My Little Moron

Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

Neither of them spoke to the other for the next several days. He didn't really know how many days had gone by, since he started to lose track after about three, sometimes four, but it was a very long time. He was terrified of what she would do, after all of the things that had happened all on that one day. He hoped she wouldn't hurt him or get rid of him, because he still quite liked her and wanted to stick around for as long as possible, but god it was hard to sit there and wait and wait and wait (and wait), and hope she wasn't just thinking up a million ways to torture him so that she could decide on the best one. When he looked around one day and realised it was night, he shrank back into himself. Oh god. Oh god, she was going to do something terrible to him, and she was doing it in the middle of the night so no one would see!

He cringed and made himself as small as possible, but nothing happened. He unclenched himself a little, since it was terribly uncomfortable, and tried to see what she was doing. She was humming to herself, very softly, but he couldn't tell what the song might be. He couldn't see what it was, exactly, that she was doing, but it involved one of her maintenance arms.

Was she... was she going to take him apart? Oh god. She had a screwdriver, didn't she. And a drill. And a drill with a screwdriver sticking out of it. Ohhh this was not good.

He thought frantically of a way to distract her from her terrible task. He really, really didn't want the screwdriver/drill that she had hidden away where he couldn't see it. He said the first thing that came to mind.

"Oi, Gladys, your optic, it's, is it, it's yellow, is it? Can't quite see, but um, that's the, uh, the only, um, colour in the room right now."

The chassis jerked a little. She seemed to be pretty good at forgetting he was there, for a supercomputer that knew everything, usually before it even happened. He wasn't sure how that worked, but it seemed to have something to do with being able to hack science with maths. He didn't like thinking about that. He didn't think he'd ever be able to do such a thing. "Oh. I suppose. I don't actually know, but it makes sense."

He twitched, hoping she would say more, or start a conversation, or something, but she didn't, and he again had to work out how to take action to save himself. "Hey, uh, just wanna, y'know, throw this out there for, um, your consideration, yeah, but uh, I don't wanna die. If. If that's okay with you. At all. If it's not, uh, that's fine too, go ahead and uh, and do your thing, but uh, I'd rather live, if, if it's all the same. To you."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well uh, you've got, um, you've got, uh, a drill there, haven't you? And a, uh, a screwdriver? And a drill with a screwdriver?"

"What the hell are you talking about? I don't have a screwdriver or a drill, or screwdriver drill bits for the drill that I don't have."

"Well uh, then what're you, um, what're you doing over there? With the, um, the maintenance arm?"

"I'm not sure. I could be doing maintenance with the maintenance arm, of course, but that would be silly."

"Oh." He tried to figure out why on earth he'd thought she had those tools in the first place but couldn't. "You, uh, you do the maintenance too?"

"Some of it. When I'm bored. The rest of it is done by the maintenance robots. Which I have to program and supervise. So yes, I do the maintenance too."

She really did do everything! But one thing about what she'd said didn't sit quite right. "How did you get bored while you were sleeping?"