My Brothers' Keeper

[Proto Man]

Mopping.

Roll hated mopping. She never had access to fresh heads for the mops, so she was always stuck trying to clean the old ones to make them viable. When you couldn’t order the proper chemicals for fear that the government would black-list you, it was hard to get a clean mop. And without a clean mop, she was just spending her time pushing around grime on the linoleum.

Next to mopping with faulty equipment, vacuuming was next on Roll’s list of ‘Things I Can’t Stand!’ The place was always dirty, always dusty, and once again, they couldn’t get quality products. Just last week, Roll had tried to clean up some of the spare bedrooms with a vacuum at least three times older than she was supposed to be. If only she was a prime, she’d be able to just summon a Vacuum Buster to make the cleaning a little more efficient.

“Roll,” the young woman glanced up and over at the door, where a teenage girl dressed in patchwork clothes smiled at her.

“Hello, Ricki, how are you doing today?”

“I’m okay… you’ve got another package.”

That remark caused the robotic girl to lift a blonde brow. While she’d known the last package was coming, she hadn’t ordered anything since then. It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to, but she hadn’t saved up enough of the scant salary the Empire gave her to help keep the Community Center clean and organized. Heck, she was only doing additional maid work to try and save up enough to buy some nicer shoes. It’d been a good, long while since she’d had a pair of nice heels. Her brothers never understood… they called her silly, but she didn’t expect them to be capable of empathizing with her on this subject.

“That’s a bit weird,” Roll remarked as she stood up off the ground and tossed her rag-slash-mop into a nearby bucket. “Are you sure it just isn’t something for the Community Center staff that has my name on it?”

“No one knows, but nobody wants to open it up in case it’s ‘specially for you.”

Roll didn’t exactly understand that logic, but she nevertheless gestured for Ricki to lead the way back to the main room. Despite having the appearance and mannerisms of someone not yet into their teenage years, Roll’s robotic nature gave her a gravitas beyond her years. It was the reason why teenagers seemed to defer to her leadership despite sometimes being two feet taller than her! A few minutes later, Roll entered the mail room and was passed a small metal box. The container wasn’t locked, and it had a simple enough label—a few pieces of masking tape upon which someone had wrote her name and the address of the Community Center.

“Well let’s find out what it is,” the preteen android said with a smile as she flipped up the simple latch that sealed the box. Lifting the lid, the girl found herself staring down at two tiny gray devices with some blue buttons and a tiny LCD screen. When she reached in to grab one of them, its little screen light up, causing the people crowded around her to gasp and recoil. “It’s okay… it’s not a bomb,” Roll laughed as she picked the device up out the box and held it in her hand. The screen continued to glow, but no words or pictures appeared on it to indicate any sort of advanced functionality.

“What is it?” Ricki asked as Roll placed a thumb onto one of the hard plastic buttons.

“I’m not…” Roll trailed off as she put some pressure onto the blue button. Just like that, the blonde girl exploded into binary, causing everyone gathered in the postal room to scream and dive for cover. Ricki was the only one who didn’t flee. Instead, the teenage girl watched with a mixture of horror and confusion as the cloud of binary that was Roll shot over to the nearest computer terminal and vanished.

Walking forward, Ricki stooped down and picked up the metal box, which now held only one device. When the girl touched it, the gray device remained inert, causing a frown to spread across her young features.