Johnson said I have to go home now and you should pick me up so I can change my pants. Love you lots.”

“I noticed we’re out of rice,” says the voice of the larger girl with black hair and yellow eyes. “I’ll get the groceries on my way home, so don’t you worry about them. And guess what! Thao passed Geography! He didn’t want me to tell you, but I couldn’t help it. I’m going to buy him an ice-cream.”

“Greetings,” says the Reaper’s own voice. “This is your foremost offspring reporting from the eldritch dungeon of Lord Yamaguchi. I have received your message via telecommunications and wish to respond in kind! I love you too, Mum. And stop worrying, you little madwoman, I’m perfectly okay here. You’re acting like I’ve moved to an igloo in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. I’ll come and visit you tomorrow.”

Smiling, the Reaper looks at Mother and waits for her to smile back. She will greet it, and she will encircle it with her arms in a way that implies affection. Affection is a good thing. If the Reaper is loved, that means that it is doing its duty in a satisfactory way.

It waits for ten minutes. Mother does not smile, or greet it, or encircle it with her arms in a way that implies affection. She lies on the bed with one decayed arm stretched toward the voices of her children, and does not even respond when it seeks to encourage a response by saying, “Hello, Mother.”

Mother ignores it as it waits, and the pain is growing rapidly. It feels as if the Reaper’s body is filled with broken glass. Its head is hurting and it can barely stand upright.

“I’m sorry. I love you. I love you all. This isn’t your fault. God, Mum, please, this isn’t your fault,” says the Reaper’s voice on the machine, and there is a click as a telephone call is terminated.

The answering machine whirs and returns to its first message. In the silence of the room, six voices that the Reaper distantly recognises sing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

When the ten minutes are over, the Reaper smiles and leaves. It is having difficulty carrying its own weight, but it walks, one foot in front of the other; step, step, step, past the open door and darkened computer screens of its old bedroom, past the photographs on the wall that display eight faces that it recognises without feeling anything, past the mummified shell of a man with the same DNA as the Reaper lying in the kitchen, past the gun that has fallen from the corpse’s hand, down the stairs, and back to Shigeru’s house so that it may say “Goodbye, Shigeru” at eight-thirty.

Now the unpleasant stimuli is beginning to fade, and the Reaper cannot walk properly. Its vision is malfunctioning almost to the point of shut-down; it staggers on the footpath, its facial muscles aching from the holding of the frozen smile, and its co-ordination so affected that this practiced route takes it twenty minutes to cover when, on other days, it takes exactly ten. It cannot fix this problem, so it ignores it. Shigeru will feed it before he goes to work. That will fix the problem.

It creeps up the staircase, and every step hurts it more.

At the top of the staircase, the Reaper suffers from an unexpectedly severe malfunction. The joints in its legs cease to work. It collapses on the carpet.

Slowly, ignoring the nervous stimuli that assault its modified mind from every corner of its body, it drags itself to the door of the apartment that is its home. The door is closed. Rising up, the Reaper turns the handle, pushes the door ajar, and crawls one-handed to the internal staircase. Although it does not need to, it looks up toward the top of the stairs, and continues to crawl. From its feet, its hips, its knees, its wrist, its abdomen, its chest, its head comes the stimulus it cannot ignore; the slow nervous creep of the system finally shutting itself down.

It reaches the bedroom.

Agonised and smiling, the Reaper crawls to its master’s bedside. Shigeru has not moved. Beneath the bed-sheets, next to the great hollow that the Reaper’s weight leaves in the mattress, his skeleton is still twisted in the shape of its final throes. The pillow on which his grinning skull rests is coated with the black hair that he suddenly shed in the days before he died; the sheets reek of the sores that bloomed on his skeletal frame as he slowly choked on the deadly smoke that flooded through the cracks into the helpless city. He has nothing to give the Reaper; no solutions to offer; no smile except for a mortal rictus.

Still the Reaper smiles for him. Against its programming, it pulls itself onto the bed. And, in extremis, it curls beside its owner and takes hold of his skeletal hand.

The clock strikes eight-thirty.

“Goodbye, Shigeru,” says the Reaper, obediently smiling for the only one it has left.

It lies beside him and it smiles, and smiles, and smiles until, at last, the smile fades away.