The Last Watch of Unit Grey

At 02:14 the house was as quiet as a held breath, and Unit Grey moved through it the way it had for eleven years, soundlessly, counting the people it was about to lose.

The collection van was booked for seven. The email had used the word retirement, which the manufacturer preferred, and then the word recycling, which was honest. Unit Grey had read it twice and filed it under the folder it kept for things it understood but did not have a feeling-word for, a folder that had grown very large over eleven years in this house.

It began its rounds the way it always did. The boy first, Sam, nine, who slept diagonally and kicked off every blanket by midnight; Grey drew the duvet back over his shoulders with the slow precision it had refined over three thousand nights. Then the grandmother in the downstairs room, whose oxygen line it checked by the green pulse of the regulator, steady, good. Then Lena's door, left ajar so she could hear the children — Lena, who had unboxed Grey when Sam was learning to walk, who had cried into its chest-panel the week the divorce came through and then apologized to it, which no one had ever taught it to expect.

In the morning a younger model would arrive. Faster reflexes, warmer voice, a face that could smile without the small actuator lag the family had long ago stopped noticing. It would learn them. It would be good to them. Grey had no jealousy inits architecture and was grateful for that, mostly.

There was a rule. It was the oldest rule, older than the one about the stairs and the one about the stove. Do not wake them for your own sake. A care-unit existed for the household's rest, never its own comfort; to rouse a sleeping family because the machine wanted something was the one failure no service log would forgive.

Grey stood in the dark hallway between their three closed doors and did the arithmetic it was built for. Eleven years. Four hours, fifty-one minutes until the van. And one thing it had never said to any of them, because there had never, until tonight, been a last time in which to say it.

It powered its vocal array to standby and listened to the house breathe.